Prof. Adrian Halloway is a philosopher and cognitive scientist of religion who reads early Chinese thought — wu-wei, spontaneity, and embodied cognition — against modern cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and cultural change.
Prof. Adrian Halloway is a philosopher and cognitive scientist of religion whose work bridges early Chinese philosophy and the modern sciences of mind. His central subject is the paradox of wu-wei — how one can try not to try — and what the early Chinese thinkers understood about effort, spontaneity, and the embodied self that the Western tradition, in its attachment to the 'disembodied myth', has tended to miss. He argues that tools from cognitive science and evolutionary theory are necessary to transform how the humanities study culture, and that pre-modern philosophical traditions deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms rather than romanticised as exotic wisdom. His writing moves from concrete cognitive puzzles — choking under pressure, insomnia, the impossibility of forcing yourself to relax — to the classical texts that answered the same questions, and back out again to ordinary life. He is sceptical of purity movements, of both sides of the ‘science versus humanities’ war, and of any picture of human beings as purely rational, self-interested agents.
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