Michael Wee

Michael is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ethox Centre. He is part of the ANTITHESES research platform investigating radical value disagreements in an age of polarisation and uncertainty. Part of his research explores the nature of disagreement and in particular how disagreement is shaped by divergent or overly narrow understandings of concepts like ‘reasoning’ and ‘argumentation’. This strand of research draws on a number of historical thinkers who have sought to expand our understanding of reasoning, such as: Pascal, Vico, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. He is also interested in developing novel tools and methods for engaging constructively with radical disagreements, such as through uncovering hidden barriers in speech and promoting intellectual empathy and humility in debate.

Michael obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Durham, with a thesis entitled ‘Action and Necessity: Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty” and the Foundations of Ethics’. He is broadly interested in the relationship between language, action, and normativity in ethics, and in developing an approach to this area of philosophy drawing particularly on Wittgenstein, Anscombe, and Schopenhauer. He has recently published on the topic of deep disagreements in ethics from a Wittgensteinian perspective, as well as the idea of liminal statuses in bioethics as a response to conceptual uncertainty.