Okay, thank you so much Elena for the kind introduction and thank you all in the audience

for making it back from holidays to attend my talk. So I'll be talking today about models of

agency in early China. But in difference to those of you who are not in Chinese studies,

I'd like to begin with a brief introduction to the historical and textual contexts of what we

call early China, of the early Chinese period. So early China begins roughly with the first

evidence of writing in the 13th century BC in a place called An Yan, which was the last

capital of the Shang kingdom. And this writing is in the form of oracle bone inscriptions,

such as the turtle plastron that you can see in the image. And these animal bones were used for

past romance, which is a plea for the gods to mediate in favor of human will. But the longer

texts that we study have an origin in the Warring States period. So from the 5th to the 3rd century

BC. And this is a time of civil war in which eight different states were fighting each other

constantly for hegemony, right, to control the territory. And so the Warring States period ended

when the state of Qin won the war and established the first unified empire, the Qin dynasty,

which gives way to our world for China. But the Qin dynasty wasn't long lived, it was quickly

overthrown by the much longer and influential Han dynasty, which goes on until the third century

of our era. And now I'd like to show you how the texts from this period looked like, written on

bamboo or silk. They were short compositions in the form of essays, narratives, dialogues,

aphorisms, old lists, points, and so on. And they were composed out of basic units, which have been

called building blocks by Bill Bolt. So these building blocks, they were movable and they could

be combined in different ways, making up for different texts. And then in the Han dynasty,

responding to the needs of the newly established imperial library, scholars felt the need, the

pressure to order, classify, and catalog the intellectual heritage from the past. So in a long

and complex process that involved addition, additions, deletions, interpolations, commentary,

interpretation, and even translation, our books from early China were born. So now why am I telling

you all this? I'm telling you this because when we think about, for example, the philosophy, the

Warring States philosophy of the Zhuanzi, right? We think about the Zhuanzi having an internal

coherence and consistency that is intended by the single book with a single author, right? But this

is quite misleading because the Zhuanzi, much as most of the other books from the early Chinese

period, are actually a Han dynasty compilation of heterogeneous materials, which were written by

different hands at different time periods. So this means that our early texts, our early books,

are composite. And the fact that they are composite texts has, of course, bearing on the way in which

we should deal with these texts, and in particular, the ways in which we should do Chinese, early

Chinese philosophy, which is my field. So I'll be happy to talk about my methodological approach

later on during the Q&A or maybe at any other time since I'm always there in my office. Now,

I'd like to tell you a little bit about my research in broad terms. So my research focuses

on patterns of arguments in early China in relation to the problem of human agency. And

these patterns are viewed as more or less successful responses to problems of uncertainty,

morality, efficacy, control, and freedom. So in other words, I deal with the problems of coping

with the future, decision-making, and how to act from the perspective of early Chinese philosophies.

And then I focus on what I call the model of adaptive agency as a privileged solution to these

problems. So what's adaptive agency? I think it's likely the first thing that the word adaptation

draws to your mind is Darwin and his theory of evolution. As you all know, Darwin postulated

evolution as a process through which organisms, physical and behavioral traits change over time,

becoming better fitted or adjusted to their habitat. So that's a process known as adaptation.

But in the 20th century, the concept of adaptation has been traveling back and forth between the

natural and the social sciences. And it's actually been applied to a multitude of fields,

from cultural ecology and climate change to business, military theory, and even informatics

and programming. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the concept of adaptation,

the biological concept of adaptation, and then the concept of adaptation in fields beyond the

natural sciences, the biological sciences. In biology, the way that Darwin postulated it,