Dascha Düring completed her bachelor’s and research master in philosophy at Utrecht University.  She  graduated  cum  laude.  Dascha’s  thesis  concerns  the  concept  of  duty in Confucianism  and Kantianism.  Since 2013 she is working  on a comparative  PhD thesis on concepts of humanity in Chinese and Western ethical traditions, and is acting coordinator of the Ethics Institute KNAW China Exchange Programme.

Her research interests primarily concern the philosophical presuppositions of practical self-understanding, with a special focus on the relation between ethical and aesthetic forms of self-reflexivity and the way they manifest themselves in different cultural traditions. Her ceterum censeo is that aesthetic sensibility plays a much more important role in practical self-understanding  than is now often assumed: agents’ capacities to relate to the external world, and themselves, in a disinterested way is crucial to how they understand themselves as agents. This has implications for our understanding of the concept of human dignity: From this viewpoint, human dignity should never solely be understood strictly in moral terms – human dignity always also has an aesthetic dimension. It is precisely the dialectic between moral and aesthetic dimensions of human dignity that make the concept interesting. In light of these considerations she is currently working on questions regarding “long-termism,” hope, and imagination in ethical theory and moral practice.