About Me

Hi, I’m Chenyu Bu—a philosopher by training, a musician in spirit, and a structuralist at heart. Thanks for stopping by.

I’m a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, finishing a dissertation called Objects, Structures, and Abstraction under Kathleen Higgins and Jon Litland, with Robbie Kubala, Josh Dever, and James Buhler. I expect to defend in 2027.

I work in metaphysics and aesthetics, with formal methods drawn from higher-order logic, category theory, and the mathematics music theory has built for itself. Two questions organize most of what I do: when does an operation genuinely introduce something new into the world rather than rearrange what was already there, and what fixes the identity of what it introduces? Music is where I find those questions most tractable, since its objects are precise enough to formalize and audible enough to check. The dissertation runs in both directions—from metaphysics into the ontology of music, and from music back out into abstract objects and structures generally.

Lately the same questions have been pulling me outward. I’ve been working with network scientists, cognitive scientists, a complexity scientist, and a pianist on when a new form opens the space of possible forms and when it closes it, on how a teacher passes on a skill she cannot put into words, on what makes the causal structure of a living system distinctive, and on what a performer is really doing when she interprets a score. The fields differ; the question I keep bringing to them doesn’t. I want to know what a structural description captures, and what it leaves out.

There’s more under Research, Teaching, and News, and the full record is in my CV.

Before Austin I graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I triple-majored in philosophy, music composition, and mathematics. Before that, I grew up in Beijing, China. And, when I’m not (directly) working on philosophy, I compose, if less often than I’d like.

Look around to learn more about my work (and non-work).