Our community lost one of its brightest lights when Lin Jih-wen of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica passed away on January 2 at age 54.
Jih-wen was an exemplary scholar, political scientist, and human being. As a scholar Jih-wen was creative, thorough, measured, and generous. He was brilliant and also humble. He was kind to lesser minds; where others might find fault, he dug for merit. Jih-wen graduated from National Taiwan University and earned his PhD in Political Science at UCLA in 1996. He belonged to a generation of socially-engaged scholars, some of whom moved into politics and others of whom, like Jih-wen, focused on academic work. He remained connected to friends on both of those paths, and his wisdom and knowledge made him a trusted voice for people across the political spectrum in Taiwan. He had strong values and a huge heart, but his commitment to rational argumentation and discourse (and his relentless questioning) ensured that his judgments were never inflected by ideology or partisanship. As a political scientist, Jih-wen was exactly what the world needs: a person capable of working in any methodological tradition who viewed methods as means, not as ends in themselves. His CV says he was interested in game theory, and he certainly was, but his research was driven by questions – questions of immediate and urgent interest to the world. He chose his methods for the leverage they would give him on those questions. He worked on a wide range of topics, including Chinese politics, Taiwan politics, and cross-Strait relations, but his disciplinary preoccupation was with the dynamic interactions between institutions and behavior in democratic nations. He died with two works forthcoming; he published six articles in the last year of his life. As a person, Jih-wen was patient, open-minded, gentle, and fun. He loved his family and he had a circle of close friends in Taipei whose bonds, in times of joy and in times of sadness, were beautiful to witness. He was serious, too, but he could laugh at himself, although I never heard him laugh at others. A story related to me by one of Jih-wen’s colleagues who attended a memorial symposium for him on Saturday captures both his keen intellect and his good heart. My friend wrote: Once, when they were at (yet another) meeting for (yet another) project that they would not get any credit for, [our colleague] commented that Jih-wen was behaving irrationally, to which Jih-wen cheerfully responded, "not really, it just depends on how you define your utility function." Lin Jih-wen defined his utility function as always asking one more question, always listening to the answer, always choosing to be kind. His death, from brain cancer that was discovered in 2003 and returned in 2016 after several years’ remission, is a great loss to Taiwan and to political science. Best – Shelley Rigger Brown Professor in the Political Science Department at Davidson College
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
歡迎來信Welcome to give us your words for Jih-wen. Categories |