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Abstract:
This talk is based on Shuchen Xiang's (项舒晨) recently published book Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2023). In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism.
Bio:
Shuchen Xiang (PhD, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and King’s College London) is the Mt. Hua Professor of Philosophy at Xidian University, China. She is the author of A Philosophical Defense of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer (SUNY, 2021), the coeditor of The Islamic-Confucian Synthesis in China (Lexington, 2023),and the translator of History of Chinese Philosophy Through Its Key Terms (Springer, 2020).