Xunwu Chen

The University of Texas at San Antonio | UTSA · Department of Philosophy and Classics

From Plato and Aristotle to celebrated modern and enlightenment philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, de Condorcet, Kant, and Hegel, democracy is suspicious and not compatible with the idea of the rule of reason. Their criticisms and suspicions of democracy are grounded in one assumption: the exercise of human reason could only be indivi...

For the last two decades since the United Nations published Declaration of Principles of Tolerance, social toleration has become the distinctive political approach to the profound reality of diversity of our time. It has become a wisdom of our time. Social toleration is a family of practice that differs from social indifference, social indulgence,...

This essay is devoted to a comparative study of three philosophers' views on the relationship between positive law and natural law. It intends to ask whether obligations which positive laws impose, rights which positive laws define, and justice which positive laws are supposed to realize have a natural basis, and whether our reflection and judgment...

the brain produces the mind through cultivation. Thus, the structure of the mind is not a priori, but culturally developed. The logic, semantics, and conceptual framework of a mind are all cultivated. While feeling is a natural function of the mind, all feelings of a mind are concept-laden or concept-mediated. A person is educated to think better,...

Abstract: Taking as the starting point that ours is a timely spirit centered on seven epoch-making ideas—global justice, human rights, constitutional democracy, the rule of law, crimes against humanity, and cultural toleration, this paper explores the relationship between Confucian values and the spirit of our time. It first demonstrates that the r...

This chapter studies Habermas’s modernist doctrines of truth, justice, and the internal relationship among truth, justice, and human reason. First, it examines Habermas’s concept of truth: from the early discursive concept to the present Kantian-pragmatic concept. Second, taking the Habermas-Rawls debate in 1990s as its paradigm of illustration, it...

This chapter studies the discourse doctrine of tolerance. It first examines Habermas’s concept of tolerance, the relationship between tolerance and rejection, as well as that between tolerance and endorsement, the distinction between tolerance and indifference, the definition of tolerance in Habermas and that in the UN covenant. It then explores th...

This chapter examines Habermas’s discourse doctrine of cosmopolitanism. It studies Habermas’s concepts of the cosmopolitan condition, a pluralistic world society, cosmopolitan law, human rights as constitutional rights, human rights fundamentalism, the possible world constitution, cosmopolitan sovereignty, and the three-tiered, networked realm of p...

This chapter studies Habermas’s doctrine of discourse ethics as a form of modernist ethics that synthesizes insights from both Kantian ethics and Hegelian ethics and that integrates the concepts of a good, worthy and happy life, a dutiful life, and an examined life. First, it examines the discourse concepts of obligation, value, justice, solidarity...

This chapter concludes the conceptual studies of Habermas’s philosophy. It concludes that Habermas has contributed greatly to the conceptual renovation in Western philosophy and world philosophy, and is thus one of the greatest philosophers of our epoch.

This chapter studies Habermas’s discourse doctrines of law and constitutional democracy. It first examines Habermas’s concepts of the genesis of public law, public law as a system of knowledge and action, the relationship between morality and law, the facticity and validity of law, the distinction between moral and legal norm, and the source of the...

This chapter studies Habermas’s doctrine of modernity and the related matters. First, it explores Habermas’s concepts of the public sphere and ideal speech situation. Second, it explores Habermas’s concepts of discourse and rational communication, presupposition, communicative pragmatics, performance competence, the distinction between communicativ...

This essay explores the traditional Chinese philosophical insights into tolerance and demonstrates how those Chinese insights are consistent with and can be illuminating to our epochal spirit. It shows how the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist concepts of tolerance can conceptually and normatively enrich our understanding of tolerance as a norm, a va...

This book offers a conceptual map of Habermas’ philosophy and a systematic introduction to his work. It does so by systematically examining six defining themes—modernity, discourse ethics, truth and justice, public law and constitutional democracy, cosmopolitanism, and toleration—of Habermas' philosophy as well as their inner logic. The text distin...

This essay investigates the Confucian cosmopolitan aspiration. First, it examines the nature of cosmopolitanism and its distinction from universalism. It demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is a philosophical doctrine that consists of two core tenets: (1) the tenet that humankind in whole is a social-political community under the rule of law; each pe...

This essay explores the philosophical insights of Zhu Xi, Wang YangMing, Kant, and Husserl and therefore proposes a new epistemic constructivism. It demonstrates that a knowing mind is a constructor, not merely a mirror-like copier or a camera-like copier in the experience of knowing. It argues that just as different kinds of machine produce kinds...

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public auth...

This essay explores the contractual dimension in Confucianism. It demonstrates that essential to Confucianism is the concept of three contracts: the contract of mind with oneself, the cultural contract with society and community; and the moral contract with humanity and the universe at large. Confucianism may not be labelled as contractualism. None...

This essay explores the Confucian concept of the space of the mind and the Confucian view on cultivation of the space of mind. It then argues that the distinction between the mind as a mental substance and the body as a material substance is that the mind can be infinitely extended while the body can only extended to a certain limit.

This essay explores the Confucian theory of mind. Doing so, it first examines the early Confucian concept of the human mind as a substance that has both moral and cognitive functions and a universal nature. It then explores the neo-Confucian concept of the human mind, the original mind, and the relationships between the human mind and human nature,...

This paper explores the Confucian value of authenticity. Taking as the starting point of the Confucian concept of becoming authentic persons of bo, da, jing, and shen, the paper first demonstrates that a high-far-firm zhixiang, creativity, an examined life, and sincerity are four necessary conditions for a self to be an authentic one of bo, da, jin...

My basic contention in this essay is that the proper characterization of Confucian ethics is not role-based ethics, rule-based ethics, or virtue ethics, but an ethics of the self or a self-based ethics. In essence, Confucian ethics is about how to realize a self in line with inner sagehood and outer kinghood (); it is about how to realize a self as...

Engaging in present debates on happiness, this essay shows that a good, happy life and an authentic life entail one another. Doing so, the essay first explores the Confucian approach to the relationships between happiness and authenticity, and between authenticity and value. It then presents the Heideggeran approach. Therefore, it demonstrates how...

This paper explores the subject-matter of the relationship between law and humanity, filling a significant lacuna in philosophy of law in the West today. Doing so, the paper starts with recasting the traditional Chinese conflict—in particular, the conflict between legalism and Confucianism—over law in a new light of the contemporary call for stoppi...

We shall start with this simple but often forgotten fact: It is in reality that we exist; it is as persons that we live. This fact gives us a clue of the strength of ethical personalism. From the point of view of ethical personalism, as Max Scheler puts it, “the final meaning and value of the whole universe is ultimately to be measured exclusively...

The essay explores the five components of present cosmopolitanism modeled after Kantian cosmopolitanism. These five components are: the commitments to the principle of human rights, to the rule of law, to the idea of democracy, to the norm of inclusion, and to the ideal of humanity.

Countering the general reading of Confucian ethics as a form of virtue ethics or humanistic ethics, this essay reads Confucian ethics as a form of ethical personalism. Doing so, it examines the ethical orientations in the Confucian classics, The Analects, Da Xue, and others, pointing out that the touchstone concept of Confucian ethics taught in the...

This essay argues that a person's fate is defined by the interaction of necessity and contingency, indicating that a person's existential competence consists of his or her ability to dance well with both necessity and contingency, not merely with either of them. As a result, it rejects the traditional association of fate with fatalism and fatality...

This essay examines the concept of fate, exploring the causal-normative constraint problem in the existential phenomenology of humanity in A Dream of Red Mansions. It studies the structure, content, and origin of the consciousness and experience of fate, as it is illustrated in the phenomenology in the novel, exploring the causal and normative chal...

Countering the present trend in the discourse on justice wherein human reason is perceived and marginalized as an embarrassment to justice and the trend to reject the concept of formal justice, this paper argues that there is formal justice and the essence of justice is setting things right and setting righteousness to stand straight. By this token...

Etude de la conception confuceenne de la rationalite qui fonde le paradigme de l'action et de la pensee rationnelles chez Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, les freres Cheng, Zhu Xi et Wang Yangming. Examinant la nature et la logique interne des quatre presupposes de la rationalite confuceenne que sont l'affirmation de l'etre humain, de la morale universel...

This article explores justice as giving due to humanity as an Aristotelian substance of all human beings. It explores that justice prescribes the inviolability of properties of humanity. It explores the voice of justice is the voice of humanity.

Experimenting with human subjects in medicine and biology encounters significant ethical challenges today. There are general questions regarding the justification of the importance of experiments of this kind. For example, is it justifiable for medical or biological experiments to use human persons as subjects in general? Are these experiments just...

Denoncant l'exclusion ou la marginalisation du confucianisme dans le discours politique contemporain, l'A. defend la conception confuceenne de la justice comme constellation entre la loyaute, l'harmonie et la droiture. Examinant le lien entre la societe juste (zhong zheng), l'harmonie sociale (zhi, qi, ping) et la vertu de droiture dans le cadre d'...

The enduring debate on the question of whether an omnipotent, omniscient God exists amid the existence of evils in the world is crucial to understanding religions. Much recent discussion has taken an approach in which the focal question is whether we can cognitively—for example, logically, evidentially, and the like—and rationally justify that God’...