Bernard Williams contends that philosophy is part of a broader humanistic enterprise of “making sense of” ourselves and our activities, including the activity of science. Whereas the scientific enterprise purports to offer an absolute conception of the world as it is (independently of any local perspective on it), the humanistic enterprise cannot disengage itself from the contingent history of our ideas upon which it operates. While I agree with Williams that philosophy should be more attentive to history, his account of philosophy, from which he derives this conclusion, is fatally flawed, being unable to meet three perennial challenges to any principled defense of philosophy as a discipline: i.e. the questions of authority, incubativity and peculiarity. Those challenges can be met only if we understand philosophy not as a humanistic discipline that is part of the broader humanistic enterprise, but as a distinctively normative discipline that tasks itself with finding answers to explicitly or implicitly normative questions, in contrast to various scientific and humanistic disciplines of descriptive inquiry. In this paper, I argue for the equivalence of philosophicality with normativity, explicate the theoretical and practical implications of the normative account of philosophy, and defend it against potential objections.

Using Wang Anshi's Reform as a case study, Yuhua Wang's "Blood is Thicker Than Water" (American Political Science Review, 2022) argues that geographically dispersed kinship networks incentivize political elites to support the building of a strong state, whereas geographically concentrated kinship networks undermine state building. In this paper, I improve the sample with the help of additional historical records, and show that the reported correlation fails to replicate when either the control issue or the outlier issue is considered. I then propose two alternative hypotheses on the role of kinship network dispersal in Wang Anshi's Reform, based on two common explanations of its partisanship geography in Chinese historical scholarship, i.e. status-competition and policy-adaptiveness. After examining those hypotheses respectively, I reflect on the limits of quantitative history this case illustrates.

This paper redresses the neglect of interregimatic solidarity—solidarity between collective anti-oppression struggles in purportedly antithetical regimes—in transnational feminist scholarship. I argue that authoritarian and demostatist regimatic contexts of oppression give rise to regimatically distinct oppressive kinds, which track their regimatic subjects of oppression respectively, and that this fact significantly increases the risk of interregimatic missolidarization in lieu of interregimatic solidarity. In response, we need to cultivate antiauthoritarian resilience, which is both an epistemic virtue and a moral virtue. Epistemically, it helps us navigate a world characterized by the dynamics of authoritarian spillover, demostatist sellout, imperial standoff and capitalist scaleup, comprehend how regimatic oppressions are interconnected, and appreciate the practical import of interregimatic solidarity. Morally, antiauthoritarian resilience helps us discern and discard moral parochialism and cynical moralism, both impeding the exercise of interregimatic solidarity. I conclude with tentative thoughts on when, for whom and to what extent interregimatic solidarity is morally obligatory, if its realization depends on cultivating the virtue of antiauthoritarian resilience.

While I find Huaping Lu-Adler's excavation of Kant's long-overlooked linguistic Orientalism both enlightening and thought-provoking, I disagree with her diagnosis of its theoretical and practical relevance. On the one hand, while I agree that Kant's positionality renders all his writings and teachings presumptively impactful, there is reason to doubt that his peculiar construction of the linguistic Oriental Other had much actual impact on his disciples. On the other hand, while I agree that the Kantian ideal of public reason is inapt for rectifying the linguistic-epistemic injustices of global knowledge production, I disagree on why it is so. In particular, I argue for a shift in theoretical and practical focuses, from linguistic biases and prejudices, to the structural epistemic constraints of linguistic diversity, as well as to other political-structural conditions shaping global knowledge production.

This paper calls for a paradigm shift in studying academic dependency, toward the paradigm of brokered dependency. Using Chinese academia as an example, I demonstrate how the neocolonial condition of academic dependency is always mediated through blockage-brokerage mechanisms. The two most salient blockage-brokerage mechanisms of dependency in the Chinese context are linguistic barrier and authoritarian malepistemization, and the effects of the latter consist of three layers: institutional, informational, and incorporational. On top of their domestic impacts, those mechanisms jointly exacerbate spectacularized postcoloniality in anglophone-hegemonic global academic publishing. The paradigm of brokered dependency not only represents a more nuanced approach to the study of academic dependency, but also underscores the fact that the dismantling of the neocolonial condition cannot be conceived and pursued in isolation from comprehending and confronting the authoritarian condition, especially when the latter pertains under the disguise of anticolonialism.

In “Confucianism and Same-Sex Marriage,” published recently in Politics and Religion, Professor Tongdong Bai argues for a “moderate Confucian position on same-sex marriage,” one that supports its legalization and yet endeavors “to use public opinion and social and political policies to encourage heterosexual marriages, and to prevent same-sex marriages from becoming the majority form of marriages” (Bai 2021:146). Against the backdrop of downright homophobia prevalent among vocal Confucians in mainland China today, Bai claims that his pro-legalization rendition “show[s] a different version of Confucianism that challenges the received perception of Confucianism that it is deeply conservative, a perception that often lies at the core of the rejection of its contemporary relevance, especially by the so-called ‘liberals’ in China and elsewhere” (Bai 2021:133). Furthermore, Bai claims that his moderate Confucianism is normatively preferable to “the typical liberal or individualist position” of a marriage equality supporter, because the specter of polygamy – the conservative trope of invoking polygamy as a reductio ad absurdum against same-sex marriage – imposes “a serious challenge” to liberals but not to moderate Confucians (Bai 2021:146, 153).

Both of Bai’s claims falter upon scrutiny, however. Granted, it is applaudable that Bai tries to dissuade his more conservative Confucian colleagues from opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage. But as Section 1 of this Response will show, the alternative rendition of Confucianism he presents, along with the way he presents it, is premised on a highly contested conception of what shared Confucian values are; does injustice to Confucians who embrace marriage equality more unreservedly (i.e., without caveats à la Bai); fails to produce new arguments that “enrich the theoretical basis for same-sex marriage” (Bai 2021:133); and, ironically, reinforces – rather than “challenges” – the “received perception” of Confucianism as deeply conservative. Meanwhile, Section 2 will show that Bai’s comparison between liberalism and moderate Confucianism relies both upon an apparent unfamiliarity with the extensive and nuanced liberal discussions on polygamy, and upon fallacious methods of assessing comparative normative valence.

Finally, Section 3 will offer some concluding thoughts from the perspective of decolonial theory, examining the dynamic of spectacularized postcoloniality that propels the production and consumption of dubious theoretical projects like Bai’s. As it turns out, this case serves not only as a cautionary tale of how not to conduct comparative normative theorizing, but also as a cautionary tale of how not to let the spectacle of postcoloniality derail the pursuit of academic decolonization.

This article examines the puzzling phenomenon that many Chinese liberal intellectuals fervently idolize Donald Trump and embrace the alt-right ideologies he epitomizes. Rejecting ‘pure tactic’ and ‘neoliberal affinity’ explanations, it argues that the Trumpian metamorphosis of Chinese liberal intellectuals is precipitated by their ‘beacon complex’, which has ‘political’ and ‘civilizational’ components. Political beaconism grows from the traumatizing lived experience of Maoist totalitarianism, sanitizes the West and particularly the United States as politically near-perfect, and gives rise to both a neoliberal affinity and a latent hostility toward baizuo. Civilizational beaconism, sharing with its nationalistic counterpart—civilizational vindicativism—the heritages of scientific racism and social Darwinism imported in late-Qing, renders the Chinese liberal intelligentsia receptive to anti-immigrant and Islamophobic paranoia, exacerbates its anti-baizuo sentiments, and catalyzes its Trumpian convergence with Chinese non-liberals.

This article is the first in a two-paper series, which offers a comprehensive and systematic review of, and response to, various anti-MeToo arguments made by MeToo skeptics. Taking the U.S. and China as examples, the first section overviews the local contexts of anti-sexual-assault/harassment movements, and the respective issues and challenges they each confront. It then summarizes the three primary objectives of the MeToo movement (accountability, empowerment and reform) and the three ideal-typical critiques advanced by MeToo skeptics (the Mobs Critique, the Damsels-in-Distress Critique, and the Puritans Critique). The second through fourth sections will address various versions of the Mobs Critique and the fifth section the Damsels-in-Distress Critique, whereas the Puritans Critique will be left for the forthcoming second article in the series.

More specifically, the second and third sections of this article discuss how MeToo skeptics misappropriate the notions of “presumption of innocence” and “trial by public opinion” respectively. As it turns out, the caricature of the MeToo movement (as well as other movements aiming at swaying the public opinion) as the tyranny of mobs jeopardizing the rule of law reflects nothing but the skeptics’ own misconceptions of what the rule of law is and what we should learn from our historical experiences. The fourth and fifth sections respond, respectively, to the “argument from false accusations” and the “argument from self-victimization.” By reviewing conclusions of existing empirical researches and analyzing the conceptual and normative confusions underlying those arguments, I show how sex and gender biases distort implicitly yet systematically our cognitions of sexual assault and harassment. Because of the systematicity of such distortions, isolated resistances cannot effectively address the problems of sexual assault and harassment; by contrast, public opinion movements, such as MeToo, are exactly the kind of collective action crucial to the transformation of sociocultural ideas, and to the development of new institutions of effective remedy.

This paper amends and defends Rawls’s idea of public reason against three criticisms: that its constraint on comprehensive doctrines does injustice to certain agendas and contestations; that its scope of application is too narrow; and that its method of evasion hinders transformation of comprehensive doctrines through dialogical engagement. In response to the first criticism, I argue that, instead of abandoning Rawls’s distinction between political conceptions and comprehensive doctrines altogether, we could replace it with one that is between substantive moral conceptions and comprehensive doctrines. Meanwhile, the second criticism can be rebutted by clarifying the relationship between the duty of civility, on the one hand, and the criterion of reciprocity, on the other hand, in Rawls’s theory, whereas the third criticism relies on implausible psychological assumptions and misjudges the practical consequences of public reason.

The argument from "moral slippery slope" is the most common type of objections to sexual minority rights. A thorough analysis of the moral slippery slope argument would not only rebut those objections but also help us explicate the very notions of "sexual minorities" and "sexual minority rights". Taking same-sex marriage as an example, this paper illustrates the two general strategies of rebutting the moral slippery slope argument and defending sexual minority rights. The "defensive strategy" is to highlight the crucial differences between certain morally acceptable patters of sexual interaction, including same-sex marriage, and certain morally unacceptable ones, so as to block the moral slippery slope against the former. The "counteroffensive strategy" is to shift the burden of proof, subjecting those who oppose same-sex marriage to various "moral slippery slopes" of their own, and forcing them to acknowledge the lack of morally justifiable objections to same-sex marriage and to adequately defined sexual minority rights in general.

This paper clarifies and defends Isaiah Berlin's conception of freedom. The first two sections argue against the common perception of Berlin as an "advocate for negative liberty", and trace the origins of this misconception to the textual ambiguities and theoretical tensions within Berlin's own work. The next three sections reconstruct the value-pluralist framework underlying Berlin's conception of freedom, and explore the various resources and strategies within this framework that could help solve the aforementioned theoretical tensions.

Philip Pettit’s republican conception of freedom as non-domination relies on an assumption about the nature of domination. All forms of domination defined in his three clauses are supposed to have the same nature, despite their variation in intensity and extent. The homogeneity of domination allows Pettit to equate all cases of domination with slavery, arguing for the priority of domination as such to interference.

The homogeneity assumption is falsified, however, by contrasting Pettit’s definition of domination with its counterpart in the Roman law. Based on the entry condition and the exit condition explicated from the Roman law, we can distinguish between two, rather heterogeneous sorts of domination: domination as option, and domination as predicament. This heterogeneity of domination leads us to reconsider the validity of the republican claim that domination should always take precedence over interference.