The Eastern-Western Philosophical Discourse of Mind, Reason, and Culture

“This book represents an astonishing scholarship of originality, authenticity, and creativity. It sheds new light on the most enduring themes of philosophy—mind, reason, and culture—throughout all times and opens a new path for approaching these most significant philosophical subjects in our time. Chen’s work thus represents one of the most original, important contributions to philosophy in our time.
—John Zijiang Ding, Professor, Department of Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, USA


This book provides a comparative study, as well as an account of global history, of the philosophical discourse of mind, reason, and culture. It then enthrones the cosmopolitan doctrine of mind, reason, and culture. It provides an approach that supersedes both universalist approach and culturalist/multiculturalist approach and rehabilitates individual persons’ mind as the primary substances of the human mind and thus primary thinking entities. The book develops a new concept of the relationship between reason and culture as part of the relationship between a substance-attribute, subject-predicate relationship, and as part of the relationship between the human mind and culture, as well as part of the humanity-culture-nature triangle relationship. It provides an alternative view both to universalism and culturalism/multiculturalism—the two dominating “isms” in approaching human reason and culture hitherto in both Eastern and Western philosophy--and emphasizes reading original philosophical classics in both Western and Chinese philosophies.


Xunwu Chen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA