
Shuchen Xiang
Shuchen Xiang (BA Cantab first class honors, PhD, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and King’s College London, summa cum laude) is the Mt. Hua Professor of Philosophy at Xidian University, China. She is the author of Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2023), which won an honorable Mention for the Asia and Asian America Section Book Award, American Sociological Association. She is also author of A Philosophical Defense of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer (State University of New York Press, 2021), the coeditor of The Islamic-Confucian Synthesis in China (Lexington, 2023), the coeditor of How China Shaped the Enlightenment: A Transcultural History of Modern Thought (Routledge, forthcoming), the translator of History of Chinese Philosophy Through Its Key Terms (Springer, 2020), and the author of around forty academic articles. Her third monograph is entitled A More Complete Humanism: The Confucian Alternative to the Liberal-Capitalist Subject.

A more complete humanism: a Confucian alternative to the liberal-capitalist subject
This talk is based on my forthcoming monograph A More Complete Humanism: A Confucian Alternative to The Liberal-Capitalist Subject. This monograph argues that the liberal-capitalist account of human nature presents us with an “incomplete” form of humanism in that it assumes the unrestrained pursuit of human desires automatically coheres into harmonious, larger whole or telos. From both the Confucian and Daoist perspectives these assumptions fundamentally mischaracterize the nature of the human. Human nature and its concomitant desires are socio-cultural and therefore, not subject to the limiting conditions of nature. Both Confucianism and Daoism recognize the agential role that humans have in shaping their desires and “natures.” These Chinese philosophers present us with a more complete humanism. The humanism of both the Daoist and Confucian described in this book redresses our current, mistaken conception of the human such that we can begin to live sustainably with each other and our world.
©2025 by The XI International Conference of Eastern Philosophy at Unicamp
Brazil-China Study Group
