On September 3, 2026, the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences organized a workshop “Cosmopolitanism and Tianxia” on the premises of the institute, which took place as part of the international project “Cotian – Cosmopolitanism and Tianxia: Toward the Shared Grounds of Mutually Beneficial and Respectful Understanding in Global Political Thought” (SAS-NSTC-JRP-2025-07).
This type of project is being solved for the first time not only at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, but also in the humanities and social sciences in general. The Slovak Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the National Science and Technology Council, has opened the 17th Call for SAS-NSTC Joint Research Projects for the humanities and social sciences for the first time. The main researcher of the project is Dr. Ľubomír Dunaj (Institute of Philosophy SAS).
At the first event, Professor Roy Tseng (Center for Political Thought, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica) presented a paper entitled “The Idea of Liangzhi-Rooted Cosmopolitanism: A Confucian Way to Resolve the Hazards of Ethnocentrism”. He presented his political-theoretical variant of Confucian cosmopolitanism, which he built on the principle of liangzhi, the so-called internalized knowledge – a moral capacity that exists independently of social status.
Chen-Yu Ko and Ming-jong Shen presented the paper “On the Philosophical-Anthropological Tension between (Confucian) Cosmopolitanism and Tianxia (All Under Heaven) Theory”, in which they focused on the critique of a particular model – the Confucian New Tianxia Model by Bai Tongdong. Against the background of this criticism, they also pointed to the rich discussions that take place in connection with the different models of Tianxia (天下).
The intersections between cosmopolitanism and Tianxia, West and East, human rights and Confucian principles have created a space for a stimulating discussion about the principles and paradoxes of equality, democracy, human nature, rationality, empathy and self-determination in the current era of multipluralism.
Text: Laura Kladeková, Institute of Arts, Slovak Academy of Sciences
Photo: Matej Pok