What I Have Learned

First of all, let me express my sincere gratitude to the organizers for putting this event together. Political philosophyPolitical philosophy continues to be a regionally focused field, in the sense that political philosophers are typically grounded in certain intellectual traditions in turn associated with certain parts of the world. While “global justice” has been a flourishing area for several decades now, in any event in the WesternWestern world, it too is grounded in intellectual traditions, and thus typically is philosophy from somewhere and then about everyone else. These tendencies are especially pronounced in the WesternWestern tradition of political thought, whose global agenda, in historical perspective, has been shaped quite a bit by thinkers connected to WesternWestern colonialism. I do not mean in any way that contemporary thinkers are still clinging to any imperialistImperialist hopes, or in any event that is not a very common phenomenon. What I mean instead is that we are all normally engaging with a rather limited set of authors grounded in a particular history who shape our agendas. But given the global realities of the unfolding twenty-first century, connecting to philosophical traditions beyond what one has learned from the home team is incredibly important for philosophy to contribute to an appropriately global intellectual culture. I personally also believe that actual in-person exchanges among scholars from different traditions are quite critical to that. Our meeting at City University Hong Kong has certainly advanced these purposes quite a bit