Li Zehou belongs to the most well-known and influential contemporary Chinese philosophers of our time. Since he is one of the exiled intellectuals, his work has also acquired a wide readership outside China. Working mostly in the fields of classical Chinese philosophy and Chinese aesthetics, he dedicated himself to the task of finding a suitable and sensible way of harmonizing past and present, tradition and modernity, China and the West. Hence, he attempted to create a synthesis between early Marxist and (...) classical Confucian discourses. The present article offers a critical analysis of these attempts, focusing upon some significant methodological problems underlying such approaches. The author aims to explain them in the framework of the methodology of intercultural research. Because in China, the problem of connecting Confucian and Marxist thought is presently a much discussed and very topical issue, the article also represents a contribution to the clarification of this relevant question. (shrink)

Li Zehou stands among the most influential Chinese philosophers in the post-Mao era. His notion of subjectality is of paramount importance for current developments in contemporary Chinese philosophy. It belongs to the central concepts in Li's theoretical framework, around which his entire philosophical system is constructed. With his elaboration of this concept, Li expanded the problem of the self in post-revolutionary modernism. The present article analyzes the theoretical bases of this concept, exposes its importance in the scope of contemporary Chinese (...) theory and shows why and how it represents a call for a new humanism. Through a multidimensional comparative perspective, the author also explains why the human subject, which is based upon Li's notion of subjectality, has the potential not only to transform modern alienation into a real “human condition,” that is, into spiritually fulfilled society of autonomous individuals but also to fill up the prevailing “vacuum of values.”. (shrink)

Kant's concept of the "thing in itself" constitutes a formidable challenge to the project of "historical ontology" with which the name of Li Zehou has become synonymous. Li's radical reinterpretation of Kant's critical philosophy, which locates the conditions of the possibility of knowledge and experience within historical and social evolution and thus seeks to allow for a form of human self-determination, brings us face to face with the dose relation between the epistemological/ontological and normative dimensions of the notion of the (...) thing in itself. My paper attempts to tease out some of the conceptual presuppositions and repercussions of Li's approach to the thing in itself in the Critique of Critical Philosophy, while locating his reading in the broader context of Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)