Space for World Order: Reconceptualizations for Late-modern Publics

Our modern Western world has marginalized a significant portion of its philosophical history, as well as the epistemologies of other civilizations. I confront in this study given 'regimes of truth' by considering the historicity (positivity and facticity) of cosmopolitanism and extracting the normative content of Ancient Occidental and East Asian metaphysics. While premised on Hannah Arendt's meditations on pre- and early modern thought and connected to the naturalism, humanism and teleology of Aristotle, Plato, Confucius and Mencius, this study appreciates and invokes considerably late and postmodern theories. I locate the connection between the schools of thought in Seyla Benhabib's ethical conception of an 'emancipated humanity' in which every person is afforded the simple right to be. By textualizing ethics, I seek to derive meaning of texts from their universal moral prescriptions and to reconceptualize notions of unity and ethical 'oughts' that speak to us from histories and texts.