This article presents and develops Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian theory of heart-mind-will and human nature as the source and basis for the understanding of humanity. This article next shows how Kant and Confucius could be said to share the same vision of humanity in light of one particular historical connection between them. Finally, I have explored four forms of knowledge in light of a distinction between feeling and observation as well as their basic unity. This gives rise to our vision of humanity as world-rooted, and so indicates further how it can serve as a grounding for world-humanities.

I agree with Professor Cheng's critique that Kant shows that Practical Reason points toward a model of human subjectivity and human autonomy congenial to Confucian thinking. In the Western rationalist tradition also there are threads that connect to other world views in an illuminating fashion if we investigate their historical roots. Using Professor Cheng's method, I claim that in the West there began a humanistic tradition that bears affinities to Confucius and which itself is now being transformed by its encounter with non-European thought. This exemplifies the comparative work that would be one facet of world humanities.

This article considers the question “Is There, Can There Be, such an Activity as World Humanities?” My response takes issue with the phrase “world humanity” that serves to legitimize a homogenizing process of globalization while simultaneously hiding from view the injustices and power imbalances that globalization creates. From my perspective as a Cree-Métis scholar, the world humanities are only valuable if they participate in the recuperation and protection of Indigenous stories—and by extension Indigenous languages and epistemes—that would require a reconsideration of the definition and obligations of what it means to be human.

Aboriginal peoples are forever explaining themselves to non-Aboriginal people: telling their stories, explaining their beliefs and ceremonies, and introducing ideas that have never crossed the non-Aboriginal mind. Western knowledge operates from a linear, singular view; it views the world from order beneath chaos; it is very noun oriented; knowledge is about oneself in relation to everything else in a relativistic sense. Aboriginal knowledge has a very different “coming to know.” It is holistic and cyclical; it views the world from chaos underneath order; its languages are process and action oriented. Knowledge is about participation in and with the natural world.

This response to Professor Little Bear's lecture considers the role of language in acknowledging our interdependency with other living beings, and explores the possibilities offered by Indigenous humanities with regard to a deep valuing of the watery commons otherwise known as the planet earth. Questions of reciprocity, historical responsibility, decolonization, solidarity, and care for future generations are raised.

In response to Leroy Little Bear's description of the Blackfoot identity as rooted in place, the article articulates an ecological conception of value based in European thought that can be in close dialogue with the telling aboriginal phrase “I am the environment.” While important similarities are noted, especially the convergence of aboriginal and ecological conceptions of value on a critique of the assessment of value by commodity price, the difficulty of rooting value in Being within the European tradition contrasts with the continuity of human, animal, and cosmic intelligence in aboriginal thought.

The humanities create communities of meaning and the means to unify knowledge. Poets and novelists offer new insights into our shared mind. History provides our continuity. Philosophy struggles to unite our scientific knowledge with our understanding of values. Each discipline creates its own perspective and they often turn inward, creating new divisions. Yet a global view of the humanities is our hope of finding the means to live together in peace. But the argument in this article suggests that a philosophical understanding of the basic concepts with which we order our claims about the world can provide a successful response.

The article opens by stating the importance of the humanities and need for unapologetic advocacy on its behalf. Armour's metaphor of world humanities, as a conversation, is then taken as a point of departure for considering the example of Chinese and European “philosophy” that might join in conversation in order to expand, through mutual transformation, what we mean by “philosophy.” The concluding section argues that if we cast Chinese thought in the light of philosophy as constructed in Europe and North America, we exclude elements that could enrich and expand our pursuit of wisdom and what that entails.

This article explores attitudes underscoring arguments I believe are located in Professor Armour's address in the present special issue. I first show how Armour's arguments are intertwined with a resolute belief in the existence of a unique form of knowledge, one particularly attuned to the work of humanities scholars, and then go on to argue this certainty is linked to an antecedent attitude, one of exceptionalism. Spelling out what I find to be troubling about this species of argument leads into thoughts around how a world-humanities might unfold. Such a field must develop as a conscious attempt on the part of scholars to bring about dialogue around how humans can find an appropriate place in the natural world.

This paper identifies five dimensions of cosmopolitanism, though doubtless there are many more: cosmopolitanism in decision making, engaging others, attaining personal wholeness, the ultimate value-identity of life, and religious sensibility. These are discussed in terms of the Confucian ideas of the “Four Beginnings,” ritual, life as cultivated education, sagehood, public versus private life, Principle, heart-mind, harmony, value, humaneness, “love with differences,” “roots and branches,” and filiality, among others. In all, it presents Confucianism as a living tradition that is facing up to how it might extend itself in light of the need for cosmopolitanism.