Xu Yu’s Post‑Europe: A Program to Reorient Philosophy for a Technological Age

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Xu Yu (许煜), a philosopher at Erasmus University (伊拉斯姆斯大学), argues in his new book Post‑Europe (《后欧洲》) that Western philosophy lost its centrality after World War II as technical systems — from ENIAC and the transistor to Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics — reconfigured how the world is governed. It has been reported that Xu frames this shift as the opening of a “post‑Europe” era in which Europeans are no longer the primary historical agents. Can modern humans still “go home” when the very idea of a home has been technologized and globalized?

A program for the “individualization of thought”

Xu builds a practical and comparative program out of three intellectual pillars. He reworks Gilbert Simondon (西蒙东)’s theory of individuation and the notion of “incompatibility” as a creative tension; he leans on Bernard Stiegler (斯蒂格勒)’s techno‑philosophy to insist that questions of spirit and technique must be addressed together; and he rescues aspects of the Chinese neo‑Confucian Mù Zōngsān (牟宗三) — especially the “liangzhi” insight that moral self‑negation can generate cognitive legitimacy — to show how Asian thought can resolve certain ontological splits in Eurocentric traditions. The book’s key move is to propose a planetary “thought individualization”: philosophical pluralism that makes thinking itself an individuating, civilizational practice rather than a mere exchange of doctrines.

Stakes for identity, language and geopolitics

Xu’s book turns philosophical method into geopolitical strategy. Reportedly, he sees East Asia’s faster path to industrialization and technological capacity as giving Asian intellectual traditions a new practical relevance — not to replace Europe, but to pluralize and reconfigure planetary thought. Questions follow: how will identity and mother‑tongue politics shape wandering intellectuals? And how does philosophy respond while global tech rivalries reshape power? Post‑Europe does not claim firm answers; it offers a programmatic wager: if philosophy hopes to matter in a planet governed by technology, it must individuate thought across civilizational differences and address the politics of language, identity and technique at once.