What can we now say about city and society and the care of the self? From Cicero, we learned that political engagement is key to the good life. Plato asks ‘What is good?’ while Aristotle actually shows us ways of how to be good with his ‘doctrine of the mean’. This is an idea that strongly resonates with Confucius’ junzi (君子, ‘gentleman’). By leading a good life of political engagement—after all, we are basically zoon politikon (ζῷον πoλιτικόν, ‘political animals’)—it should be possible to achieve eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία, ‘flourishing’) in our lives through proper care of the self.

Li Shiqiao explored the care of the self in China, pointing to some crucial differences with the Western, Greco-Roman-derived conceptions of this kind of care. He warns (as he also does in his book Understanding the Chinese City) that the historical Western models of city life may be inappropriate or even inimical to a proper understanding of Chinese urban life. This may also be causing great damage to the Chinese city. One of the main aims of the research presented in this volume is to free our reading of the city (and society) from too narrow and too overly Western understandings of the city. One of the main aims of this volume is to try and see a new openness in the acceptance of other perspectives on the city and society.

It has also helped that a number of the papers in this volume have taken such theoretical stances in their investigations into the city and city life. Michel Foucault’s work has proved its continuing relevance more than thirty years after his untimely death in 1984. Luiz Paulo Leitão Martins’ papers highlight Foucault’s ‘biopolitics of power’ to look at how ars erotica (‘erotic art’) can be both detached from a scientific model of knowledge and related to the use of pleasure for care of the self.

Other contributors have used Chinese philosophy in their explorations. Massimiliano Lacertosa’s reinterpretation of dao (道) establishes a philosophy of comparison that embraces both theoretical hypotheses and methodological praxis (πρᾶξις) to propose a different approach to its understanding.