This article engages with the biblical legacy of anthropomorphism from a contemporary perspective. First, it revisits the biblical creation myth and questions the deeply ingrained notion that what it offers is an account of ‘creation out of nothingness.’ Second, this rereading is followed by a closer look at how this particular theology was elaborated by Hans Jonas in his philosophy of life. In the final part of the paper, Jonas’s philosophy of responsibility is linked to a reflection on humanity’s unique capacity for destruction and self-destruction. Contrary to much of contemporary posthumanism, it is argued that a recognition of the interdependence between the human and the non-human worlds must never be a matter of erasing the distinction between them, since such a blurring of distinctions runs the risk of overshadowing the uniqueness of human destructiveness and thereby of undermining a serious discussion of human responsibility.

Taking as its starting-point Frédéric Worms’s Les maladies chro­nique de la Démocratie (2017), this paper shows the links between three kinds of interconnections: planetary, socio-cultural, and interpersonal. The contemporary refusal of interdependence is illustrated by an examination of three sicknesses: empiricism, racism, and ultraliberalism. It is proposed that the challenge they represent can be met by a cosmopoli­tanism inspired in part by both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant.

The Chinese counterpart of ‘landscape’ is fengjing 風景. This word is based on the three semantic elements: wind, light, and seeing. I will trace below the philosophical implications of the three key sememes of the word fengjing in the perspective of comparative philosophy. The purpose of such a task lies, on the one hand, in evoking the aesthetics of fengjing dormant in the East Asian tradition and, on the other hand, in presenting a new model of interdependence that can stimulate environment-friendly ethical imagination.

Fundamentally, ethics may be understood as having to do with what and who acting persons are. Persons, however, act variously. Some persons are basically individualists. They characteristically act as if they are as wholly independent as possible from other persons. Other persons are collectivists. They act as if they are as much a dependent part of some larger community of persons as possible. Accordingly, one cardinal issue for any philosophical ethics is whether almost all persons are, fundamentally, independent entities. That is, are almost all persons independent entities, or are almost all persons dependent ones? The idea I pursue here briefly is that, fundamentally, persons are neither independent nor dependent entities but interdependent ones. They are so in the senses of not being essentially prior to, or not being ontologically more basic than, or not having their ontological identity apart from other persons.

This paper takes its point of departure from a prior reflection on John Rawls’ argument for a two-stage model which shelters the political from immediate contestation. I turn to an examination of populism first from an historical and then from a normative perspective. Historically, populism can be traced to early Roman times, while from a normative point of view, as the literature shows, populism lacks a clear definition. In my view this is derived from its essentially parasitical function in relationship to democracy. In the end, populism, which claims to be grounded on the immediacy of conflict, is exposed as a remnant of a pre-democratic past which does not and cannot accommodate itself to the ‘fact of pluralism’ that characterizes our contemporary democratic situation.

The conflict between traditional ethics posed by contemporary technology is especially acute in the case of artificial intelligence. This is because the conception of nothingness or vacuum developed by both Laotse and Zuang-zi is resisted by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence with its incorporation of inter-subjectivity and inter-objectivity cannot be a vacuum.

This article discusses the ethical interdependence and political practice in the age of the Anthropocene. The article presents the work on this topic by Bruno Latour in his discussions of social constructivism in relation to the political philosophy of the Anthropocene. With Latour we can perceive the emergence of a new form of geopolitics where the earth and its nature has become a field of politics. Politics has become climate change politics and the political hypermodernity is forced to integrate nature in the ethics and politics of our time. Therefore the age of the Anthropocene implies the emergence of a new form of international governance. Resilience politics in the age of the Anthropocene opens for a new responsibility for climate change that moves beyond the technological understandings of modernity because humanity is situated in the center of the earth in interdependence with nature and culture.

Given an ethic of interdependence in the different dimensions between global and interpersonal/individual, the article focuses on the individual human being under the guiding principle of interdependencies. Apart from blocking interdependencies, primarily promoting interdependencies are exhibited. That means those that awake and promote the creative abilities, and enable individuals to introduce their original values and norms into existing moral contexts and also to change them. The thesis examines the effect of interdependencies in an inner-individual (and ultimately also in interpersonal) dimension. With respect to border cases a new and unusual value setting emerges which requires an approach that justifies a temporal dependency. Accordingly, referring to the individual, the question is: How can values and standards emerge in the moral context that differ from the established ones? How can new values be initiated in violation of prevailing values, which are regarded as first and mute values which rely on other actors and listeners who respond to and accept them?

The problem of interdependence is crucial for understanding the climate, with its interactions between land, water and atmosphere, as well as with human activities, past and future. The concept of interdependence expresses two types of relationship, that of causality and that of responsibility. For the problems of climate governance as understood as a statistical average in the Conferences of the parties (COP), causal dependence is impossible to reconstruct precisely, notably because of the complexity of these phenomenons. However, dependence does not only concern the domain of being, falling within the natural sciences and social sciences and human descriptivo-predictive. It also concerns the ought-to-be and therefore the normative sciences (ethics, political thery, law and normative economy). Here interdependence is much more problematic since it is opposed to freedom. The article discusses the various interdependencies and political solutions that are offered to take care of this needs, architectures for discussing climate change politically: systems (N. Luhmann) and deliberation (J. Habermas). He proposes then another solution, that of the moral and political consediration.

This paper takes Wilhelm von Humboldt seriously—as a philosopher. It does so by exploring Humboldt’s central notion of “Individuum/Individualität,” which does not coincide with the philosophical usage of “individual/individuality” in English. It is closer related to Leibniz’s notion of the “monad,” being characterized by infinity, totality and ineffability. Humboldt’s focus on the philosophical role of language does not primarily aim at an analysis of the system(s) of language(s), but rather at an hermeneutical investigation of actual thinking and speaking among thinking and speaking individuals, every one of them being characterized by infinity, totality and ineffability. This analysis eventually leads to a new approach to ethics. It circumscribes an ethics without universal truths, guided by the respect of the words of the others even if we cannot ever fully understand them. But it is necessarily their words which co-constitute our mentally framed perception of the world.

By entering positive law, human rights reveal not only internal contradictions, but also external conflicts between the practical reasons which inspire them. These contradictions and conflicts could pull us in the doldrums (Pot au noir), this mythical place where ships, caught in violent storms and world winds, could shipwreck.

The now widespread notion of environmental racism, coined around 1990 and still important in its place, was never intended to do justice to the full range of issues raised by the Anthropocene. To meet this challenge I propose the introduction of a new concept, that of “anthropocentric racism.” This concept is an extension of what some have referred to as systemic racism, but because the Anthropocene challenges the distinction between nature and culture championed by the Boasian school of anthropology as a way to attack racism, the Anthropocene obliges us to look at racism differently. I propose an extension of the dialectical approach to racism championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon and will illustrate that approach by examining climate change as a form of antipraxis.

It is the aim of this paper to develop the phenomenology of phronesis through a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of phronesis by employing different kinds of phenomenological reductions. In section 1, I will show that phenomenological reduction is identical with a change of attitude and that we have to employ different kinds of phenomenological reductions in order to interpret Aristotle’s theory of phronesis phenomenologically. In section 2, employing different kinds of phenomenological reductions, I will attempt to develop the phenomenological psychology of phronesis through a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of phronesis. In section 3, employing different kinds of intersubjective reductions, I will clarify intersubjective aspects of phronesis. In section 4, adopting these insights, I will try to resolve two of the many difficulties of Aristotle’s theory of phronesis. In section 5, I will conclude with two remarks concerning the future tasks of the phenomenology of phronesis.

The social and political problem of immigration forces us to reflect on ethical issues such as the relation of responding and bonding across sharp differences, the role that moral values play in relating to the other, and the possibility of solidarity as a way of being responsible for the others with whom we do not have any ready-made social bond. I take Levinas's notion of the ethical relation with the other as a primal society from which the third is not excluded, as a starting point for thinking of social bond as solidarity. I argue that it allows for ethical social bond making in situations determined by bio-power; even in situations in which people are depersonalized and deprived of their right to rights, and of their ethical agency. I propose that the bond of solidarity with the immigrant can be a model for the ethical social bond.

The technological society, with all its potentialities in terms of well-being or improvement of daily life, is a source of many paradoxes that constitute real challenges for ethical reflection. Indeed, we have never been so free to express ourselves through information and communication technologies, while simultaneously encountering increasingly acute forms of alienation. More broadly, our current world suffers from an impoverishment of social imaginaries (if we consider the generalization of the consumerist model, identity retreats, separation logics), even though their strength is essential to the fate of ethics, let alone in technological societies that are becoming more and more structurally complex.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Peter Kemp (1937–2018), whose extraordinary influence since the 1960s as an academic scholar and public intellectual transformed the Scandinavian philosophical scene in the post-analytic period. His contributions are viewed in the light of a rich biographical context, from his 1973 doctoral defense and his unflagging commitment as a teacher and author to his continued critique of narrow philosophical perspectives. I emphasize the unparalleled success of Kemp in addressing and challenging both the broader society and its constituent elements of political leadership, public administration, and the business community. Finally, I show the impact of his personal life on his aim to link critical thinking and conviction in developing a philosophical commitment. In this way, as in general, Peter Kemp not only followed in the footsteps of, but also continued, Paul Ricoeur’s project.

In this paper, I discuss how Turkish feminists have approached the phenomenon of male violence in Turkey as a political problem by following the feminist precept that the private is public. In the last twenty years, feminist activists in media have made male violence increasingly visible, by criticizing the framing of femicides as fatalities of jealousy and love. I argue that Turkish feminists do not consider male violence as just a “situation” or a structure of “oppression.” They problematize it as systematic political violence, which calls for a critique of the anti-feminist state policies that restitute masculine supremacy by the promotion of patriarchal values. The political consolidation of masculinity by the rejection of gender equality is a key aspect of authoritarianism. Turkish government does not frame domestic violence as a women’s problem but as a family problem. In contrast, feminist arguments invite the government to confront domestic violence as male violence. I suggest that the male violence that women experience in Turkey can be seen as a manifestation of bio-power at the age of the crisis of neo-liberalism.

According to Eco-ethica, our circumstances have a triple structure: 1)Nature, 2)Technological Conjuncture, and 3)Culture. In the twenty-first century we face the crisis of a global warming. It is because of human activities that create technological conjuncture: a diminishing time-process that aims at economic effects. Climate change is a cosmopolitan problem because it easily transcends boundaries. Practices must be subject to not only political regulation to promote public awareness, but also to individual consciousness-raising of personal responsibilities. Democracy must be rethought in order to promote joining the public and individuals to become World Citizens. In this information-society, Big Data must be available for everyone equally and freely. There is a social difference between rich and poor. Tocqueville suggested that rich citizens in a democracy are necessarily supported by the poor.

This article presents Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the tension between existence and politics and the role of political commitment in existentialist philosophy. Based on Sartre’s concept of engagement, the article analyzes the transition from the personal to the political perceived as a movement from personal moral consciousness to the awareness of the importance of the individual as a social actor and citizen in society. Sartre’s concept of political engagement can be characterized as critical intellectual commitment and “Socratic Citizenship.” Accordingly, this article is also an acknowledgment of the two important philosophers of ecoethica, Tomonbu Imamichi and Peter Kemp, both committed public intellectuals who said that the role of the philosopher is to contribute to the public affair of cosmopolitan society. Thus, the article presents the political engagement in four major parts: (1) From the existential to political engagement, (2) Political commitment as a struggle for human freedom, (3) The Socratic Citizenship, and (4). Conditions of authentic political action. Political engagement represents an effort to realize the respect owed to each individual as a universal singular, as well as that owed to freedom and democracy in the Kingdom of Ends.

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first is to reveal the unique significance on publicness in the Confucian 儒家 tradition. In order to achieve this, Confucian philosophical documents that explain the state 國 (guo) and the family 家 (jia), and loyalty 忠 (zhong) and filial piety 孝 (xiao) as continuous relationships will be analyzed. The second is to elucidate that the most important principle for maintaining the Confucian distinction between the public and the private, or publicness in the Confucian sense, is the scholar-gentry 士 (shi) spirit. In order to achieve this, the significance of uprightness 直 (zhi) and conducting oneself with reverence 居敬 (jujing), which are central to the scholar-gentry spirit, will be translated into contemporary terms and, furthermore, the possibility of Confucian existentialism will be explored. The final point of the present study is that the condition for the inheritance of the Confucian concept of publicness in modern culture must be found in the possibility of Confucian existentialism.