Environmental ethic depends on technological ethics. We must therefore think of the technique with all its virtualities and not merely as an instrument. Heidegger’s approach to technique avoids this reduction. Brought closer to the language it questions its essence. With modem technology that essence does not advance production but provocation, by which nature is ordered to deliver an energy that can be extracted for maximum utilization and lower costs. The way of producing poetry remains open yet. This article reads again this difficult text, indicates some limitations, and tries to take the better of its wealth for contemporary debate crossing environmental and technological ethics.

This paper is a modest attempt to derive an environmental ethics of Teaism from Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, for as both authors assert, Teaism is not just aestheticism but also religion and ethics with regards to the whole point of view about man and nature. The first part presents the main features of the Teaism, its brief history, the tea room and tea ceremony, and the philosophies behind it. The second part applies Max Scheler’s axiological ethics, particularly his notion of love as a movement towards the enhancement of the value inherent in the beloved to the love of Nature expressed in the tea ceremony. An environmental ethics from Teaism would then mean developing a habit of harmonizing, revering, purifying and being joyful in poverty before the ephemeral, the ever-changing and self- forgetfulness of Nature, including our human nature.

This paper deals with the relationships between ethics and the environment in Rousseau’s thought. The concept of environment is understood in its various dimensions. What is at stake is the natural, as well as the social and political, environment of human beings. The notion of ethics is also understood in a broad sense. We do not set ethics, understood as the search for happiness (or for the good life) against morality, understood as the fulfillment of duty. However, we take up two main questions. The first question concerns the influence of the environment, both natural and social, upon the ethical development of human beings. The second question concerns the responsibility of human beings towards nature. We examine what Rousseau teaches us regarding these two questions. Finally, we envisage liberty from the point of view of the relationships between nature and the political order. Human liberty is a matter of rights. It depends upon the republican nature of the state. However, liberty is also a sentiment that is intimately related to the living experience of nature. In order to understand what Rousseau means by liberty, we must grasp this intimate relationship between nature and politics.

This essay explores how Paul Ricoeur analyses the body as both flesh and text. Beginning with a phenomenology of embodiment and life in his early philosophy of the will, after his hermeneutic turn in the 1960s he concentrated more on the mediation of flesh through textual interpretation and language. This led Ricoeur beyond Husserl and Levinas and closer to the work of Merleau-Ponty. His later writing opens horizons for rethinking the ‘flesh of the world’ in new ontological and ethical ways.

The aim of this paper is to show the anthropological resources of Ricceur’s philosophy of the act, in order to elaborate a living articulation of ethics and politics that avoids the deadlock which represents the idea of a complete divorce between moral idealism and political realism. In this second part, it defends the thesis that the reconquest of an “ethical-political teleology” is only possible to the extent that, in Ricceur, the reappropriation of the “ethical originary affirmation” takes a radically critical form. Then it tries to show how this critical approach is likely to lead to a release of the mediating power of social imaginary, which always complements and precedes our acts.

If Emmanuel Lévinas does not develop a criticism of audiovisual technologies, sometimes even granting them hermeneutical virtues, he remains mindful of the risks incurred by societies that are increasingly determined by these technologies. In this article we want to underline the fact that, for Lévinas, considerable distraction can be generated by information technology, which risks neutralizing the experience of living speech. Compared to these risks, a certain ethical urgency must serve as a reminder that, if the responsibility is not just a figure of speech, it demands we question the way in which we understand images in our societies that may be fully configured by the flow of information, and the way we understand how the other is revealed to us through screens.

Nature doesn’t need our care, the environment does. “Our” environment is a relational term implying surroundings that are inhabitable, allowing us not only to survive but to live good lives. For ages our “natural” environment was understood as that part of our environment that was given by nature and, therefore, not accessible to human actions as are our cultural and social environments. We had to accept it and adapt to it. Nowadays we are faced with the fact that more and more parts of our natural environment can be and are altered or prevented from altering by human manipulations. So ethical responsibility is extending beyond the traditional fields of social and cultural environmental conditions. We will have to find answers to the new question of what kind of nature we want to preserve, to cultivate, and to build, and for whom and to whom we are responsible.

This paper attempts to derive an ethics of interdependence in the Chung Yung, the Doctrine of the Mean. The Doctrine of the Mean, one of the Four Books of Confucianism often paired with the Great Learning, Ta Hsueh, is considered a patchwork of at least two separate writings. While the title indicates the topic to be the Doctrine of the Mean, analogous to the Aristotelian Mean, the latter half of the treatise discusses another topic, Cheng, translated often as sincerity, truth, or reality. On closer reading, however, and emphasizing the second character Yung, meaning “practice” or “common,” one can discover the ethical implications of the treatise. The first part presents the main ideas of the treatise, and the second shows the logical movement of these ideas to come up with an ethics of interdependence: interdependence of self and others, of self and things, and of self and Heaven and Earth.

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.