A characteristic feature of the 21st century is that every important thing is invisible: boundaries, technological risk, global warming, etc. In Eco-ethica, a new ethics in contrast to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics must be developed with respect to these invisible realities. What should we do to demolish the nuclear facilities at Fukushima? This is a question of “technica negativa”, the invisible process of demolition. The problem must be examined through ethics, Kant’s legal thinking and, finally, politics. Habermas’ idea of “solidarity” is fruitful here because he insists on civic democracy at a transnational scale. This idea may be linked to a new form of cosmopolitanism.

This paper tries to answer the question: why did Paul Ricœur keep a nearly total silence after 1963 about Soren Kierkegaard, and was there from the beginning a reticence with regard to Kierkegaard? An answer can be found in the beginning of Ricœur’s work, in his first book written with Mikel Dufrenne on Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de I ’existence. This book that is full of references to Kierkegaard also shows that it was Jaspers’ particular appropriation of the Danish thinker that affected him. But, like Jaspers, Ricœur became too preoccupied with external historical, social and political life to be a true disciple of Kierkegaard.

Paul Ricœur is rarely considered as a political thinker by his commentators. However, the question of power is constantly present in his thinking. The paper aims at retracing the main lines of Ricœur’s political project. Being instructed by the twentieth century totalitarianisms, he attacks systematicism in politics with “systematicity”, relying on the strength of political paradoxes. This argumentative form invites us to renounce claiming a knowledge and to connect politics with ethics through a practical wisdom. Ricœur’s reflection gives us keys for understanding today’s politics. His criticism of “minimal policies” may in particular be addressed to neoliberalism.

What does it mean to call the so-called second Arab awakening a liberal revolution? In this article, the author tries to answer that question by first framing it in the larger historical context by reference to the origins of the liberal narrative. Second, he attempts to probe the question of why and how the recent events of the Middle East can be put in the context of that narrative. Finally, he turns to evolutionary theory to see what kind of paradigm can be prescriptive for the second Arab awakening.

As is well known, Kant finds the subjective condition of morally motivated actions in the feeling of respect for duty, and defines it as an a priori affect caused only by reason, an affect to be distinguished from all psychological inclinations. In Confucian ethics, one can find such a transcendentalized affect explaining the origin of authentic moral actions. The author analyzes and compares two privileged moral feelings not only in the perspective of contemporary debates between duty ethics and virtue ethics, but also in the perspective of contemporary Korean experiences of moral crisis.

This essay attempts to outline a genealogical approach to the question of why political reasoning and moral reasoning have parted company, highlighting the contributions of Aristotle, Aquinas, Geulincx, Kant, Garve, Hegel, and Schmitt. In the author’s conclusion he looks in particular at the work of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, the former largely associated with political philosophy and the latter almost exclusively associated with ethics, to show that these readings are both one-sided understandings of their work and that, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, neither accept the standard account of the relation of ethics and politics.

The task of this paper is to derive an ethics of governance from the teachings of Mencius that may be applicable to our present time. Mencius follows Confucius in the three important elements of the state: security, basic necessities, and the confidence of the people in their ruler. Mencius specifies these in terms of avoiding unjust wars, providing a sound and inclusive economic program, and adding justice to humanity in parenting the people.

This article seeks to show that multiple modalities uncovered in the phenomenology of recognition is the basis for understanding how social and political phenomena can manifest itself variously in amoral social conflict, moral struggles for recognition as well as peaceful experiences of mutual recognition. Conceived in this light, the moral task for individuals is to move beyond the recognition of others as things and instead towards the recognition of the others as persons worthy of respect and sympathy. And the political task of institutions is to teach and cultivate moral forms of mutual recognition even as they regulate and constrain the amoral Hobbesian tendencies for social conflict.

The author discusses the concept of equality in ethics and political economy. The first section presents a philosophical concept of equality of resources, as it is suggested by Ronald Dworkin. The second section looks at the concept of equality in relation to the factual distribution in our contemporary political economy. It relies on Thomas Piketty who argues that it is the concept of capital that reproduces inequality and that is still the most essential concept in our economic system. The third section discusses the conceptions and perspectives on the relation between ethics and political economy in our present society.

Human beings experience themselves through various kinds of collectively experienced time. Medicine that relies upon precarious forms of ancestral or evolutionary explanation generates such collectively experienced forms of time, which are thus essentially politico-medically instituted versions of kin relations. Kin relations structure our ethical relations to each other rather thoroughly, even in Western modernity, especially through legally sanctioned relations. Hence, an ancestral or evolutionary explanation in medicine should be examined for its ethical import via its structuring of etiologically linked kin relations, even if those relations extend beyond the family, people, population or group context back into cosmic and evolutionary origins.

The aim of this paper is, first, to test the hypothesis whereby narrativity constitutes an existential in the Heideggerian sense. Second, the author renews his appeal for a pluralism of possible modes of self-emplotment, without presupposing any separation between pre-narrative experience and narrative experience. Finally, he devotes some time to a discussion with Strawson and Ricceur on the limits of narrative or, more accurately, to limit-narrativity as a form of narration impeded as a result of traumatic experiences. The article then introduces the concept of narrative substitution in highlighting the role played by others and by third-person narrators who substitute themselves for the inability to self- emplot. - Key-words: narrativity, Ricceur, Strawson, traumatic experiences, self-emplotment.

The characteristic feature of modernized systematic environment is realized by one little, thin box named a smart phone or iPhone. By touching the surface, it can open various kinds of technologically magnified internet environment, and bring us into so-called world-wide information society. Our surrounding world is changed to a “technologically developed imaginary world”, virtual reality, where we can live and enjoy. Through this instrument we will be an “anonymous person” for helping people but we may hurt another person’s dignity. It is possible to hide one’s own “self’ behind the technological tool. People always look at the surface of smart phone and concentrate upon outer world without consciousness. It is the crisis of “self’, because of a lack of thinking. Unfortunately, dehumanization will occur. But for solving transnational problems, for example global warming, refugees, etc., we must change our ethical attitude from nosism without any responsibility to an awakening consciousness or living together as “world citizens”.

Moral naturalism in Europe and elsewhere today is the view that only the natural sciences can satisfactorily analyze the ethical value of persons. Many thoughtful people appear still to believe that the natural sciences can “reduce” the distinctive ethical value of persons ultimately to microphysical terms. Such an apparently widespread belief in part of the EU cultural environment today, however, raises serious questions. - In this EU context and in the Symposium contexts of Tomonobu Imamichi’s (1922-2012) eco-ethical concerns about “a new ethics for our new times,” I would like to offer here two sets of critical observations in support of non-naturalistic accounts of the ethical value of persons. The first group comprises reasons why even some impressive contemporary forms of scientific ethical naturalisms of the person continue to be surprising. And the second, briefer set comprises several elements only of what a non- naturalistic ethics of the person might require.