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.

The pragmatic turn away from epistemology could mean a number of things for the definition of the future of political theory. First, political liberalism would mark a distinct departure from comprehensive liberalism that is based solely on epistemological justification of fundamental liberal notions. Second, the pragmatic turn would cause Rawls to modify his long-time emphasis on constructivism, moving from Kantian constructivism to political constructivism, and implicitly adopting more substantive approach. Third, the fact of pluralism would radically open up the question of the foundation for consensus, which would lead to an emphasis on constitutionalism. Fourth, this move, innovative as it was, would lead to the establishment of an association between constitutional interpretation and public reason. Finally, this set of moves associated with the pragmatic turn would essentially set up a series of constraints when it comes to evaluating public reason from an international perspective.

The aim of this article is to cope with the academic schizophrenia and the anthropological deficit of contemporary social theory by a comparative investigation of Christian Smith and Paul Ricoeur. Two interrelated “gaps” are identified: the “external” gap, which has to do with the brutal, yet seldom recognized, contrast between the naïve, uncritical praise of humanism in public life, and the theoretical anti-humanism of the strong versions of the predominant poststructuralist and postmodern epistemologies within human and social sciences - and the “internal” gap associated with the academic schizophrenia of scholars who systematically disconnect scholarly theory and personal experience, description of facts from normative convictions. In order to provide resources to cope with these challenges, the author turns to Smith and Ricoeur, considered as two different versions of contemporary personalism.

The distinction between xenophobia and racism is sometimes used to deny that Islamophobia is a racism. I challenge this strategy by tracing that distinction back to the formation of the term racism by Franz Boas, Julian Huxley, and Ashley Montagu, that culminated in the UNESCO Statement on Race in 1950. By showing the connection between their understanding of racism and the deployment in this context of further distinctions, such as that between race and religion, or that between nature and culture, and by recalling the ideological purpose the use of these distinctions were intended to serve, I deploy a genealogical approach to show that Islamophobia is a racism. Racism cannot be identified through the use of analytically established distinctions when what is at issue is the discriminatory behavior which is at its heart. Antiracism needs to learn to be as flexible in its thinking as racism appears to be.

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 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.