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.

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.

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.