To what extent can another self be at the origin of its givenness to me? If I am the one who presents the Other, I would still be the only origin of the meaning of the world. In the Cartesian Meditations we find, on the one hand, the claim that all presence, including that of the Other, is possible as a constitution of the transcendental ego, and on the other hand, the idea that we are in bodily entanglement in our existential spatiality. Such an entanglement permits thinking that the Other can be the source of its own manifestation to me, giving the Other also a constituting rather than solely a constituted role. My essay offers a reading of Husserl¡¯s Fifth Meditation, highlights Sartre¡¯s brilliant contribution to the solution of this problem inherited from Husserl in Being and Nothingness, and explains Merleau-Ponty¡¯s two responses to it in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1961).

Our capacity to act¡ªconceived as the ability to interpret within complex technological environments¡ªis increasingly constrained by dynamics of structural disruption and a broader crisis of governmentality. This destabilization of normative frameworks calls for a renewed socio-philosophical engagement with the art of interpretation. In hypermodern societies, this crisis manifests through the opacity of digital technologies, which operate via imperceptible flows of data and information. While screens mediate our perception of the world, they obscure the architectures that underpin them, confining us to a structural invisibility that complicates hermeneutical efforts. Addressing this challenge entails developing a critical approach attuned to the ethical and ecological implications of digital life. The opacity intrinsic to these technologies obliges us to rethink and reconfigure our interpretive tools, thereby reaffirming the practical urgency of critical judgment in the digital age.

This article presents a discussion of the relation between Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny L¨¦vy, based on the book by Laurent Touil-Tartour, Achever Sartre (Completing Sartre), Figures, Grasset, Paris 2024. L¨¦vy and Sartre worked together on the newspapers La Cause du peuple and Lib¨¦ration, and L¨¦vy was Sartre¡¯s personal secretary from 1975 to 1980. Just before Sartre died in March 1980, L¨¦vy and Sartre published a set of articles in Le nouvel observateur with the title L¡¯Espoir maintenant (Hope Now), which discussed and evaluated important parts of Sartre¡¯s philosophy. The text led to a considerable scandal among Sartre¡¯s friends and collaborators, because it implied critical challenges to many key concepts of existentialism, and because Sartre now was much closer to Emmanuel Levinas in the sense of searching for a solution to the problems of morality in Jewish humanism and Talmudic wisdom. L¨¦vy was accused of manipulating Sartre and forcing him to publish something which was very far from his usual philosophy.

Using Jane Addams¡¯s concepts of perplexity and sympathetic knowledge, this article presents Addams¡¯s work as a multilayered practice of discursive action. This practice is based on Addams¡¯s use of perplexity, first as the affective state that uncouples knowledge and action, then methodologically, to formulate the problems that uncouple them. This is followed by a structured practice of caring listening found in sympathetic knowledge. The ultimate goal of her practice of discursive action is to shape the public understanding of social problems and the broader political imagination. Shaping public understanding and political imagination are seen as key tools to tackling questions of injustice and marginalization, which are often themselves sources of perplexity.

This essay reviews the origins and limits of Confucian modernity, dating back to Confucius¡¯s teachings (method of humorous self-directed questioning, pursuit of objective-collective freedom through etiquette practice), and compares them with Socrates¡¯s teachings (method of ironic refutation, pursuit of subjective-personal freedom through alternative thinking) that we can find in the origins of Western democracy and Enlightenment. It also examines how much the driving forces of Confucian modernity (knowledge-oriented attitude, ideal of self-cultivation, seek of a stable system, meritocracy) could satisfy the conditions of postmodern society, explaining how they are revealed recently in the so-called Chinese Dream.

How can reading as an act and process be a possibility of philosophical and eco-ethical renewal? How do we theorize reading? What is our image of reading, and to what ¡°political imaginary¡± does it correspond? The long history of philosophy and theory of literature manifests not just the stages of the birth of the reader as a theoretically vital element but also competing theories and typologies of reading, reminiscent of the birth of ¡°man¡± and his ¡°rights¡± into racializations. The term ¡°addressee function¡± is proposed here to analyze the politics of reading that ensues when reading and readers become the object of theory. Which readers¡ªaccording to race, caste, and gender for instance¡ªare reflected or ignored in these theoretical images? The addressee function helps identify the hidden possibilities of theories of reading. It asks anew and finds new answers, in new situations, to the question ¡°Why read?¡±

This essay explores the role of political imagination and institutional creativity in relation to a theory of action. It examines the role of imagination in prudential calculation and in the construction of utopian models of society. It highlights the contradictions involved in the construction of utopias that are meant to guide the actions of future generations. In contrast, the analysis proposes the idea of a creativity inherent to social and political practice. However, such creativity is ambivalent; it can lead to progressive as well as regressive results. Change is not a value in itself. Therefore, the outcomes of both political imagination and institutional creativity must remain subject to constant critical evaluation.

This article engages critically with one of the more original and thought-provoking efforts of recent years to respond philosophically to the current predicament of the world: Thomas Lynch¡¯s 2019 study Apocalyptic Political Theology. While agreeing with Lynch that the urgency of our times calls for more radical approaches than cautious dialogue or reformist adaptation, it nonetheless argues that apocalyptic political theologies eventually fall short precisely in their lack of radicality. To respond philosophically to a ¡°world in crisis,¡± we need instead to explore alternative traditions of radical thinking, including alternative conceptions of revolutionary temporality. Drawing on the Jewish Trotskyist thinker Daniel Bensa?d, the concluding part offers an endeavor in this direction. Given the urgency of the moment, it suggests, we need to shift focus away from the idea of radicality as negativity and disinvestment towards an idea of radicality as tenacity, persistence, and hope against all odds.

This essay attempts to integrate Robert Bernasconi¡¯s interpretation of the lived experience of the colonized in Frantz Fanon in accordance with Sartre¡¯s ¡°regressive-progressive¡± method with a psychoanalytical investigation of affectivity. Fanon notes that the affectivity of the colonized is overexcited; however, he also points to various kinds of displacements. The psychoanalytical theory posits that under conditions of oppression, defensive mechanisms encounter the lived experience of feeling. In traumatic situations, affect does not spontaneously translate into feelings. Fanon argues that the tendency to adapt to the harsh reality of colonialism is not without immense tension. His challenge in?The Wretched of the Earth?is an intervention in the psyche of the colonized. In The Wretched of the Earth, he creates an imaginary and symbolic space about revolution and the process of decolonization, aiming to transform the colonized¡¯s awareness of oppression through bodily affects into a space capable of accommodating feelings.

Psychoanalysis cannot be excluded from questions of psyche, health, and society in medical care and medical ethics. But can psychoanalysis be conceived as a therapeutic possibility beyond Europe? The ethics of thinking psychoanalysis beyond Europe must first confront the abnegated cartography of Europe and its beyond and do so without confining itself to the colonial moment. It must also confront the politics of the circuits that psychoanalysis has already inhabited. Such an ethic must confront caste as the continent¡ªto indulge in the old witz¡ªneither dark nor unconscious and yet hidden in plain sight both in Indian and European psychoanalysis. Unlike the unnameable Latin America that Derrida felt compelled in 1981 to name within psychoanalysis in the name of ethics, we will have to confront the politics of other hidden names¡ªIndia, Orient, ¡°Aryan¡±¡ªthat swarm around this unnamed ¡°caste¡± in the history, and possibly the future, of psychoanalysis.

This article discusses the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre on Frantz Fanon¡¯s political thinking. Sartre presents a dialectical social theory, based on the progressive-regressive method, considering the interplay between individual and collective, history and contemporary action, past and future. This philosophy has had a critical impact on Fanon¡¯s political theory of neocolonialism, race, and intersectionality. Fanon studied colonialism based on Sartre¡¯s philosophy and analyzed the problems of racism and oppression. He developed the concept of the colonial gaze as internalization of the gaze of the colonial order as self-oppressive othering of the self. The point of departure for the article is a short presentation of Fanon¡¯s biography. From this the article discusses the famous meeting between Fanon and Sartre in Rome in 1961. Finally, the article places this encounter within the development of a critical philosophy of race, as proposed in the work of Robert Bernasconi.

This article presents a theory of the scientist and researcher as a public intellectual who contributes with political, social, and ethical justified opinions and views on the future of society. In recent discussions the figure of the activist researcher has emerged as subject to criticism by defenders of science as being objective and neutral about politics and value-claims. However, the restriction of science as separated from politics has also been a limitation of academic freedom. In this context, I propose a political theory of academic freedom that argues that it is a part of the intellectual duty and responsibility of modern researchers, scientists, and academics to formulate the ethical and political implications of their research. Such a theory is necessary due to the social and political challenges of contemporary society. The activist voice of the researcher can therefore be justified as an integrated part of academic freedom in contemporary society.

In this paper, I present a nominalist ethics of intersubjectivity based on the principle of a discourse transcendent reality of the Other within an intersubjective relationship. Through a discussion of the authors Foucault, Sartre, and Hegel, and the film Drive My Car, the article presents a phenomenology of the appearance of one¡¯s own body and of the body of the Other, according, either, to evaluative criteria or to existential criteria not accessible to discursive handling. The argument is nominalist in its denial of a discursive purchase on the Other. It is realist in its exploration of the discourse transcendent reality of the Other. The argument moves between different orders of scale.

In writing the essay on ¡°factions¡± in The Federalist Papers, James Madison was able to point to one of the major purposes of the new United States Constitution, namely, to deal with the emergence of conflicting interests in the new commercial society. This represents the transformation from classical constitutionalism with its focus on virtue to modern constitutionalism with its preoccupation with the mediation of interests. As such, this transformation points to the reconstruction of the domain of the political.

This paper is the first outline of a reflection on the notion of moderation, which is at the center of contemporary debates: moderation in consumption, moderation in the exploitation of natural resources, ideological and political moderation, and so on. I first consider moderation as opposed to excess, then moderation as opposed to political radicalization. I then develop the idea that moderation has different meanings depending on the domains or ¡°spheres¡± in which we use the word. In the socio-economic sphere, moderation involves rational calculation, while in historical-cultural communities it is a tradition-based ethical practice. A third sphere to consider when exploring the uses and meanings of the concept of moderation is the political sphere. To do this, I turn to Aristotle¡¯s theories of ethical judgment and phronesis in relation to his conception of the political way of life.

This article attempts to trace the continuity of Tomonobu Imamichi¡¯s understanding of nature and its relationship with human beings in Peter Kemp¡¯s insights on nature in the context of a cosmopolitan Philosophy of Education. The first part deals with Tomonobu Imamichi¡¯s synthesis of the past and present relationship of the human being with nature. The second part describes Peter Kemp¡¯s inclusion of animal nature in a cosmopolitan understanding of Nature. The article concludes with lessons learned from both philosophers in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democracy of consideration is a conceptual candidate, next to deliberative democracy. Consideration offers an interesting constellation. If we take the two directions in which consideration leads us, respect and careful examination, these two requirements, to be held together, promise and lead both to a quality of relations between participants of a discussion who feel considered, and to an epistemic quality, from several points of view (constellation), even disciplines and aspects of the issue. It gives rise to a sense of perspective, pluralism, the process of examination, its cessation, and its stabilization ¡°all things considered.¡± Consideration can be linked to all levels of a deliberative system, to tackle complex problems such as the fight against global warming. Indeed, it goes from individual decisions to international agreements and back again. Solving such a problem requires transitions understood as adjustments (responsiveness) between knowledge, institutions, and individuals, in the course of conversations, all things considered.

As its founder Imamichi Tomonobu repeatedly stressed, eco-ethics focuses on comprehending what a new ethics for our new times requires. Today, under very dark totalitarian skies, I suggest here several points for further eco-ethical critical discussion on three cardinal themes for such an ethics: human rights, a common good, and social justice. After a short introductory section elucidating my figurative title, I propose in each of the three following sections a summary question and a tentative working hypothesis. The titles of the sections are: 1. Why the idea of human rights lacks general consensus; 2. Why most everyday notions of a common good are equivocal; and 3. Why even strong accounts of social justice are probably unreliable. The presentation concludes with a return to the figurative starting point in the widely suggestive metaphor of a trembling world.

Is ecological anxiety¡ªsometimes called eco-anxiety¡ªjust a paralyzing affect, or can it lead to an ethical and political commitment? At first glance, it seems that this anxiety implies, by definition, a lack of knowledge, and must therefore be overcome in order to live better and be able to act again. However, I wish to argue in this article that ecological anxiety, when it is a fear for the future, is not a pathology to be rid of, but a valuable awareness. Indeed, in a period of social and environmental disasters on a global scale, this affect is above all indicative of a concern for the world. The question that then arises is that of the effectiveness of practical wisdom, in the sense of Aristotelian ¦Õ¦Ñ?¦Í¦Ç¦Ò¦É? [phronesis], in deliberating on issues as complex as global warming. However, it seems necessary, to overcome the paralysing anxiety, to return to the sources of a collective practical wisdom that could enable citizens to reappropriate issues that concern them directly.

Is there a philosophical nationalism? Reading Fichte¡¯s Addresses to the German Nation and its use by the Nazis, Derrida concluded that all nationalisms are philosophical and onto-theological as they are posited beyond race, biology, and nature. However, Fichte¡¯s text reveals a specific form of racism that insists on biology and nature. Fichte¡¯s racism is a species of ¡°hypophysics,¡± a consecration of nature as value. His theory of language is simultaneously biological and spiritual, these two aspects flowing from a single geistige Naturgesetz (spiritual-natural-law) and determining the hypophysical unity of language, community and ¡°philosophy¡± (as he defined it). The logic of such a hypophysics is misrecognized and left unaddressed in the conventional categories of ¡°naturalism¡± and ¡°biologism.¡± Further, hypophysical-logic is not onto-theo-logic (in Heidegger¡¯s definition). This imposes new questions for the history and future of philosophy: how does hypophysics enter philosophy; can there be philosophy without hypophysics and its attendant racisms?

Due to the global environmental crisis and problems of climate change, but also the economic problems of neoliberalism and inequality, it is important to rethink our ideas about society, business, and economic organization in the context of a transition to a more sustainable society. Important themes of a political economy of sustainability are Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the philosophical underpinnings of governance and sustainability management. Reforming global economic and political institutions means finding new, creative, and imaginative solutions for managers, administrators, and members of government critically to evaluate our political economy and management concepts and values. It is important to rethink policies and strategies in the light of challenges of the global society. We will do this in what follows by focusing on important topics such as 1) The origin of our contemporary crisis 2) The political economy of the crisis 3) The transformation of governance for lasting change.

In the circular sphere around the Pacific Ocean many volcanos have erupted, and, because of tectonic plates, numerous earthquakes have occurred. In Tonga, especially, the resulting devastation has been beyond our wildest imagination. Regarding such natural phenomena, we could not predict anything. Likewise, the Covid-19 pandemic appeared suddenly, and no one can say when its destruction will end. Protective measures against infection have affected the nature of our social interactions: masking has changed our spatial consciousness; observing social distancing has made us less dependent on one another and has influenced us to seek solitude. As a result, inter-subjectivity¡ªthe foundation of ethics¡ªhas been broken. All of these effects on our interpersonal relationships have instilled in us a new attitude towards nature, because the human being is a part of nature. This new attitude with nature opens up a new paradigm: dialogues with nature and their co-operative activities must be demanded, and we must wait for nature¡¯s movement and ask for its help. It is, in a way, the traditional artistic attitude toward nature.

My extended project, for which this study of Machiavelli is the beginning, is to examine early modern constitutionalism in order to understand the modes of pluralism that were advocated either intentionally or unintentionally in the construction of the idea of the political that was bequeathed to us. I will consider the thought of two major figures in this historical section of the project, namely, Niccol¨° Machiavelli and James Madison. The first section will be focused on Machiavelli exclusively. This section will consider Machiavelli¡¯s work in the context of three major interpreters: J. G. A. Pocock, Anthony J. Parel, and Isaiah Berlin. The topics will be: time and the construction of the political, nature and prescriptive normativity, and the plurality of values.

In this essay, I will reflect on Max Weber¡¯s idea of disenchantment in relation to the material turn within contemporary religious studies. In the first part, I return to the two most famous texts in which Weber uses the concept, with particular attention to the historical context in which these texts were penned. In the following part, I discuss some of the contemporary efforts to engage critically with the disenchantment narrative, including the endeavor to recover the material dimensions purportedly marginalized by major strands of Western religiosity as well as the scholarly reflection on religion. Finally, I return to Weber and investigate the lasting value of his work while also raising some critical questions about the ways in which ¡°nature¡± and ¡°matter¡± are reinvited in some contemporary efforts to dismantle the disenchantment narrative.

Without society there is no nature. Paradoxically, this is what Rousseau¡¯s texts teach us. The paradox lies in the fact that the Discourse on Inequality seems to say the exact opposite. In the second Discourse, the history of the human species appears to unfold within the framework of an immutable, ahistorical natural order. In this article, I will highlight two points. First, I will show that nature understood as a whole does not really exist for the human being in the state of nature. It only exists for the educated, cultured, and therefore socialized human being. Second, I will analyze a passage from Rousseau¡¯s Essay on the Origin of Languages, which brings to the fore the ¡°negentropic¡± function of human labor. Without human labor, the natural order disintegrates. This, I will argue, makes nature a political problem for both Rousseau and for us.

One persisting problem in political philosophy today is explaining clearly enough for effective remedies the problematic notion of ¡°the lack of political will.¡± Failures of political will underestimate a cardinal element in the basically contested notion of so-called political will, namely social egoisms. This is what the founder of Eco-ethics, Tomonobu Imamichi, described by analogy with ¡°egoism¡± as ¡°nosism.¡± I try to elaborate here Imamichi¡¯s analogy of individual egoism and social ¡°nosism¡± in terms of the still elusive fundamental notion not only of human nature itself but of the nature at issue in human nature. My basic claim will be that most political talk today of ¡°the lack of political will¡± makes insufficient allowance for what we might call tentatively ¡°the nature of human nature.¡± That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily an always present, and largely negative, major element of social and not just individual egoism. The nature in post-essentialist human nature is neither exclusively physical nor exclusively cultural. Rather, the nature in human nature is a dynamic, interacting mixture of both material and non-material aspects, including very powerful individual and social egoisms.

Within intellectual history there has been a widening interest over the last decades in rediscovering intellectuals who used to be renowned when they were active, but who for various reasons have been more or less forgotten over time. The Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849¨C1926) was a famous intellectual who gained her reputation through books, pamphlets, and hundreds of lectures on topics such as pedagogy, peace, and women¡¯s rights¡ªtopics that were at the top of a general intellectual agenda around 1900. I will focus on her idea of internationalism that was founded on an evolutionary life philosophy of development. Her engagement in internationalism was built on an idealist foundation of philosophical, religious, and humanitarian beliefs organized around peace and a problematization of the nation. Key advocated a kind of patriotism as her path towards developing internationalism. In this article, Key¡¯s work is contextualized and conceptualized in the discussion of internationalism of her contemporaries.

This essay concerns the idea of nature in Judaism. It is a part of my ongoing reflection on the relations between our ecological concerns and the various cosmological, anthropological, and ontological conceptions in our different intellectual traditions, such as Jewish traditions of text and thought. I examine how contemporary philosophy has interpreted the meaning of nature in Judaism, in contrast with Greek civilization, focusing on the works of Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. There are three different and competing constellations of the Greco-Jewish contrast, as defined by what is criticized and what is affirmed: one is pro-Greek and anti-Jewish; another is pro-Jewish and anti-Greek; and another, the most complex, is anti-Greco-Jewish and pro- some other alternative. This essay does not simply attribute each of the three constellations to Heidegger, Jonas, or Levinas; rather, it shows how a careful hermeneutics can reveal more than one constellation in each thinker, depending on the text or reading.

Pure nature, the nature that we distinguish from grace, spirit, nurture, society, history, culture, and the supernatural is an abstract fiction. A genealogy of the idea of pure nature reveals its source in the problematic theological idea of a purely human nature. But it was subsequently transformed and expanded by Rousseau into the idea of a state of nature from which all else derives. This all-encompassing nature stifles thought by dehistoricizing. Adorno¡¯s ¡°The Idea of a Natural History¡± and Sartre¡¯s offer a dialectical approach that returns us to the concrete.

Should we preserve nature or revolt in order to protect ¡°the living¡± (¡°le vivant¡±)? At first sight, this invites a comparison between two ways and means of protecting nature. However, this article will defend the thesis that these two methods of protecting nature do not rest upon the same conception of our position, as human beings, towards the living. Indeed, in the end, we find an underlying opposition between nature, conceived as savage or as radical alterity (often inspired by the culturally loaded notion of wilderness, as found in the politics of preservation of vulnerable natural spaces) and the notion of ¡°the living.¡± I intend to use the concept of the living in order to emphasize ¡°ordinary nature¡± and our strong connection with all other living things. This reflection will enable me to defend the connection between the fight for environmental justice (namely revolt or resistance movements on the part of the poorest populations defending their living environment and their resources against an unequal production system) and the struggle for the protection of vulnerable living spaces and species.

Freud¡¯s late works established the schema of a more or less inexorable civilizational course built around one drive¡ªthe death drive¡ªdespite his emphatic insistence on a dual structure of two drives. This schema became influential for Critical Theory and in a more subterranean way, also for decolonial thought, and has been widely invoked during the pandemic. It indicates the extent to which drive, destruction, and mastery have consolidated into a , which not only fails to be dislodged by but even informs Derrida¡¯s readings of Freud. Instead, we have to be attentive to the play of homology in Freud as of life, psyche, and civilization, as archaic inheritance. Freudian homology distinguishes itself from what Derrida called ¡°genealogical drive.¡± The Freudian assumptions in this regard need to be addressed in a step beyond which works with a concept of origin¡ªas its own interruption¡ªthat can neither comprehend nor deconstruct the concept of origin as a single and perpetually active homological power as is to be found in Freud.

In my reflections on Peter Kemp¡¯s Citizen of the World I first consider the link between cosmopolitanism and globalization. Second, I examine the historical analysis of the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism following it from its origins in ancient Greece to its manifestation in our contemporary world. Third, I reflect on the way in which cosmopolitanism can become the hermeneutic basis for a philosophy of education, the principal claim of the book.

A number of devastating disasters have occurred in Japan since 2017, including heavy rains, wide ranging floods, a large typhoon, earthquakes, and landslides. Such disasters are beyond our imagination and our scientific assumptions. All of these come from global warming, which comes from human economic activities with CO2 emissions. There are interdependencies around the globe, between sea and land, ocean and air currents, and so on. In the twentieth century, we pushed technological innovation to conquer nature, but it only partly succeeded¡ªand was actually almost in vain. We must recognize that human beings are a part of nature and must rethink our attitude towards nature. As citizens of the world, human beings must have a keen sensibility to find new virtue, ¡°living together on the same globe.¡± It is the new ideal beyond boundaries and beyond differences between the rich and the poor, looking for the possibility of democracy.

The intent of this article is not to compare the philosophies of education of Confucius and Peter Kemp but to draw out what is perennial in Confucius¡¯s philosophy of education and bring it to the contemporary context in Peter Kemp¡¯s philosophy of education. The first part deals with Confucius¡¯s teachings on education. The second part highlights Peter Kemp¡¯s philosophy of education, the context of which is globalization and its dangers. The synthesis of both philosophies would mean that education is a right that everyone is entitled to, that education is basically cultivation of character more than instruction, that the virtues of ren, righteousness, wisdom, and propriety can be adapted and applied to the demands of global citizenship. The method of teaching can be both dialogical (Confucius) and democratic (Kemp) when the teacher is passionate, engaged, knowledgeable of issues, caring for students, and an exemplar of what she teachers.

In this article, I propose to question under what conditions an act of engagement can take place for causes that escape our immediate perception (in a phenomenological way), even though our hypermodern lifestyles are ambivalent: they allow us to open up to the world through information technology, but they also close us to our own subjective spheres. In the digital age, access to information is indeed becoming more and more personalized and dependent on algorithmic recommendation logics. The more we create cognitive bubbles, the more we make it difficult to access a common world, as well as to get morally involved in distant causes.

This article focuses on the extremely poor, on those who, if they are to live decent lives, are most in need of assistance. Like those suffering today from extremely severe famine in Yemen and elsewhere, very many of those suffering from extreme poverty will die not only prematurely; probably they will die before the end of the year. They will die if, among many others, thoughtful and resourceful persons including some philosophers continue to fail to engage themselves to assist them. My aim is to underline several of the philosophical elements in some recent discussions of both monetary and non-monetary extreme poverty. With these elements freshly in view, I would then like to examine critically yet constructively the most salient ones from the perspective of a certain understanding of the cardinal notion of ethical engagement. I will conclude with a summary of the main argument and a formulation of several key questions which still need further reflective discussion today.

This contribution presents the idea that the functioning of modern democracy implies a reciprocal education of the governed and those who govern, of public opinion and the political class, within the framework of the rule of law. Such reciprocal interaction is a prerequisite for the development of a collective intelligence (phronesis) that make the achievement of sound political decisions possible. However, the democratic process develops in such a way that it also generates counter-educational effects. This is due to the fact that the same process includes a contest for power that arouses antisocial feelings and achieves a kind of counter-education. One of the reasons for this ambivalence lies in the way in which political parties operate: they are both laboratories for the development and implementation of collective projects and instruments for the conquest and exercise of power. A similar ambivalence characterizes the role of states at the level of international relations concerning the handling of global problems. What is at stake is the possibility of dealing in a sensible way with problems that, at both the national and international levels, can only be solved through concerted and cooperative action.

In the evolving relationship between the European Union and its member states, the evolution of a democratic deficit at the European level has become increasingly manifest and problematic. EU remains a polity in which the nation-state remains the repository of democratic legitimacy, while EU-wide rule-making and decision-making are vested with institutions lacking democratic accountability. At the core of the problem are the persistent peculiarities of European nation-states, in this case, the reluctance of successful nation-states like Sweden and Denmark to concede democratic power and legitimacy to a common European polity. Remembering a conversation with Peter Kemp.

This article takes up Derrida¡¯s discussion of secularism as a development in Western Christian tradition and history and in his deconstruction of the opposition between secular and religious in ¡°Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ¡°Religion¡±at the Limits of Reason Alone.¡± What are the implications of Derrida¡¯s discussion of originary faith in Turkey that has a majority of Muslim population, and a history of modernization and secularization? Should Turkey renounce secularism in education because it is not ¡°really¡± part of its own tradition? Is a secular school system an oppressive institution for people born in a Muslim family because it alienates children from their own cultural traditions? I refer to Derrida¡¯s deconstruction of identity, his discussion of tele-technology, return of the religious, auto-immunity, and sovereignty to find answers to such questions. I think they give us valuable insights to construe a Derridean response to the present problems, even though I am also critical about Derrida¡¯s failure to acknowledge the need for universal secular norms in school education.

This article is based on an exchange between Peter Kemp and Jacob Dahl Rendtorff on the occasion of Peter Kemp¡¯s seventieth birthday in 2007. It presents the development of Kemp¡¯s ethical philosophy from his philosophy of technology and technology ethics to his philosophy of bioethics and biolaw. It also discusses Kemp¡¯s relation to Existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and Marxism with the development of a critical hermeneutic philosophy of engagement. This is related to Kemp¡¯s work on humanistic ethics of technology in his book on the ethics of the irreplaceable. The article presents Kemp¡¯s long discussion with Paul Ric?ur about the ethics of the good life and about narrative ethics. Finally, it elaborates on the bioethical turn towards an ethics for the living world and discusses the role of basic ethical principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity, and vulnerability in relation to cosmopolitan and global responsibility for sustainability and humanity.

This text is dedicated to the memory of Peter Kemp (1937¨C2018) and his later philosophical project cultivating citizens of the world as a response to globalization. Inspired by Grundtvig, he developed world-citizenship from a post-post-national perspective, combining the aim for the equality of the people with equality of all mankind. In this presentation, Kemp is recognized as a ¡°struggling¡± philosopher according to Ricoeur¡¯s critical hermeneutics. As a horizon of understanding, the author brings in a discussion on the anthropological deficit of the new competition state (Ove Kaj Pedersen), generated by the shift from a moral determination of the self to an opportunistic economic man wholly motivated by self-interest and utility maximization. Conclusively, it is being argued that Kemp¡¯s way of introducing Ricoeur into the field of education, by transforming his hermeneutics of the self into a hermeneutics of the cosmopolitan self, has simultaneously revealed how much Ricoeur is a profound universalistic thinker.

Inspired by the contemporary Danish philosopher Dorthe J?rgensen, this article engages in a re-reading of Peter Kemp¡¯s 1973 dissertation Th¨¦orie de l¡¯engagement with a view to exploring its persisting theological value. After briefly revisiting its main argument, I turn in the following section to a discussion of its way of relating phenomenology and theology in terms of shortcomings as well as possibilities. In the concluding section, I bring together Kemp and J?rgensen and offer a reflection on what theology could and should be and why I believe that it still has a significant role to play in academia as well as in the wider culture. In particular, I argue that phenomenological theology¡ªwith its long tradition of reflecting on mythopoetic language¡ªis particularly well-suited to provide a cultural hermeneutics of relevance not only for practicing religious people but also for a broader audience in a culture that is still to a high degree immersed in biblical imagery.

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.

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 phenomena. However, dependence does not only concern the domain of being, falling within the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the human descriptive predictive. It also concerns the ought-to-be and therefore the normative sciences (ethics, political theory, law, and normative economy). Here interdependence is much more problematic since it is opposed to freedom. This 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). It then proposes another solution, that of moral and political consideration.

The growing number of universities today makes it relevant to consider again the idea of the university. Consulting the classics of the discussion, I argue that we must retain the idealist notions of knowledge, science and truth professed by Newman in his argument for liberal education, although he neglects the possible corruption of the university faculty. The problem of corruption is recognized by Jaspers, criticizing all idealist notions and leaving science and scholarship to rely only on existential commitment. The problem for both classics, however, is that they conceive of academic freedom in an all-too individualist way. Instead, I argue that the idea of the academic republic should be taken seriously, i.e., that a contemporary idea of the university must include suggestions for university government comprising institutional checks and balances. Only such a constitutional notion of academic freedom may counter neo-liberal reification of higher education, science, and scholarship.

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.

In this paper, I will first argue that the refugee crises in Europe and along the southern border of the United States are the direct result of colonial and neo-colonial politics. The nations that have caused the problems, therefore, have a moral responsibility first to accept refugees and then to work to fix the problems they created. The nations that are responsible for the problems should work to fix them so that the refugees can return home. We will also see that at times, for example in the case of Central America, the problems first-world people are facing are directly tied to the problems that are making refugees flee. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that there are good reasons to think that Western nations can accept more refugees without creating a xenophobic backlash if they work to address the problems that their own citizens are facing.

This article¡¯s aim is to promote further critical discussions on sustainable development and its philosophical presuppositions. The focus is on the first of the United Nations¡¯ 2000 Millennium Development Goals and its 2015 Sustained Development Goals: the eradication of poverty. In this regard, one important question here is just what ¡°a philosophy of development¡± should look cular, the article raises issues about the coherence of a global philosophy of development and the often exaggerated roles of the understandings of development in exclusively economic terms. Alternative proposals are then indicated. A final section examines the idea of a more narrow understanding of philosophies of development in terms of key elements in the eco-ethical proposal such as the stratified social subject. Imamichi¡¯s eco-ethica provides indispensable descriptions of current global contexts in terms of now unprecedented globally interconnected informational and communications technologies (¡°the technological conjuncture¡±).

The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first is to reveal the unique significance on publicness in the Confucian Èå¼Ò tradition. In order to achieve this, Confucian philosophical documents that explain the state ‡ø (guo) and the family ¼Ò (jia), and loyalty ÖÒ (zhong) and filial piety Т (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 Ê¿ (shi) spirit. In order to achieve this, the significance of uprightness Ö± (zhi) and conducting oneself with reverence ¾Ó¾´ (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.

This paper attempts to show how civil society has served as public space and democratic participation in a society, in particular in Philippine society. It consists of three parts. The first part tries to delineate what constitutes civil society. The second part discusses the antinomies of elite democracy and participatory democracy, of rights-oriented liberalism and communitarianism, of welfare state and free market, and how civil society answers these antinomies. The third part surveys the role of civil society as public space and democratic participation in Philippine society. The paper concludes with the challenges in the context of the new dictatorial regime of President Rodrigo Duterte.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Peter Kemp (1937¨C2018), 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.

This article deals with the relationship between the practice of philosophy as a profession and democratic participation. It examines the way this relationship is treated in Eric Weil¡¯s political thought as part of a reflection on the meaning of political action and philosophy¡¯s educational function. The analysis places the philosophical education that teaches critical reflection and dialogue within the context of the conflicts specific to modern societies, while emphasizing that these conflicts generate feelings of injustice and nonsense. In this view, philosophical training must help develop these feelings into a coherent discourse. The ability to develop a coherent discourse on justice and meaning is necessary for members of constitutional democracies to move from mere revolt to political action properly speaking.

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.

This article examines how European narratives of crisis have been related to religion in different periods by different factions and with varying purposes. It first takes a look at some tendencies in the pre- and interwar era, during which religion was used both as part of a conservative, nationalistic narrative of crisis and as part of a progressive anti-nationalistic narrative of crisis. Secondly, it revisits some of the post-war debates, in which religion¡ªor the biblical legacy¡ªwas commonly depicted as the root of the ideological perversions that had caused Europe¡¯s recent crises. Yet at the same time, religion was also laid claim to as a constructive force in the building of post-war Europe, not least by the founding fathers of the European Union. Thirdly, the paper seeks to map the contemporary European landscape with regard to religion in various political and cultural discourses. Like in previous eras, religion is today laid claim to for various and often conflicting purposes. Against this backdrop, the paper ends by briefly pondering the critical role of theology in contemporary Europe.

The emergence of citizenship out of subjecthood at the end of the eighteenth century presented a series of problems for which the United States, among other countries, seems to have been unprepared: it was unclear who qualified for citizenship, what privileges it afforded, and what duties it demanded. Nevertheless, this uncertainty could be manipulated pragmatically to take advantage of any given situation without regard for consistency or future implications. By examining the obstacles placed on the path to citizenship of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and Chinese Americans, this article shows how the (non-)category of the non-citizen was weaponized. Indeed the mistreatment of non-citizens becomes the best indication of the value of citizenship.

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?

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 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.

The Chinese counterpart of ¡®landscape¡¯ is fengjing ïL¾°. 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.

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.

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.

This paper takes Wilhelm von Humboldt seriously¡ªas a philosopher. It does so by exploring Humboldt¡¯s central notion of ¡°Individuum/Individualit?t,¡± 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.

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 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.

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.

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.