Eco-ethica

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 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.

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.

The technological society, with all its potentialities in terms of well-being or improvement of daily life, is a source of many paradoxes that constitute real challenges for ethical reflection. Indeed, we have never been so free to express ourselves through information and communication technologies, while simultaneously encountering increasingly acute forms of alienation. More broadly, our current world suffers from an impoverishment of social imaginaries (if we consider the generalization of the consumerist model, identity retreats, separation logics), even though their strength is essential to the fate of ethics, let alone in technological societies that are becoming more and more structurally complex.

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.

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”).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 paper takes Wilhelm von Humboldt seriously—as a philosopher. It does so by exploring Humboldt’s central notion of “Individuum/Individualität,” 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.

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?