As a moral principle toleration is universal, but only in the sense that potentially it is addressed to every rational and moral agent. The question is whether this principle is appropriate in all situations and what are those moral agents who recognize its practical actuality for them? Toleration is not an absolute ethical principle, but one among others in the context of a particular moral system. It should be given a proper place in the hierarchy of principles. Understanding toleration as the absolute or even overriding principle may lead in the face of obvious and directly threatening wrong to its use as an umbrella for adoptive or escapist behavior. The limits to toleration are given by basic and minimal ethical task to resist evil. The principle of active opposition to evil by all possible means is prior to the principle of toleration.

Globalization and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and autarchy and nationalism, on the other, are two extremes between which humankind is destined to balance constantly, due to diversity and the natural confrontation of various cultural and civilizational systems by which it is represented. At the same time, globalization and cosmopolitanism are natural phenomena and are the most important characteristics of social development. That is why we should not put obstacles in the way of their dissemination and rooting in social life, but to aim at deeper understanding of their essence and what is hidden behind them in order, preventing ourselves from rash evaluations and one-sided conclusions, to contribute to the formation of a stable and just global world.

Rather than unifying the peoples in the world, globalization divides them into zones: either developed and prosperous, or underdeveloped and ravaged by poverty. How, then, can one imagine economic and financial globalization as a current implementation of cosmopolitanism, which abolishes the old fratricidal strife and seals the reunion between men across national borders? And how can we not doubt the cosmopolitan order facing the proliferation of identity claims, the rise of competitors due to globalization? Are we condemned to live in a world ever more unequal, more “hard” for the losers, the weak? What space is there in philosophy to think the new solidarity? This paper sketches some answers to these questions.

This paper focuses on four brief points only: first, the general character of today’s understandings of globalization; then, one substantive danger that arises from this general understanding of globalization; third, by contrast, the universal character of just one of the most important traditional understandings of cosmopolitanism; and, finally, on what might bring together a certain globalization and a certain cosmopolitanism into something more than either just a so-called European or African “anthropocentric ethics.” The key conceptual resource highlighted is that of friendship.

Globalization stands for systemic integration, mainly economical and technological. It is related to the expansion of the free market economy, trade, and the global integration of systems of communication and information technology. As such, globalization co-exists with strong cultural affirmations of individual and collective difference and with political fragmentation. Cosmopolitanism needs to take into consideration cultural and political conditions of human existence. The cosmopolitan imperative to form a political community beyond the nation state is a process-guiding principle or regulative ideal, not an institutional blueprint. Cosmopolitanism needs to stress the voluntary character of integration among self-governed peoples who are willing to enhance the transnational rights and freedoms of their citizens while accepting institutional constraints.

On se propose de fédérer les questions relevant de la bioéthique, des générations futures et de l’éthique environnementale autour du thème de la communauté morale. On examinera certains problèmes théoriques posés par l’élargissement de celle-ci. On soutiendra qu’il n’est possible d’y faire face qu’en se ralliant à une forme d’anthropocentrisme. Toutefois, il s’agit d’un anthropocentrisme méta-axiologique, pas d’un anthropocentrisme normatif: il ne saurait être question de soutenir que les intérêts des être humains ont, toujours et partout, priorité sur les intérêts des autres créatures.

This essay discusses the challenges that the problem of environmental destruction represents for both ethics and political philosophy. It defends universalism as the only ethical theory capable of dealing adequately with the issue, but recognizes three limitations of it: First, its strong anthropocentrism (as in Kant); second, the meta-ethics of rational egoism (Spinoza and Hobbes); and, third, the reduction of ethics to symmetric relations in the mores of modernity. With regard to political philosophy, universalism rejects the idea that consensus is a necessary and sufficient condition for morality; it points out that democratic rule is rule by majority, only rarely by unanimous consensus, and insists on the fact that even a unanimous consensus does not guarantee justice if the people affected by a decision are not identical with those entitled to make it. The latter is the case in issues of intergenerational justice. The essay ends by opposing a formalist and proceduralist concept of democracy with one that understands democracy as one reasonable tool for achieving a substantive concept of justice.

The hypothesis I develop involves that we have been witnessing, during the last ten years or so, an interpenetration in the area of applied ethics of certain concepts originally belonging to different areas of ethics, namely bioethics, environmental ethics, and also business ethics. Certain concepts such as “future generations,” “consent,” “precautionary principle,” “intrinsic value,” “global governance,” “sustainable development,” or “scientific uncertainty” are becoming “thick ethical concepts,” in the terminology of metaethics; or in the terminology of American pragmatism: “living beliefs.” They are now charged with strong moral contents that unfolds a new horizon of meaning at the heart of Western Modernity, a horizon largely defined by science and technical actions. Nevertheless, is this conceptual convergence in the area of applied ethics the sign of the coming of a new ethic of technique? I will discuss this topic taking as an example the case of nanotechnology.

This paper presents a critical reflection on the attempts to determine the historical meaning of the present situation as a philosophical topic. To determine the specific interpretative character of the diagnostics of our contemporary situation—beyond both absolute knowledge and arbitrary thinking—this paper argues that “now” and “here” need to be defined in accordance with the concepts of “historical time” and “inhabited space.” This has been made possible as a result of the recent metamorphosis within the hermeneutical tradition.

A symposium with the title “Tradition, Modernity and Postmodernity: Eastern and Western Perspectives” is in need of a subtitle auch as “Overcoming Dichotomies.” Societies, as well as historical epochs, are complex and overlapping phenomena. A clash between complex civilizations will naturally be a complex encounter. The conflicting parties will always find kindred souls on the other side, motivated by converging interests and values. Modernity and secularism are not inseparable, and tradionality and secularism are not incompatible (see Confucian politology). Two main philosophical reasons for the complexity of civilizations are the heterarchical structure of the human value system and the creative potential of human individuals. These highest values cannot be optimally realized at the same time. The potential for self-fulfillment that every human being has, thanks to his mental structures, excedes the potential for self-fulfillment a singular culture can provide.

Naturalism is a pan-Asian view of the world and way of life. Unlike the atheistic naturalism in the West, Asian naturalism, which rests upon an organic view of the world as represented by key concepts such as the Dao, Heaven, and Emptiness, is basically spiritual. Going beyond the traditional Western antithesis of naturalism and supernaturalism, matter and spirit, it can even be called “supernatural naturalism.” As a living example of Asian naturalism, this article examines the ethics of threefold reverence: reverence toward Heaven, all human beings, and all beings, animate and inanimate. Threefold reverence constitutes the cardinal teaching of Cheondogyo or the Eastern Learning, a native Korean religio-philosophical movement which arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The ecological-environmental crisis of our age cannot be overcome without a fundamental change in our attitude toward nature. Recovering humanity’s primal sense of reverence toward all beings in nature is a vital part of this change.

This an attempt to present, in analytic-descriptive terms, the complex and multi-layered legacy of the way philosophy has been done in Korea throughout history. It is panoramic and selective, largely intended for colleagues who are encountering philosophy in Korea for the first time. This presentation will be carried out in four parts. First, I examine how Korea’s geographical location on the periphery of the Asian continent has made it imperative to make use of philosophical influences coming from the continent to solve the existential and political problematique faced by Korea. Second, I describe the encounter of Korea with the West, and particularly with Westernized Japan, as a clash of civilizations that has led to a century-long total rejection of the tradition in Korea. Third, I describe the present day philosophical scene in Korea, as it attempts to deal with direct exposure to Western philosophy and revival and renewal of the traditional philosophy. Finally, I advance the thesis that it is philosophy’s task to forge a cultural synthesis adequate to deal with the problems facing humanity that will engage philosophy in Korea in the future.

In Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes fundamental ontology. Heidegger conceives of Being as temporality. Being (Sein) is unconcealment which is replaced by be-ing (Seyn), that is, the disjunction between unconcealment and concealment. In the topological phase as in Contributions to Philosophy (CP), The Thing and Building Dwelling Thinking be-ing yields to enowning. “B-ing holds sway as enowning” (CP section 10). But be-ing holding sway entails that a being (Seiende) “is”. Which means that a thing things. Enowning is Dasein’s thinkingresponding to the call of Be-ing. Hence be-inghistorical thinking (Seynsgeschichtes Denken) which is enowned thinking. When a thing things, world worlds (Die Welt weltet). Be-ing-historical thinking is thinkingthinging, that is, thinking space-time or thinking gathering (Versammlung) of elements that “belong together”. Thinging is the mirror interplay of the fourfold. In Four Seminars, Heidegger says: “There is no longer room for the very name of being. . . . Being is enowned through enowning. Sein ist durch Ereignis ereignet.” But enowning means thinking thinging.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the issue of the meaning to be attributed to our talk of Korean philosophy. Of course, the answer to all the questions that can be raised concerning this issue depends on our conception of philosophy. I start by claiming that philosophy should be an ars vivendi aiming at making our life worth living. Drawing on Socrates’s saying that the unexamined life is not worth living, I try to show that philosophical inquiry has to start with the reflection upon the belief-system underpinning our way of life. Through this reflective activity we are inevitably led to tackle the problem of cultural identity constituted by such belief system; there is no belief-system that is not culturally conditioned. Korean philosophy is an ongoing endeavor of the Korean people to renew their cultural identity—by way of philosophical reflection upon their cultural identity.

The ennobling vision of modernity asserts that the benefits of identifying individual citizens as subjectivity are realized only when each subject is aware of the self as free in decisions and actions. Modernization through industrialization and urbanization has been seen as a means by which society can, through market contractual relationships, allow each citizen to become a self-determining subject. In Korean society this self-awakening has already set in and ought to deepen through dynamic economic growth. However, the authoritarian political power combined by technocracy obstructs the emergence of mature subjectivity. This is what can be called a phenomenon of counter-modernization. Citizenship training through philosophical dialogue may find ways to resolve this impasse by reconceptualizing modernity’s goals and means in terms of enabling the potentiality inherent in subjectivity.

The author of the paper starts by calling our attention to problems that make it necessary to rethink philosophy and puts her finger on one common factor at the origin of these problems. This is what she calls “the loss of the object of knowledge” in epistemology.After she shows how the object of knowledge is lost in two prevailing epistemologies of the twentieth century—in pragmatism and logical empiricism—and the consequences of this loss for our lives, she gives examples of rethinking certain philosophical questions. These are the questions of what knowledge is and problems of norms related to the lack of distinction between epistemological kinds of norms. This rethinking also implies the necessity of rethinking philosophical education.

An exposition of the core Confucian text, the Analects, is a rich resource for thinking philosophically about aesthetics, ethics, and religion. Indeed, the Analects is an inspiration for doing philosophy as a dialogical, rather than a dialectic, dialogue and an edifying conversation. The four integrated dimensions of Confucian humanism as embodied in Confucius’ “anthropocosmic” philosophy encompass the sacredness of earth, body, family, community, and the world. Specifically, it envisions that the full realization of the way of learning to be human consists of (1) the integration of the body and mind, (2) the fruitful interaction between the individual and society, (3) the sustainable and harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, and (4) the mutual responsiveness between the human hear-mind and the Way of Heaven. Furthermore, it transcends the concepts of rationality in the Enlightenment mentality and provides a philosophy of life rooted in the sensitivity, sympathy, and compassion inherent in human nature. Confucius’ “anthropocosmic” philosophy is one of the most profound spiritual legacies in rethinking the human in the twenty-first century.

Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and Hegelianism anticipates major twentieth-century philosophical movements ranging from structuralism, existentialism, and phenomenology, to post-structuralism and postmodernism. This paper analyzes Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the relationship between subjectivity and temporality in pivotal passages in The Sickness Unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety. Heidegger’s account of the interplay between presentation (Darstellung) and representation (Vorstellung) imagination points to Kant’s theory of the imagination and suggests the way in which the Kierkegaardian subject is constituted by an irreducible alterity that is never present but is always already past. The infinite qualitative difference of the divine is reflected in the inescapable interiority of the subject. Kierkegaard’s abyssal other returns in Barth’s wholly other God, Heidegger’s aletheia, Derrida’s différance, and Lacan’s real. For each of these writers, subjectivity is haunted by another it can neither exclude nor appropriate. This interior exteriority is the condition of the possibility of both desire and hope.

If ‘power’ means cultural and political influence, philosophy has become a global world power. Philosophical argumentation and reflection constitute a non-economical, non-technological, and non-military power by the word that is capable of challenging the other powers, exposing lies and illusions, and proposing a better world as dwelling for humanity.Often the power of the philosophical word has been ignored, when philosophy was seen as pure description, pure reference, an innocent mirror, that forgets itself and make us present to things. However, if philosophy has the power of the word, not all kinds of philosophizing are necessarily good for humanity. It can be very seducing for a group, and give food for mass suggestion making that appeals to the worst part of ourselves. We have learnt to understand how philosophy in itself may not only enlighten and liberate, but also seduce and manipulate. Today, philosophy has lost its innocence; we cannot philosophize without reflection on our linguistic practice. But we philosophers are not only called to understand ourselves. We must also contribute to developing an understanding of the power of the word more generally. And as citizens of the world, we must recognize that humiliation of others might be the most brutal violence we can practice without directly killing.