The purpose of the present study is twofold. The first is to reveal the unique significance on publicness in the Confucian 儒家 tradition. In order to achieve this, Confucian philosophical documents that explain the state 國 (guo) and the family 家 (jia), and loyalty 忠 (zhong) and filial piety 孝 (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 士 (shi) spirit. In order to achieve this, the significance of uprightness 直 (zhi) and conducting oneself with reverence 居敬 (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 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”).

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.

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.

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—or the biblical legacy—was 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.

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.

Emmanuel Levinas can be read as challenging the legal principle that everybody must be treated in the same way without fear of favor, no matter who they are or what status they hold. He did so by highlighting the private suffering that goes unnoticed if justice is blind, as is suggested by the image of Iustitia wearing a blindfold. What this unspeakable suffering means for justice is explored through a reading of Jean Améry’s At the Mind's Limit and Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard.

The Confucian concept of Jhongyong corresponds to the Western idea of metaphysical justice, and encompasses similar ideals to the Aristotelian golden mean. Herein is an approach to this Confucian concept from the perspective of comparative philosophy, its aim being triple: to expound on the central or representative position that the concept of Jhongyong takes in Confucian philosophy, to analyze various semantic spectrums of this Confucian concept, and to clarify the complex relationship it has with other Confucian ideas and principles.

The intent of this paper is to derive an understanding of social justice from Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People. Sun Yat- sen, the founder of modem China, gave a series of lectures in 1924, setting the goals of the revolution against the Qin dynasty and the foundation of a modem China. The word “justice” is mentioned only once in the lectures and it is paired with “faithfulness,” or trust referring to the ancient moral character or virtue. And yet underlying the whole programme is a notion of justice that is not interpersonal but social. The first part of the paper gives a summary of the meaning of the three principles: nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood. The second part attempts to draw the meaning of social justice from the three principles, hopefully showing the relevance of Sun Yat-sen’s ideas to our time.

This essay explores the personalism underlying the ethical dimension of Ricceur’s discussion of the institutional justice. According to Ricoeur, “public justice” refers to civil society’s critical response to the judicial acts of justice, with reference to ethical values as negotiating or mediating between the principles of justice and concrete practices, i.e., how things are done in the world, the existing state of affairs. Public justice can force institutional justice to function when it is not functioning well because of political interference and manipulation. In case the public justice is obstructed, for instance in a totalitarian regime, which intimidates the public debate, all we are left with is “personal justice,” a virtue in the Aristotelian sense that exceeds justice in the institutional sense. If institutional justice collapses and public discussion is silenced, personal justice is the only remaining relation to the third, which is irreducible to friendship.

In the case of Japan, we accepted the Chinese philosophy of morality when we received the Chinese character Yi: it means responsibility to Heaven (vertical) and, at the same time, responsibility to community (horizontal). An act having this structure might be our responsibility as human beings: yi means “justice”, keeping balance between Heaven and Earth. The Japanese people had such a balance until the Edo era. In 1868, when the Meiji Restoration occurred, the Japanese government tried to accept Western ideas. Cyoumin Nakae introduced the Western philosophy of law and the constitutional system. He translated Rousseau’s The Social Contract into Japanese and gave a series of lectures on the social contract. The fundament of his thought is concentrated in the “rights of Liberty”. He emphasized transcendental liberty beyond personal, phenomenal liberty and found the same structure in Mencius. His idea of ft suggests the way of justice. Unfortunately, this idea was crushed with the death of his talented disciple in prison. After the book of Bushido, ft was only translated as “duty” for the community (horizontal), and we lost the vertical perspective: transcendental liberty.

This paper explores the idea of justice in the prophetic strand of the Jewish and Christian traditions. First, a brief description is given of the context in which the prophetic idea of justice first evolves. Second, focussing on the historical and prophetic literature Hebrew Bible, an analysis of the defining characteristics of this idea of justice is undertaken. Third and finally, the relevance of this prophetic tradition for our contemporary politico-philosophical debates on justice is discussed in relation to the discourse on law and justice initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1990s and followed up by Giorgio Agamben during the last decades.

This article elaborates upon how memory and justice are connected within the philosophical project of Paul Ricoeur, and thus it aims to explore the broader context and meaning of his intriguing term “a just allotment of memory.” First, the concept of justice will be contextualized within the framework of Ricceur’s philosophical anthropology in general, and second, more specifically, with respect to his "little ethics.” Thereafter, issues relating to the manner in which memory generates questions of justice, and, indeed, why memory needs history in order to be just, will be explored. Finally, some crucial questions about the limits of justice, and the challenges associated with the presence of justice and injustices in limit-situations will briefly be raised.

Ethics has to do basically 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 like eco-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 try to 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 ontologically more basic than, or having their ontological identity apart from other persons.

This article focuses on the problem of political legitimacy: first, by finding it to be the driving force in the Rawlsian paradigm moving from a focus on the moral to one on the political; second, with the help of a consideration of multiple- modernities theory, by arguing for a version of political liberalism freed of its western framework; and third, by applying that framework to current debates over the meaning of democracy in a Confucian context.