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.

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.

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.

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, Niccolò 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.

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?

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—the foundation of ethics—has 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.

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 (1849–1926) 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—topics 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.

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.

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 in terms of the 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 “the nature of human nature.” That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily a 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.