The task of this paper is to derive an ethics of governance from the teachings of Mencius that may be applicable to our present time. Mencius follows Confucius in the three important elements of the state: security, basic necessities, and the confidence of the people in their ruler. Mencius specifies these in terms of avoiding unjust wars, providing a sound and inclusive economic program, and adding justice to humanity in parenting the people.

This article seeks to show that multiple modalities uncovered in the phenomenology of recognition is the basis for understanding how social and political phenomena can manifest itself variously in amoral social conflict, moral struggles for recognition as well as peaceful experiences of mutual recognition. Conceived in this light, the moral task for individuals is to move beyond the recognition of others as things and instead towards the recognition of the others as persons worthy of respect and sympathy. And the political task of institutions is to teach and cultivate moral forms of mutual recognition even as they regulate and constrain the amoral Hobbesian tendencies for social conflict.

The author discusses the concept of equality in ethics and political economy. The first section presents a philosophical concept of equality of resources, as it is suggested by Ronald Dworkin. The second section looks at the concept of equality in relation to the factual distribution in our contemporary political economy. It relies on Thomas Piketty who argues that it is the concept of capital that reproduces inequality and that is still the most essential concept in our economic system. The third section discusses the conceptions and perspectives on the relation between ethics and political economy in our present society.

Human beings experience themselves through various kinds of collectively experienced time. Medicine that relies upon precarious forms of ancestral or evolutionary explanation generates such collectively experienced forms of time, which are thus essentially politico-medically instituted versions of kin relations. Kin relations structure our ethical relations to each other rather thoroughly, even in Western modernity, especially through legally sanctioned relations. Hence, an ancestral or evolutionary explanation in medicine should be examined for its ethical import via its structuring of etiologically linked kin relations, even if those relations extend beyond the family, people, population or group context back into cosmic and evolutionary origins.

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.

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.

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 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.

The conflict between traditional ethics posed by contemporary technology is especially acute in the case of artificial intelligence. This is because the conception of nothingness or vacuum developed by both Laotse and Zuang-zi is resisted by artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence with its incorporation of inter-subjectivity and inter-objectivity cannot be a vacuum.

The now widespread notion of environmental racism, coined around 1990 and still important in its place, was never intended to do justice to the full range of issues raised by the Anthropocene. To meet this challenge I propose the introduction of a new concept, that of “anthropocentric racism.” This concept is an extension of what some have referred to as systemic racism, but because the Anthropocene challenges the distinction between nature and culture championed by the Boasian school of anthropology as a way to attack racism, the Anthropocene obliges us to look at racism differently. I propose an extension of the dialectical approach to racism championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon and will illustrate that approach by examining climate change as a form of antipraxis.

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.

This text is dedicated to the memory of Peter Kemp (1937–2018) 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.

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.

Some scholars have responded to the increasingly widespread concerns about Immanuel Kant’s racism by promoting his cosmopolitanism as if the two were self-evidently incompatible, but his particular form of cosmopolitanism has its own history of difficulties when it comes to both racism and anti-Judaism. These concerns can be grounded historically if one links his 1784 essay on history with his account of cosmopolitanism in his 1793 lectures on the metaphysics of morals, where he criticized Jews for failing to embrace cosmopolitanism. Kant’s attack on the Jews was in line with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s attack on them that had provoked Saul Ascher, a young Jewish Kantian, to accuse Fichte of inventing a new form of anti-Judaism. In this essay I reaffirm my rejection of the widespread claim that Kant toward the end of his life abandoned his belief in a racial hierarchy. I also demonstrate that he used the idea of cosmopolitanism as a tool not only against non-whites, but also against Jews. Kant’s cosmopolitanism should not be presented as the corrective to his racism, but as a new and dangerous addition to his earlier focus on inferiority.

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.

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.