Search Results (105)

Contemporary debates over whether Confucianism should be regarded as a religion are often constrained by the Western binary opposition between philosophy and religion. Rather than remaining within this classificatory framework, this article shifts attention to the question of how the religious dimension of Confucianism is concretely grounded and sustained. By comparing the “li (理)–mind/nature (心/性)” paradigm of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism with Wang Fuzhi’s “qi (气)–history (史)” paradigm, the article argues that the former relies primarily on inward moral experience and the self-cultivation of mind and nature, a mode that can effectively uphold a meaningful order under relatively stable historical conditions. By contrast, in response to the rupture of the Ming-Qing transition, Wang Fuzhi relocates ultimate normativity within the dynamic process of qi (气) transformation and historical practice. Through four interrelated formulations—“li (理) resides in qi (气),” “nature (性) is the principle of life,” “principle is to be pursued in concrete affairs,” and “historical reflection as verification”—he provides moral and value judgments with a stronger grounding in lived reality and historical testing. In this way, Wang effects a significant transformation in the religious dimension of Confucianism, shifting it from a mode of inward justification to one of worldly verification. His thought thus offers a more historically resilient account of how Confucian meaning can endure amid times of profound upheaval. Full article

The research explores the possibility of understanding pre-Hispanic Andean philosophical thought through the use of Quechua terms such as pacha (world, universe, space and time) and pachayachachiq (the world that reveals itself). The aim has been to philosophically analyse how the runas (persons) understood their existence within a dynamic cosmos. Methodologically, the research follows a qualitative approach and hermeneutic method. The documentary recording technique was adopted for the linguistic, historical and ethnographic sources, which enabled a critical interpretation of these sources to be carried out. Furthermore, the results have shown that the term pacha constitutes a complex ontological category that integrates time, space and the generative force of energies, differing from Western conceptions. Pachayachachiq, meanwhile, emerges as a socially constructed knowledge based on the observation of the natural cycle. Andean society is therefore understood through its tetradic structure: (hanan pacha: the world above, kay pacha: the world here, uku pacha: the world within, and kuteq pacha: the changing world); these structures are articulated under principles of complementarity–reciprocity. It is concluded that the exploration of pachayachachiq has made it possible to become aware of a relational ontology that enables the realisation of a life cycle of nature, humanity and the universe. This way of understanding the world calls into question the dualist postulates of the Western worldview and proposes developing a conception of reality in relation to an endless change, thereby enriching lived experience. This way of understanding things calls into question the dualist postulates of the Western worldview and proposes bringing things closer to a conception of reality governed by constant relation, endless change and the enrichment of one’s own vital experience—a contribution to intercultural philosophy. Full article

The following essay argues that Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, elucidates a corrective to pragmatist deliberative philosophy. First, it begins with the book’s protagonist Rodrigues in his eventual role evaluating banned Christian objects to prevent them from entering seventeenth century Japan. While these actions present a model of a dejected, apostate padre, they also model his silent acknowledgement of suffering. Second, Endō’s narrative does not aim to explain the suffering its characters experience. Instead, it draws its readers into a practical concern for what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as their form of life. Film adaptations highlight the challenges of interpreting religious examples by including artworks that defy easy apprehension. Third, throughout Silence the story navigates the gap between Rodrigues’s visceral suffering and divine silence. In so doing, it exemplifies Simone Weil’s notion of embodied affliction. To fully appreciate such experiences, Weil suggests that the scope of affliction must include divine silence. The desire for God arises in response. A similar contrast can be seen between the characters’ different dispositions towards keeping quiet. In sum, the essay contends that when immanent suffering is inevitable, practices of embodied silence can be the only way to speak. Full article

Recent studies in plant and animal cognition are currently leading to a re-evaluation of subjective experience in scientific endeavor while also questioning the widespread application of the physicalist paradigm. These new developments reactivate the old Aristotelian idea of natural philosophy as a unitary vision of science, life, and the universe that surpasses the way it is fragmented into different and even separated disciplines by modern scientific thought. This new scenario, and its reappraisal of subjectivity, anchored in Gestalt theory, addresses scientific classifications, methodologies and assumptions, while highlighting the limitations of the reductionist paradigm. Moreover, it shows that perception becomes a shared principle of organization for both psychology and biology. All this indicates that a more comprehensive understanding of the many nuances of life is possible and this paper includes various suggestions on how to achieve it. Full article

This article examines how theology can engage meaningfully with secular academic and cultural contexts, focusing on the possibility of public theology within the modern university. Emerging from societies where religion was long marginalized or privatized under communist regimes, the discussion highlights the renewed struggle to reintegrate theological discourse into public intellectual life. It argues that public theology must learn to “speak faith publicly”—that is, to express religious convictions in ways that contribute to shared intellectual and moral discourse without resorting to confessional exclusivity. By comparing public theology to public philosophy, the authors highlight both the similarities and tensions between the two. While both seek to address common human questions concerning truth, value, and meaning, public theology must navigate the added complexity of grounding its insights in faith traditions while remaining open to secular dialogue. The article argues that the Beatitudes and the concept of middle axioms provide complementary theological and methodological resources for communicating Christian faith within secular higher education, as illustrated by a qualitative case study conducted at a public university in Slovakia. Full article

Religion continues to play a role in many contemporary wars and conflicts, despite its professed commitment to peace and non-violence. A key feature of religion is the demand for sanctification of its members. This raises a paradox: why do religious communities that emphasize individual sanctification often produce or justify selfish forms of action, and why do sanctified individuals consent to them? In traditional frameworks, sanctification refers to the disciplining of human instincts and affects according to a moral code established by the religious community, in order to bring the individual closer to God. In 1881, Nietzsche identified the core of the problems stemming from collectivism, including religion, in what he calls “the properties of the organism”: the tendency of a whole to functionally organize its parts for its own preservation. While it is condemned as egoism at the individual level, it is often justified in religious communities as devotion to God or as an altruistic act for the benefit of the collective. From this perspective, our focus must shift from the individual as part of an organism to the self as an organism, exemplified by the Übermensch. This paper argues that, within traditional religious communities, sanctification functions as a mechanism of control and preservation. Inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy, it proposes “New Sanctification” as a form of individual self-formation. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the Übermensch serves as a model of New Sanctification. Such sanctification does not require the individual to lose the self in the collective. Rather, it is a process through which the individual returns to the self, confronts the world directly, and affirms one’s life in the most active and life-affirming way possible. That is the new sanctification that a healthy individual continually realizes through self-overcoming. Full article

In his lectures from November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze describes the immanent and compositional nature of Spinoza’s philosophy expressed in the content, the method, and the form of his writings. Spinoza himself uses in the Ethics and the TP the images of the climatologist studying the weather and the geometric drawing of lines and surfaces for his technical, artisanal, and neutral approach to the affects and political life. His ontology is characterized by the absence of hierarchical order and by nature as the principle and source of diversity. This approach is reminiscent of art, which also orders the chaos of human existence and makes it productive in a free and immeasurable way. Deleuze conceives of Spinoza’s ontology as a practical philosophy, leading him to the examples and the analysis of paintings (and, vice versa, from the art of painting to Spinoza’s philosophy), to which he dedicates his subsequent lectures from March to June 1981. In this article I reflect on the link between Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza and on painting, and therefore also between Spinoza’s compositional thought itself and painting. Full article

This article contends that Western philosophical traditions and Abrahamic spiritualities, while different, are entangled in the sense that together they represent distinct discursive performative epistemologies regarding how individuals inhabit the world. More specifically, what they share are social imaginaries that are founded on epistemologies of deficiency that radically separate human beings from other species and the Earth. It is argued further that these epistemologies are implicated in Western subjects’ instrumental, reifying, and exploitative dispositions and behaviors toward other species and the Earth, which the climate crisis makes apparent. Psychoanalysis can provide reasons for the emergence of these social imaginaries and their attendant resistance to changing how we dwell with other species and the Earth. In psychoanalytic parlance, epistemologies of deficiency entail projecting onto other species existential impermanence, which accompanies weak dissociation that assuages anxiety and fear regarding the impermanence of ourselves and our significations. Once persons become aware of this, they are ideally faced with deciding whether to take accountability and to change. Quantum physics/philosophy can provide a corrective lens for both psychoanalysis and Western spiritualities—a lens that accompanies more capacious epistemologies that invite ecologically inclusive, caring, and ethical ways of inhabiting a biodiverse world upon which matter–life–consciousness depend. Full article

The article is based on On the Move a holistic, playful movement intervention with children in Red Cross asylum centers in Denmark. Children in asylum centers in Denmark have diverse backgrounds, challenges, and resources. Common challenges due to their life situations can include potential trauma stemming from flight, migration, and/or war experienced by the children and their parents. Furthermore, they live with uncertainty regarding future relocation. These conditions may induce a state of alert, as the children’s foundations feel insecure. These circumstances can also affect the children’s emotional, cognitive, motor, and relational developmental processes. On the Move is a practice-based research project focused on examining how participation in a long-term holistic, playful movement intervention can support children in asylum centers regarding connectedness. The research project is inspired by a phenomenological understanding of body and movement, hermeneutic–phenomenological research, practitioner research, and Arts-Based Research. The data presented here is derived from scenic descriptions and interviews collected during the research project. The theoretical framework is based on the concepts of ontological security, movement philosophy and movement psychology. The article illuminates one of the main practice-based thematic findings from the research project: “Children sway—movement processes”. The article highlights challenges faced by the children due to their life situations and shows how teachers can support the children’s participation in the intervention. The article focuses both on the children’s life situations viewed by professionals and on the children’s movement processes during the intervention. In the movement processes, the children can enter a state in which they are described as being in harmony with the movements, with themselves, and with others. In this way, participating in a holistic, playful movement intervention can support the connectedness of children in asylum centers. Full article

Gary Snyder’s vision of the ‘great earth sangha’ articulates a philosophy of ecological awakening in which spiritual, ethical, and affective relationships connect all forms of life into a cohesive and sacred web of interbeing. The concept of the ‘great earth sangha’ embodies a profound sense of ‘oneness,’ in which the dichotomy between the self and the other dissolves, leading to a realisation of the Earth as a sentient, experiential, and pulsating entity. Inspired by the holistic perspectives of Buddhism and the resonances of Indigenous cosmologies, Snyder’s idea of the ‘great earth sangha’ represents a heightened consciousness and an “emotional intelligence” that fosters compassion, love, care and empathy for all beings in the world. For Snyder, the great earth sangha is a practice—a way of living in mindful ecological engagement. It is embedded with the principles of sila (morality), which foregrounds visions of harmonious coexistence and ecological kinship. This article argues that Snyder’s idea of the ‘great earth sangha’ offers a counter-anthropocentric perspective that subverts entrenched human-centred hierarchies by situating human identity within a communal web of existence. The article discusses how Snyder redefines the notion of ‘community’ as an inclusive, interdependent network that transcends human boundaries and embraces all planetary beings. Finally, the article explores how Snyder’s holistic vision propounds a restorative path that centres on ideas of ethics, affect, justice, responsibility and stewardship. Full article

This study explores water as memory and as method in African thought. It shows how rivers, rain, and oceans act not only as sources of life but also as teachers who carry a story, restore balance, and reveal moral truth. Drawing from Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, southern African, Kenyan and Afro-Atlantic traditions, this paper presents water as archive and as oracle, holding the past while speaking to the present. This article develops the idea of hydro epistemology, understood here as a way of knowing through flow, renewal, and relationship. In this framework, knowledge is created through ritual engagement with water, transmitted through oral memory and ecological observation, tested against environmental response and revised when conditions change. Water is treated as a witness, mediator and guide, rather than a passive resource. By setting these traditions alongside global discussions on water governance, nature-based ecological care and decolonial environmental ethics, this paper argues that African water imagination offers more than symbolism. It proposes a practical philosophy in which caring for water and caring for life are the same act. To listen to water is to remember, to restore and to recover a way of living that renews both people and land. Full article

This paper examines Wittgenstein’s shifting engagement with religion, from the early emphasis on the limits of the world in the Tractatus to the later attention to the ordinary and to the ways religious expressions inhabit forms of life. An analysis of later Wittgenstein shows that the religious functions within ordinary language-games, in which expressions tied to religion have established places and contexts of use. These uses, in turn, are intelligible against the background of many kinds of talk and observation that are not ordinarily characterized as religious. At the same time, Wittgenstein is concerned with the way in which words can be intensified through personal use, acquiring an inflection that responds to individual experience and is exposed to the possibility of acknowledgment or failure. What emerges is a way of inhabiting language in which the religious is understood as a renewal of one’s gaze upon the everyday. This is the region in which philosophy and religion meet in Wittgenstein: the work of finding again the words that speak for us, allowing them to regain their depth and to return us, moment by moment, to ordinary life. Full article

Poetry is not philosophy, nor was it meant to be, except on rare, glorious occasions. And only Wittgenstein seems willing to claim that philosophy should be written as poetry. Yet it is difficult to imagine poetry not wanting to impinge on the cultural roles played by at least some philosophy. And some philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger, want to influence the course of poetic practice. So it seems useful to inquire into the various ways these two disciplines can overlap or complicate one another’s modes of inquiry, even if one has no hope of securing abstract definitions for either practice. Those with the appropriate philosophical background, for example, could articulate tensions within a culture’s intellectual life as a means of specifying how an author develops emotionally resonant concrete experiences grappling with this environment. One example might be examining how the need to address Humean skepticism helped shape the development of Romantic ways of making constructive imagination inseparable from attentive states of perceptive involvement in the world. Another example might focus on efforts by contemporary poetry to correlate the work performed by ordinary language philosophy with Heideggerean ideals of building and dwelling potentially applicable to the frameworks provided by philosophical grammar. Full article

This article will bring together and explore the relations between four aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks on, and his relation to, religious language. The first is his sense of the special role that religious language can play in the lives of people. The focus is not on traditional issues in the philosophy of religion—not the Ontological Proof of the existence of God; not any of Aquinas’ Five Ways; not the argument from Design or the Cosmological Argument; and not any other philosophico-religious matter concerning arguments for the existence or non-existence of any deity. His interests lie elsewhere. Second, we see that what Wittgenstein is centrally concerned with is the life-structuring power that religious language can possess and exert; it concerns both the sense-making power of pattern-lives in religious narratives and the metaphorical content of religious ways of thinking and perceiving. The third aspect is the distinctive, and in its way transcendental, way of seeing the world and existence sub specie aeternitatis, that is, under the aspect of eternity. Or, I will suggest, under the aspect of timelessness, or of having the sense of being above and outside of time. Wittgenstein said that he was not a religious person, but that he could not help but to see every problem from a religious point of view. In this third theme of the article, I will attempt to explicate what that remark can mean—how it reveals what Wittgenstein elsewhere in his work calls “a way of seeing.” And then fourth, this article will connect these three aspects to the special, non-pragmatic (and often in the above sense, transcendental) way that we view works of art. In his Notebooks of 1914-16, Wittgenstein wrote, “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” At the close, I suggest that the way we learn to see the world through and within religious language (again, apart from any theological claim concerning divine existence or not) is parallel to one important way of seeing art—where the parallel is one that casts light from each side to the other. Along with some other works, my most central example in art will be the paintings of Morandi: in conveying an unmistakable sense of timelessness, they both convey, and in viewing them invite us to enact, the special way of seeing objects sub specie aeternitatis. Full article

As emotion becomes increasingly digitized, there is a growing risk that computational systems may overreach, shaping or managing affect in ways that undermine human autonomy. This study builds a cross-cultural dialog between Daoist affective philosophy and Western theories of emotion to address this problem. By comparing their assumptions about emotional life—what emotions are, how they should be guided, and what counts as appropriate intervention—the paper develops a set of ethical principles for the design of affective technologies. Through textual analysis and a historical–conceptual review, the study identifies three safeguards drawn from Daoist thought—minimality, autonomy, and reversibility—and translates them into practical guidance for data use, system behavior, and user interaction. A brief case from Finland’s well-being initiatives illustrates how these principles can redirect technological design toward supporting inner balance and self-directed regulation rather than external control. The paper’s contribution lies in offering a clear boundary ethics for affective computing, showing how Daoist ideas of moderation and self-cultivation can help prevent emotional alienation while still allowing technological systems to enhance human well-being. Full article