4th International Colloquium
in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
May 31 (Fri) - June 02 (Sun), 2024
The University of Nagano
Organized by: Society for Philosophy as Global Conversations, supported by KAKENHI Grant: Reconstruction of the historyof the concept of dignity in the Western world in light of new contemporary concepts of dignity such as the “dignity of thecreature” (23H04850) (https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PLANNED-23H04850/)1

4th International Colloquium in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
General Info

Theme: Nature, Spirituality, and Culture
Dates : May 31 - June 02, 2024
Venue: The University of Nagano, Miwa Campus, Learning Hall (8-49-7 Miwa, Nagano City. 7mn of walkfrom Hongo StationNagano Dentetsu Line, 4th station, 7mn. From Nagano station).
Organizer: Society for Philosophy as Global Conversation ( https://philogc.org )Colloquium Chair: Tomokazu Baba ( The University of Nagano)
Deputy Colloquium Chair: Rossen Roussev (St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo)
Registration Fee: Free of charge
Organized by: Society for Philosophy as Global Conversations
Co-organized and hosted by: The University of Nagano (Miwa Campus), Nagano, Japan
Supoorted by: KAKENHI Grant: Reconstruction of the history of the concept of dignity in the Westernworld in light of new contemporary concepts of dignity such as the “ dignity of the creature ”(23H04850) (https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PLANNED-23H04850/)
Language: English
Publication after the Colloquium: Organizers will consider the completed academic articles of theconference presentations for publication (after a review process) in the next issue of Global Conversations:
An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture (https://philogc.org/journal/), an
online open-access academic journal inaugurated after the first conference of the Society for Philosophy
as Global Conversation in March 2018.
Website: http://philogc.org/colloquia/
On the Idea of the Colloquium

The link between nature, spirituality, and culture is as old as humanity. And yet, the culture of modernity
largely turned its back on nature as a source of spirituality focusing on it instead as a source of utility. Thistendency continues also today, but now accompanied by ever stronger trends towards a return to nature,
which also comes along with a rediscovery of this basic link as a philosophical topos. Deep ecology is aprime example here, but others are voices from indigenous ethnic groups, such as that of the Brazilian
thinker Ailton Krenak.
In the Eastern cultural traditions, the link between natural and spiritual has remained strong andexperienced less interruptions than in the West. Perspectives on it can be found in Hinduism, Chinese
thought, and Japanese Buddhism amongst others. The Hindu view of the natural and spiritual presence of
Dharma, and the Taoist view of the relation of Tao and Te have both left deep traces in their cultural
traditions. Likewise, in Japan, the Medieval Buddhist schools have left a rich mark on the topic with the2work of Kukai a prominent example, and later on, in the Edo period, Shoeki Ando appeared as a grassroot
thinker promoting holistic understanding of the relation between humans and nature. In another regionand still later, the Bengali poetic thinker Lalon Fakir conveys his moral-philosophical insights in a versethat abounds with natural and spiritual metaphorics.
Among the masterpieces of the Western philosophy and culture exploring the topic, we canimmediately point to Immanuel Kantʼs Critique of Judgment, as well as to the works of the Romantic poets,
writers, and artists. Similarly, the works of Baruch Spinoza and Germain Spinozism remain philosophicalresources of deep ecology which today calls for renewed interpretation of the link in question from anever-wider perspective. For their part, the non-traditional 19th century thinkers Søren Kierkegaard andFriedrich Nietzsche apperceived human existence, life, and nature within terms that in one way or anotherpoint to the same link as well. In 20th century, the philosophy of Henri Bergson (especially his work Matterand Memory) opened a new debate on this matter, but so did also thinkers as different as Edmund Husserl,
Marin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone
de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous,
Willard V. O. Quine, and Richard Rorty, among still others. A contemporary relevance of the link of nature,spirituality, and culture can be also sought, and in various ways, in art, literature, critical theory, socialpolitical theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and not least in
the research and debates that today surround the AI venture as a whole.
Meanwhile, it is also true that peculiar takes on the link between natural and spiritual have beenused to prop up various nationalist ideologies as well. This has been so to such an extent that it has been
seen as integral to the matrix of nationalism, as for instance manifest in Emmanuel Levinasʼ critique ofthe later Heidegger. Nevertheless, the cultural consequences of the link between natural and spiritual aremuch wider than what its nationalist appropriation could suggest. In particular, the link between natureand spirituality can be associated with the relation between local and global as a cultural encounter, which
can be seen also as a form of a continuous conversation. Thus, the conjecture is that it is a high time to reexamine the relation between nature, spirituality, and culture.
Nagano, the site of the colloquium, is itself rich in nature and spiritual places, which are integral
to its culture. Temples and shrines can be found nearby in the areas of Togakushi mountain and Lake
Suwa. Additionally, an integrated cultural program will offer to the participants the opportunity tocomplement the intellectual stimulation of the academic conference with a first-hand local and global
cultural experience.
Specific topics of interest to the colloquium can be related but not limited to,‒ Environmental philosophy and ethics‒ Traditional religionsʼ views on nature and human‒ Philosophy of nature and mind
‒ Philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives on animals and vegetables‒ Capitalismʼs separation of human from nature3‒ Exploitation of nature and humans‒ Philosophy of landscape‒ Well-being and mindfulness‒ Multispecies anthropology‒ Animism in ethnic traditions and religions
Other topics of interest to the colloquium can be related but not limited to,- Phenomenology, existential philosophy, post-structuralism- Metaphilosophy, pragmatism, and communicative action- Language, thinking, and technology- Critical theory, literature, and art- Ethics, religion, and spirituality- Power, politics, and economics- Race, gender, sexuality, identity- Refugees, strangers, and outcasts- Community building, inclusion, and integration- Human person, health, and self-creation- Globalization, multi-culturalism, and the meaning of nationality- Trans- and cross-cultural horizons- Environment, common concerns, and common solutions- Radicalization, Populism, and Extremism- Poverty, Gentrification, and Biopolitics

Registration to participate as Listener (ONLINE and IN PERSON)
https://forms.gle/ryp8FVD6z7HE4B3E8 (Deadline 28th May 2024)
We will send you Zoom Link by May 29th 20244Colloquium Program
Day 1, Friday May 31, 2024
Introduction 9:15 a.m.-9:30 a.m.
Tomokazu Baba (Colloquium Chair)Friday PanelⅠ 9:30 a.m.-11:15 a.m.

l

Ionut Untea (Southeast University), “Topological Existential Engagements: Modern Local Identity
and Postmodern Performativity”lSikong Zhao (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences), “The Metaphor of Messiah’s Chair from the
Perspective of Modernity”

lFelix S. H. Yeung (University of Essex), “Enlightenment’s “Good Mourning”: A Psychoanalytic
Interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment”

lDiscussion15min, Chair Rossen Roussev
Break

11:15 a.m.-11:30 a.m.

Art Session【ONLINE】11:30 a.m.-12:15a.m.
Antoine de Mena (Artist）, "Life is savage".
Chair Tomokazu Baba
Lunch 12:15 p.m.-1:15 p.m.
Friday PanelⅡ

1:15 p.m.-3:00 p.m.

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【ONLINE】Fernando Gerheim (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), “Reﬂections on ArtResearch Group Poéticas em Campo Experimental – PAX (Poetics in Experimental Field) in dialogue
with Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language regarding the articulation between Nature, Spirituality,
and Culture”.

lMotohiro Kumasaka (Tokushima University), “Creating Little Deities To Be a Prayer to Nature andto Be a Player with Nature”l

Ryo Kikuchi (Sophia University), “Can We Love an Extraterrestrial? ‒ A Reﬂection on Love andHuman Nature”

lDiscussion 15min, Chair Nicolaas Buitendag

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Break

3:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

Art Session【ONLINE】3:15 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
Akiko Nakayama (individual)“Hemispherical Portrait”
Chair Tomokazu Baba

Break

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4:00 p.m.-4:15 p.m.

Friday PanelⅢ 4:15p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Kunimasa SATO (Ibaraki U), “Doxastic Transformation and Transformative Experiences That Cause
Epistemic Conversions”lStavroula Tsirogianni (Chinese university of hong kong Shenzhen), “Slowing Down in the Age of
Involution: A Case Study of the Black Box Space”lRyan Adams (University of Memphis), “Association Comes Before Assent: Reconsidering Religious
Epistemology in Social Terms”

lDiscussion15min, Chair Ve-Yin Tee

6Day 2, Saturday June 1st, 2024l

Saturday PanelⅠ9:15a.m.-11:00a.m.
Songqi Han (the University of Tokyo), HAOGUANG LI, “Body as Line of Flight: A Deleuzian
Account on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology”

lVe-Yin Tee (Nanzan University), “Home Away from Home: Migrant Culture and Allochthonous
Nature”l

HUANG Lu (TOHOKU University), “Speculative Realism, Phenomenology and the Truth in
Empirical Science: A Defence of Husserlian Phenomenology against the Critique from Ancestrality in
Meillassoux”lDiscussion15min, Chair Zhao Sikong
Break

11:00a.m.-11:15 a.m.

Art Session【ONLINE】11:15a.m.-12:00a.m.
Aly Roshdy Aly Shelby (Lecturer assistant at Faculty of Fine Arts - Helwan university - Cairo – Egypt)"Calm Canvas: A Visual Odyssey of Tranquility"

Lunch 12:00a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Saturday PanelⅡ 1:00 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
lLucas Scripter (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), “Environmentalism and the Sublime”

7lNicolaas Buitendag (Faculty of Law, North-West University), “Between Nature and Society: The
Anthropocene's Challenge to Environmental Law”lVaiva Daraškevičiūtė (Associate professor at Vilnius University), “(An)Aesthetics of the
Anthropocene and the Problem of Landscape”

lDiscussion15min, Chair Fiona Tomkinson
Break 2:45 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Art Session【ONLINE】3:00 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
Hannes Schumacher (Chaosmos ∞)“Strange Visitors”

Break 3:45 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
Saturday Panel Ⅲ 4:00 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
lBeth Harper (The University of Hong Kong), “Delightful leisure and spiritual freedom: the gardenerin comparative perspective”lChristian Krägeloh (Auckland University of Technology), “Unitlessness and Pure Experience:
Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Psychology in Mindfulness Studies”lNarcisa Paredes-Canilao (University of the Philippines Baguio (ret Professor of Philosophy), “Mindless dancing: The no-mind principle and indigenous epistemology of performance”

lDiscussion15min, Discussion, Stavroula Tsirogianni
Colloquium Dinner 7:00 p.m.
Location TBA

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Days 3, Sunday June 2nd, 2024
Sunday PanelⅠ 9:15a.m.-11:00 a.m.
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Joﬀ BRADLEY (Teikyo University), “Fūdo, technical milieu and the fourth ecology”
Keiko Ueda (Tokyo Metropolitan University), “Nature as “The Holy” in Heidegger’s Interpretationof a Hölderlin’s Hymn “As if it is a Day of Festival…” ――An Approach to the Fundamental Ecology Based on the Holiness of Nature”

lRossen Roussev (St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo), “Nature, Culture, andDeconstruction: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida”

lDiscussion15min, Chair Tomokazu Baba
Break 11:00 a.m.-11:15 a.m.
Art Session【ONLINE】11:15 a.m.-12:00 a.m.
Eugenia Gianno “undergrass”

Lunch 12:00p.m.-1:00 p.m.
Sunday PanelⅢ 1:00 p.m.-2:45 p.m.
llTomokazu Baba (The University of Nagano), “Kaii Higashiyama and Sympathy with Landscape”
Roman PAȘCA (Akita University), “The Heart-mind as a Field: Cultivation, Spirituality and Nature in
Japanese Philosophy”

lFiona Tomkinson (Nagoya University), “Ted Hughes and Nature: the Goddess of Complete Being
and the Remains of Elmet”

lDiscussion15min, Chair Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė

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Break 2:45 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Closing discussion 3:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
Excursion 3:30p.m.-5:00 p.m.
Zenkoji Temple
Nagano Prefectural Art Museum Higasiyama Kaii Gallery
Closing Party 7:00 p.m.
Chair: You, International Colloquium in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture

Monday, June 3rd, 2024
Excursion
Togakushi Area
Taking bus from Nagano Station

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Time Table

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PRESENTERS’ ABSTRACTS AND INFORMATION(listed alphabetically by presenter’s last name)

Association Comes Before Assent: Reconsidering Religious Epistemology in Social Terms

byRyan Adams, University of Memphis, United States
The ﬁeld of religious epistemology makes extensive use of the concept of “Reason of the Heart” as a way of
explaining the grounding features of religious decision making. The Reason of the Heart is often used as ameans for giving ground to rational assent to belief-propositions, when these propositions come without whatmight be considered, in other branches of epistemology, as suﬃcient evidence for assent. This paper willargue against the use of the “Reason of the Heart” as the key consideration for religious epistemology andinstead argue for a reconsidering of the basis of religious epistemology around the grounding of community.
The history of the concept of the “Reason of the Heart” is ﬁrmly grounded in a very particular cultural andreligious setting. While this may reﬂect some of the considerations which ground a religious epistemology inthose settings, its use as a universal foundation of religious thinking is dubious at best, and fails to capture awide range of religious experiences, communities, and ways of thinking. In order to avoid the individualism
and Eurocentrism found in understanding religious epistemology in terms of the “Reason of the Heart,” thispaper will argue for a grounding of religious epistemology which is based primarily in a desire to belong in aparticular community - either in the human community of believers/practitioners or else with a deity,
pantheon, or spiritual body. In order to demonstrate this lens for religious epistemology, I will show how it
reﬂects on a wide variety of religious communities and traditions, how it relates to those who are “broughtup” in a particular tradition, and how it relates both the experience of the convert and also common trends ininitiatory practices.
Ryan Adams, A graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and Instructor in Philosophy

at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. I work primarily on Continental philosophy, Phenomenology,social/political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of time.
"Calm Canvas: A Visual Odyssey of Tranquility"

by
Aly Roshdy Aly Shalby Aly, Lecturer assistant at Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan university, Cairo, Egypt
A Visual Symphony is a concept that encapsulates the essence of my trip through a captivating video art piece12

in Bulgaria.
It will aim to evoke emotions and sensations akin to experiencing a musical symphony. Throughcareful editing, pacing, and composition, will ﬂow seamlessly.
Movement and Tranquility The juxtaposition of movement and tranquility will be a central theme in myvideo. Scenes depicting bustling city streets will transition seamlessly into tranquil countryside vistas,
illustrating the harmonious coexistence of activity and serenity aims to evoke a sense of peace and tranquility
in the viewer. By immersing them in the beauty and serenity of Bulgaria, the video will oﬀer a respite fromthe chaos of everyday life and invite contemplation and reﬂection.
Overall, A Visual Symphony through my vision promises to be a captivating exploration of thecountry's beauty and tranquility from my point of view, leaving a lasting impression on anyone who
experiences it., Aly Roshdy (born in 1993) lives in his hometown of Cairo, Egypt. He graduated with a BFA
in 2016 works as a lecturer Assistant, got his masters in '' Developing and experimenting in Contemporary
mural painting'' in 2021 and working now on his doctoral degree ''Contemporary visual media and its
relationship with mural painting and its impact on the researcher's experience'' Aly enjoys blending editing
he got mophradat grant in 2021 with a group of artists
Aly Roshdy Aly Shalby Aly won a prize on video art Lfoa' in Cairo Opera house in the youth salon competition

2021 as well as participate in Cannes ﬁlm festival in France 2018 for Editing "The unknown sweet potato
seller”. And in 2018 I took part in short mega cities docs Documentaries in Paris with“ Al Marg Helwan “, itwon a prize martyr Ahmed basouni in the salon of youth at Cairo Opera house.
Higashiyama Kaii and sympathy with landscapebyTomokazu Baba, The University of Nagano, Japan
Kaii Higashiyama (1908-1999) is one of the leading Japanese painters of the 20th century. Many of his works
are based on the natural environment of Nagano, and the Nagano Prefectural Museum of Art has the Kaii
Higashiyama Gallery. With few exceptions, humans and animals rarely appear in his works. The naturallandscapes depicted are seascapes, mountains, rivers, and forests. After studying in Berlin (1933-34) as ayoung man and learning the history of Western art, he returned to Japan and entered an unfavorable period
as a painter until his late thirties. At the same time, war overshadowed his life, and his parents and younger
brother died of illness. He practiced suicide bombing attacks in the army, in which he would charge tankswith bombs, and he himself prepared for his own death. In the midst of a life of loneliness and facing his own
mortality, he had an encounter with a landscape that could be described as a kind of mystical experience. This
experience made him decide to become a landscape painter. The artist's encounter with the landscape was,in Heidegger's words, an experience that occurred in a state of Sein zum Tode. Unlike Heidegger, the13

awareness of the ﬁnitude of one's own existence leads to a sense of community of destiny with natural beings
such as grass and trees. The painter, who was familiar with sketching in nature from his childhood, foundnature, not other human beings, as Being that existed with him. He was moved by the fact that he shared thesame life as plants and trees, and by the way they endured the wind and snow. Based on the artist's own words,
I will attempt to relate this shift to the East Asian Buddhist view of life and deep ecology.

Dr. Tomokazu Baba is Professor at the University of Nagano. He received a Ph.D. from Hitotsubashi

University (2008) and another one from the Sorbonne Paris IV (2013). His research discipline includes
Contemporary Philosophy, Ethics, History of Ideas, especially 20th century French and German Philosophy,
Levinas and Heidegger. He is also practitioner of philosophical dialogue in philosophical café, schools, and invarious settings. Email: joiespacieuse@gmail.com
Fūdo, technical milieu and the fourth ecology

byJoﬀ P. N. Bradley, Teikyo University (Japan) U.K.
I am inspired to think about the question of the middle after reading Bernard Stieglerʼs Bifurcate. In thatbook, Stiegler talks about the necessity to read the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, who he says thinks
about the middle in his meditation on climate. From there, Stiegler talks about the necessity to understandthe human, to understand the non-inhuman and its intermittent possibility, which I think results in a new
speculation about the middle in the time of the radical change to our environment. What does this mean?
This means to think about the technical milieu, which is something like a fourth ecology, an idea I developed
from the work of Félix Guattari and his Three Ecologies.
If the three ecologies are the environment proper, social ecology, and mental ecology, what is thisfourth ecology? What is the possibility of a fourth ecology? What I take from Stiegler is that a fourth ecology
might be the technical milieu, and that is why he makes reference to Watsuji following Augustin Berqueʼstranslation of climate as milieu. If it is the case that when we talk about the climate, the sense of what theclimate is has changed, then what has caused this change? An answer might be that the Anthropocene signals
a change from the previous understanding of what the climate is to the technical as such, to the technicalmilieu as such. This is what climate change suggests: a change from the natural to the artefactual, a change
from a natural sense of what the climate is to a technical sense of what the climate or environment is, to thetechnical milieu as such.
How would Watsuji understand his sense of ⾵⼟ in the contemporary milieu? How would thehistorical sense of Japanese spiritual climate (⽇本の精神的⾵⼟) be transformed by the technological spiritof our days? What is the crisis of spirit picked up on by Stiegler in Paul Valéry and Henri Bergson, and how
can we read the crisis of the technological spirit in our own historical moment?

14

My thoughts about this are to ruminate on Stieglerʼs exhortation to think about Japanese philosophy
qua milieu, as middle, and then to begin to compare the philosophers of the milieu, Deleuze and Guattari,
who discuss the milieu in A Thousand Plateaus. My thoughts about this are to consider Stiegler, then Watsuji,
to make a move to Deleuze and Guattari, and ﬁnally to make some speculations about what Watsuji mightunderstand by the contemporary technical milieu or planetary exosphere as Stiegler names it.

Joﬀ P.N. Bradley is Professor of Philosophy and English, Faculty and Graduate School of Foreign Languages,

Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Joﬀ serves as a visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi
and as a visiting researcher at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Joﬀ has also served as a visiting professor at
Université de Nanterre in 2022, Durham University in the UK in 2022, and Universidad Nacional de San
Martín in Argentina in 2023. He is vice president of the International Association of Japan Studies and amember of the advisory board for The International Deleuze and Guattari Studies in Asia as well as sitting
on the advisory board for Deleuze and Guattari Collective in India. Joﬀ has co-written A Pedagogy of Cinema& coedited: Deleuze and Buddhism; Educational Ills and the (Im)possibility of Utopia; Educational
Philosophy and New French Thought; Principles of Transversality, Bringing Forth a World; Bernard Stiegler
and the Philosophy of Education I & II. He published Thinking with Animation in 2021; Schizoanalysis andAsia in 2022; Schizoanalysis and Postmedia in 2023; and his latest book is Deleuze, Guattari and Global
Ecologies of Language Learning.
Between Nature and Society: The Anthropocene's Challenge to Environmental Law

byBuitendag Nicolaas (Nico), Faculty of Law North-West University, South Africa
As the climate crisis looms over society, environmental law is in a disciplinary crisis. Corresponding to thetheory of scientiﬁc revolutions described by Thomas Kuhn, environmental law is at a point where competingtheories are, at least in academia, attempting to overthrow mainstream environmental law as it is actively
practised. These new legal paradigms are numerous, and a sign of the understandable frustration
environmental lawyers feel that their ﬁeld is currently not suﬃciently eﬀective. Despite their internal
diﬀerences, it is possible to identify certain commonalities among the new environmental legal paradigms,
such as calling for the Rights of Nature, discarding the lawʼs old Cartesian Culture/Nature distinction, and acritique of legal anthropocentrism.
The presentation begins with a brief overview of the development of the concept of “Nature” andits counter-concept “Society” during European modernity. Drawing methodologically on the technique ofconceptual history or Begriﬀsgeschichte as developed by Reinhart Koselleck of the Bielefeld School ofhistoriography, the semantic shift that occurred around the concept of Nature will be laid out not only tocontrast it with Society but also to show the past political potential of the idea.

15

With the help of Niklas Luhmannʼs autopoietic social systems theory, relying on its
phenomenological inﬂuence, it is argued that the demand for the legal system to transcend the Nature/Society
distinction is faced with signiﬁcant theoretical and practical diﬃculties. However, this problem can be
unfolded if we reconsider the meaning of legal subjectivity in the 21st century, a legal development that willbe essential for dealing with a diversity of problems such as the climate crisis, questions over human andgender identity (LGBTQ+), and even looming questions posed by Artiﬁcial Intelligence (AI).
Buitendag Nicolaas: Believing that current global questions ask for broad structural responses, Dr. Nico

Buitendag conducts transdisciplinary theoretical research that bridges law, politics, sociology, historiography
and philosophy. Deeply inﬂuenced by autopoietic systems theory, his work attempts to project the theory
further along its radical and anti-hierarchical horizon. It has also resulted in the translation into English ofseveral works of Niklas Luhmann, late pioneer of autopoietic systems theory, from German. Recently Dr.
Buitendag published his ﬁrst monograph, States of Exclusion: A Critical Systems Theory reading ofInternational Law (Aosis, 2022) which engages with the structural and systemic complicity of law, politics
and science in colonial projects. He also hosts the Undisciplined Podcast, which interviews leading academics
about their most exciting new research.
(An)Aesthetics of the Anthropocene and the Problem of Landscapeby
Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė, Associate professor at Vilnius University, Lithuania
The crisis of Anthropocene usually is associated with technological development and economic exploitationof nature; however, in this process the aesthetic factor also is important. Visual culture analysts T. J. Demosand Nicholas Mirzoeﬀ, who research the Anthropocene in this perspective, introduce the term of
Anthropocene aesthetics deﬁning by it the tendency to represent the Anthropocene mainly with abstract
panoramic images. According to their critique, in the time of crisis this kind of visual communication works
not in a mobilizing, but in anesthetizing way helping to reduce the situativity of toxic environments to thesight. As notices Mirzoeﬀ, this kind of approach characteristic to the Anthropocene iconography should beseen as the part of a bigger systemic problem related to the representational strategies, still guided by theprinciples established by the discourse of modernity. In my talk Iʼd like to discuss two aspects ‒ theaesthetization of nature and the dissociation of the subject from the environment. Both of them can berecognized in the Anthropocene aesthetics (as it is described by T. J. Demos and Mirzoeﬀ) and also both ofthem can be retraced from the ontological assumptions of the modern aesthetics. Firstly, it will be analysed
the connection between landscape painting and the aesthetic formation of nature (Ernst Gombrich); secondly,
it will be discussed the panoramic perspective explaining it as the speciﬁc model of relationship with theenvironment (William Thomas Mitchell, Philippe Descola). The talk will be concluded focusing on the16

concept of landscape as transﬁguration (Descola), which proposes to treat the landscape not as a sight, but
as a model of milieu where diﬀerent biotic communities are connected.

Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Vilnius University (Lithuania).

She is co-author of collective monographs Transformations of Nature: Modernity and Anthropocene (Vilnius:
Vilnius University Press, 2021 (in Lithuanian) with Mintautas Gutauskas, Danutė Bacevičiūtė and Gianluca
Cuozzo) and Post-secular Condition (Vilnius: Vilnius University Press, 2022 (in Lithuanian) with Tomas
Sodeika, Danutė Bacevičiūtė, Algirdas Fediajevas, Egdūnas Račius, Lina Vidauskytė). Also, Daraškevičiūtė
has numerous publications in the ﬁelds of aesthetics, philosophy of art, ontological hermeneutics and visualstudies. Recently her research interests are focused on the situation of Anthropocene, seeking to explore thepossible practices of living in a new climate regime from the philosophical perspective.
Life Is Savage

byAntoine De Mena, Artist, Brazil
I have been living and working in Brazil for almost three years now. Brazil has profoundly transformed myexistence, and Brazilian Afro-Amerindian thoughts in relation to nature and culture has shifted most of myartistic and political positionning. Underlining the idea that "Life is savage", I will be presenting some art
works, linked to Brazilian contemporary thinkers and activists like Ailton Krenak and Antônio Bispo dos
Santos.

Antoine De Mena is a French-Spanish artist, ﬁlmmaker, poet, and translator. He currently lives and works in

Rio de Janeiro. He holds a Masterʼs degree in Asian Studies ‒ Japanese Language and Culture (INALCO,
Paris, France / Tokyo University of Foreign Studies), Masterʼs degree in Documentary Creation and New
Technologies (Université de Poitiers, France) and Bachelorʼs in History and Social Sciences (Paris IVSorbonne, Paris, France). Email: antoinedemena@gmail.com
UndergrassbyEugenia Gianno, Chaosmos ∞ , Greece
UNDERGRASS is a polyphony of stories locked in voices of humans and a bamboo forest in Águeda, Portugal.
The ﬁlm sprouted from a gathering for collective listening with the bamboo forest, exploring human-soil
relations by sensing multiple deaths and (re)births.

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Eugenia Gianno completed her MA in Visual and Media Anthropology with a transmedial and multi-sitedresearch on grassroot initiatives in Southern Europe. Her work centers on multispecies care and agency inthe context of the environmental crisis, each time engaging the local multispecies communities to collectively
revive emancipatory practices through ritual, play, and local myths creating spaces for shared intimacy, trustand collectivized experiences. She is a co-founder of the grassroots space Chaosmos ∞ in Athens, founding
member of the art collective Vandaloop and coordinates the public programs of the Berlin-based publisher
Freigeist Verlag.

Reﬂections on Art-Research Group Poéticas em Campo Experimental ‒ PAX (Poetics in Experimental
Field) in dialogue with Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language regarding the articulation between
Nature, Spirituality, and Culture.

by
Fernando Gerheim, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Could art as an integration of the ﬁeld of the word with the sensorial ﬁeld of the image be seen as resistanceto the instrumentalization of language that is the basis of colonial reason? Could the art, by inﬁltrating theperceptual dimension in the predominantly conceptual thought, although highly aestheticized, ofcontemporary culture, and by exposing the margin of indeterminacy in which technology is based, showingthat its directions have always resulted, after all, from decisions of aesthetic order, could the art thus
contribute to a (re)enchantment of the world? This presentation will discuss these and other issues based on
the work of the Art-Research Group Poéticas em Campo Experimental (PAX), that I coordinate as a postgraduate professor in the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

Fernando Gerheim is writer, artist and professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Programade Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais - EBA and Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes da Cena - ECO.
He is author of Signofobia (Ed. 7 Letras, 2022), Inﬁnitômetros (Ed. 7 Letras, 2018) and Linguagens
Inventadas - palavra imagem objeto: formas de contágio (Ed. Zahar, 2008). He also directed the shortﬁlms Salomé (2011) and Urubucamelô (2002), among others.
Body as Line of Flight: A Deleuzian Account on Merleau-Pontyʼs Phenomenology

bySongqi Han, the University of Tokyo, Japan
Haoguang Li, Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University, Japan
Regarding Merleau-Pontyʼs phenomenology, the prevailing view among researchers suggests that the body,18

as the boundary and mediator between the agent and its environment, is neither subjective nor objective, nor
is it material or spiritual. This view generally tends to demonstrate that the body a priori distinguishes
between agent and environment, and therefore where the body exists, the subject and object, and mind andmatter, are clearly separated. However, this dichotomous attitude was never adopted and was even opposedby Merleau-Ponty; rather, in primordial consciousness, such distinctions were not yet extracted. This paper
aims to oﬀer a Deleuzian account on Merleau-Pontyʼs phenomenology, regarding the body as the line of ﬂight,
and the agent as a rhizome as well. The body, as the line of ﬂight, consistently plays a role of the forefront of
the rhizome, engaging in nonlinear processes of de- and reterritorialization. The agent and its environment
are not distinguished by the body; rather, they are enclosed within the body without distinction. We argue
that such an account is in accordance with Merleau- Pontyʼs claim, as Gestalt psychology, which he often
quotes, views the relationship between the agent and its environment in this manner. Furthermore, if
rhizomes are regarded as plural monads, an intersubjectivity can be grasped, which can be traced back to
Husserl and even Leibniz. In order to illustrate this account, this paper examines the bodyʼs processes of deand reterritorialization during the Covid-19 era, prompted by the quarantine policies implemented bygovernments. Such restrictions circumscribed the body, thus constructing a norm for the body to adhere tooﬃcial rhetoric.

Songqi Han is a PhD student at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo,

specializing in the philosophy of psychology and phenomenology under the guidance of Professor Koji
Ishihara. A graduate of Beijing Normal University with a degree in Philosophy, and holding a Master of
Science from the University of Tokyo. His work, notably in Gestalt psychology, Husserlian and MerleauPontian phenomenology, and ﬁeld theory across psychology and philosophy, has been recognized in various
international journals and conferences. Han's notable publications include "World as Logic andConsciousness" and "Verbal Field in Gestalt Psychology." As a member of several esteemed academic societies,
including the Philosophical Association of Japan, the Japanese Psychological Association, and the Society for
Gestalt Theory and its Applications, Han has established himself as a respected ﬁgure in his ﬁeld, contributing
valuable insights and fostering intellectual discourse.
Haoguang Li, I am currently a Ph.D. student at Keio University. My research interests include Chinesepolitics, anthropology, social movements, and modern history. I hold a Master of Science in China in
Comparative Perspective from the London School of Economics and Political Science, a Master of Media andGovernance from Keio University, a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Indiana University, and a
Bachelor of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University.
Delightful leisure and spiritual freedom: the gardener in comparative perspectivebyBeth Harper, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

19

Largely missing from the textual tradition prior to the eleventh century, in China the gardener becomes aﬁgure of importance only from the Song onwards. A notable forerunner, however, may be found in the Tang
essayist Liu Zongyuanʼs 柳宗元 (773‒819 CE) allegorical biographical sketch of the gardener Guo Tuotuo
郭橐駝 (ʻGuo the Camel Backʼ). Signalling the Zhuangzian trope of physical deformities as signs of inner
virtue and wisdom, the gardenerʼs art of cultivating plants becomes an allegory for the arts of governance.
The human desire for control of the more-than-human world must yield to the natural rhythms of things. In
Augustan Rome, the poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) inserts a digression on the Corycian gardener into the last bookof his Georgics, a poem seemingly extolling the virtue of labor improbus and the sturdy moral and culturalvalues of hard work. Isolated from political and social organization, the gardener presents that aspect ofhuman nature which is private and individual and whose highest embodiment may be the poet, or perhaps,
the sage.
In reading comparatively, I hope to show how two moments in these literary traditions demonstratea shared lingering on the gardener as a ﬁgure who knows what it might mean to be properly alive and free.
Set against the values of utility, service and violent subjugation of the natural world, these representations of
the gardener, I suggest, transcend the values of Confucian or Augustan orthodoxy to question the limits ofthe political in human life. If the discourse of cultivating gardens presents a millennia-long elite conversation
about value and meaning-making beyond political power and orthodoxy, what might these poetic depictions
teach us as creatures of modernity? How might an ecological lens reanimate our latent longing for morenatural forms of self-cultivation?

Beth Harper is assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She specialises

in premodern European and Chinese literature and thought, with a particular interest in tragedy, lyric, andeast-west comparative poetics. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare, English Studies, postmedieval,Comparative Literature: East & West, The Journal of East-West Thought, and is forthcoming in the Journalof World Literature, and History of Humanities. Current projects centre on classical theories of leisure andpleasure, and the eco-poetics of classical Latin and Chinese poetry.
Speculative Realism, Phenomenology and the Truth in Empirical Science: A Defence of Husserlian
Phenomenology against the Critique from Ancestrality in Meillassoux

by
Lu HUANG, TOHOKU University (Japan), CHINA
Correlationism is an umbrella term Meillassoux used in After Finitude for philosophical systems whose
fundamental claims are based on “the idea we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking andbeing, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2008: 5). He accused20

correlationism of conﬁning us to what is given and depriving us of the legitimacy to claim the truth of reality.
Meillassoux raised the problem of ancestrality in disclosing the incoherence of correlationism. Ancestrality
refers to scientiﬁc statements claiming the truth about events occurring prior to any possible givenness, suchas “The accretion of the earth happened 4.56 billion years ago.” (ibid. 10, 16) In order for such claims to bescientiﬁcally meaningful, they have to be at least possibly true about their referents as mind-independent
reality. From the perspective of correlationism, such statements will be nonsensical, for what they “describe
as real is an impossible event” (ibid. 17) because no givenness is possible. Correlationism can either
acknowledge they are true about what really happened or deny they have any realistic thereby scientiﬁcsigniﬁcance (ibid.).
Here I shall defend phenomenology admittedly as a form of correlationism (cf. e.g., Sparrow 2014,
Wiltsche 2016, Zahavi 2017) against Meillassouxʼs attack. I will focus on Husserlian phenomenology andargue that statements of empirical science on ancestrality can have a realistic sense within the context ofphenomenology without incoherence. Following Meillassouxʼs reasoning, my line of arguments is attempted
as follows: ﬁrst, the material on which such claims are based is both the intentional and the real object. Second,
the laws in accordance with which the scientiﬁc conclusion is deduced from the material are true, althoughcontingent and falsiﬁable. Third, the scientiﬁc conclusion itself, as a necessary result of the hypotheticaldeductive method, refers to the real object in question.
Lu HUANG: fellowship with the Department of Arts and Letters, TOHOKU University
Can We Love an Extraterrestrial? ‒ A Reﬂection on Love and Human Natureby
Ryo KIKUCHI, Sophia University, Japan
Recently there has been wide speculation about Unidentiﬁed Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) all over theworld, resulting in the growing demand for scholars in humanities and social sciences to consider social, moral,
political and religious implications of a discovery, or disclosure, of such existence. In this presentation, I shall
explore the question “Can we love an extraterrestrial?” to commence philosophical and intercultural dialogue
on the moral status of such a being. I believe that in addition to the practical signiﬁcance of such a hypotheticalquestion this reﬂection will serve as a thought-experiment to illuminate the nature of love, which plays acentral role in our humanity ‒ in our culture and spirituality. The thesis of the presentation is that humans
can love only those who are suﬃciently similar to themselves. In the ﬁrst part of the presentation, I shalldiscuss various cases of “love” which are best analyzed away as pseudo-love, such as those involving makebelieve, like Pygmalion “falling in love” with his statue. In the second part, I shall discuss more diﬃcult cases
involving non-human intelligence (NHI) such as animals and artiﬁcially intelligent beings (e.g., AI programs,
robots, androids etc.) to ﬁnd out what types of beings other than human beings can be “loved”, in a more21

robust sense of the term “love”, exempliﬁed in a loving relationship between human beings. I shall claim thatwhat makes beings potentially “lovable” to us is their similarity to us in a certain way, more speciﬁcally, theirpersonhood, in the sense that they are beings with whom we can communicate and share our lives in virtueof their having certain features constituting personhood. In the third and ﬁnal part, I shall examine thequestion of whether we can love an extraterrestrial based on the results of the foregoing discussions andconsider its practical implications.

Ryo Kikuchi was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating from high school, he went abroad to study

in the U.S., where he was trained in analytic philosophy, ﬁrst at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where
he earned a B.A. in Philosophy, and then at Stanford University, where he was enrolled in a Ph. D programand acquired an M.A. in Philosophy. After a stint as a management consultant in Tokyo, he went study abroadin Freiburg, Germany, where he earned an M.A. in Caritas Science and Christian Social Ethics. He is currently
working on a dissertation on philosophy of love at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is the author of academic
articles including “Care as an Aﬀective Value Response: Exploring a Modern Catholic Approach to thePhilosophy of Care” (Tetsugaku: International Journal of the Philosophical Association of Japan 5) and is alsoa published poet.
Unitlessness and Pure Experience: Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Psychology in
Mindfulness Studies

byChristian Krägeloh, Auckland University of Technology, New ZealandOver the past few decades, the systematic application and study of mindfulness and meditation practices
within psychology have gained mainstream recognition. As the discipline evolved, the scope of mindfulness
interventions expanded from their primary focus on alleviating psychological distress in secular contexts tointegrating religious, spiritual, and ethical dimensions. This expansion has deepened scholarly discussions
around the integration of Buddhist philosophies̶ from which many of the mindfulness practices arederived̶into contemporary psychological theories. A focal point of these discussions is the concept of
nonduality and its experiential state, nondual awareness, which coincides with the growing use of ﬁrst-person
methods from experimental phenomenology. However, due to their introspective nature, such researchmethods have revived debates reminiscent of those that had catalyzed the development of behavior analysis
and its philosophical frameworks. This paper addresses the shortcomings of approaches such as experimental
phenomenology, which reify experience and are thus ill-suited for studying nondual experiences thattranscend the subject-object dichotomy. The philosophical framework of "unitlessness" is introduced here,
aimed at avoiding the conceptual contradictions commonly encountered in contemplative studies. Within thisframework, "pure experience" is deﬁned as what is left after all units of description have been exhausted.

22

From the standpoint of language, pure experience may be regarded as an ontological principle, although suchconceptualizations are void at the plane of raw experience as well as at the all-encompassing plane ofunitlessness. While sharing crucial aspects communicated by the nondual Kyoto School, the framework of
unitlessless adopts the a-ontological starting position of contextual behavioral science, with behavior̶
including verbal behavior̶as a unit of analysis. This new philosophical framework not only enriches theacademic dialogue between Eastern and Western philosophical traditions but also provides a coherent
foundation for empirical research in psychology, particularly in the study of mindfulness and meditation.

Chris Krägeloh, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience,

Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Apart from his research interests in health outcome
measurement and psychosocial factors related to robotics and artiﬁcial intelligence, much of his work exploredempirical and conceptual topics in mindfulness. Chris is an author of more than 150 articles in international
journals, lead author of a mindfulness research book (“Mindfulness-Based Intervention Research:
Characteristics, Approaches, and Developments”), co-editor of two major reference works on assessment(“Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research” and “International Handbook of Behavioral Health
Assessment”), and co-editor and co-author of several other books on research methods and well-being. Chrisis joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Mindfulness”, which is widely considered to be the ﬂagship journal of
mindfulness research. With his co-Editor-in-Chief, he will also be launching a new journal in 2024, with thetentative title “Psychology & AI”.
Creating Little Deities: To Be a Prayer to Nature and to Be a Player with Nature

byMotohiro Kumasaka, Tokushima University, Japan
The Western philosophical tradition, which makes a sharp distinction between humans and nature and claims
human superiority, has been criticized as anthropocentric since the late 1960s. Some philosophers argued
that non-human beings should also be regarded as objects of moral considerations, and thereby developed acertain amount of non-anthropocentric arguments in ﬁelds such as animal ethics and environmental ethics.
On the other hand, the way of anthropomorphizing non-human beings in various contexts has also been
criticized as a form of anthropocentrism. How could these two contrasting stances ‒ 1) on extending the realmof morality, which has traditionally been exclusively human, and 2) on discouraging the extension andprojection of human perspectives and values onto non-human entities ‒ somehow be reconciled? One of thepersuasive approaches is to evaluate how people interact with nature based on criteria that can be objectively
measured, such as the degree of the development of their nervous systems and their response patterns tostimuli. While this approach has several advantages, it simultaneously raises several issues to be considered.
One of them is that it seems to have abandoned the previous ambitions of environmental ethics to make moral

23

evaluations of interactions with non-sentient organisms and ecosystems, and instead regarded them as mere
resources and concerned only the question of environmental justice, namely, whether they are equitably
distributed among humans. One could certainly assert that the old ambitions of environmental ethics wereout of dated, and philosophers should concentrate their attention on problems of environmental justice. Is
that, however, a promising way of reconciliating the opposed stances? The paper is to discusses, instead ofenvironmental justice, the possibility of animistic ethics for developing broader moral relationships withnature and artifacts, with reference to the history of yokai, namely, spirits in Japanese folklore.

Motohiro Kumasaka is an associate professor of Applied Ethics at Tokushima University in Japan since 2013.

His research interests lie primarily in the areas of animal ethics, food ethics, and especially environmental
ethics/philosophy. His works deal with issues of environmental justice, environmental virtue, andcomparative environmental ethics. Kumasaka earned his PhD and MA in social studies from Hitotsubahi
University, Tokyo, and his BA in literature from Waseda University, Tokyo. He has conducted research at the
University of Tübingen in Germany (2006-2009) and in Taiwan (2011-2013). He also has taught courses inJapanese history, modern Japanese culture and society and given Japanese studies Seminars at National
Kaohsiung University in Taiwan (2012-2013).
Hemispherical portraitsbyAkiko Nakayama, individual, JapanI am a visual artist who uses paints, a camera, and video equipment to create paintings called "alive paintings."
In response to this year's theme of "Nature, Spirituality, and Culture," I would like to introduce my recent
installation work, "hemispherical portraits," and share my thoughts on its production. Although the shape of
bubbles and the ﬂow of paint that rises inside the bubble ﬁlm are based on physical phenomena. By
positioning them as portraits and depicting them as people, I realize that even within the order of physicallaws, each has its individuality that is impossible to change. And there's something spirituality about it feelingspecial. I want to talk about a question that came up to me while referring to the video in the exhibition record.

Akiko Nakayama (JP) (b. in 1988) is a painter who depicts the beauty of conveying energy metamorphosis

through several media such as installation, videos, and performance. She brings the painting to life bycombining the energy of movement and the vibrance of colors. Called “Alive Painting.” She depicts theresonance between shapes and textures using diﬀerent types of liquids, each with a unique characteristic.
Various mediums and colors are blended, and the works that change lively are like improvisational poetry.
MULTIPLICA Festival Luxembourg(2023), JAX festival Riyadh(2022), MUTEK Montreal (2019), Tokyo
2020 Olympic Games Closing Ceremony.

24http://akiko.co.jp
Mind-less dancing: The no-mind principle and indigenous epistemology of performanceby
Narcisa Paredes-Canilao, University of the Philippines Baguio (ret Professor of Philosophy), The
Philippines
In this paper under the general rubric of aesthetics or philosophy and dance, I suggest an indigenous
epistemology of performance drawn from the principle of no-mind in Asian mystical systems, moreparticularly as it has evolved in Taoist and Zen texts. Further, I suggest, this proposal is a re-mediation ofcurrent approaches in analyzing indigenous dance under the lenses of phenomenology and embodimentphilosophy, which betray their Western humanist and dualist ontologies, ontologies that may result in
misrepresentation and misunderstanding of indigenous knowledges. I build up instead a case for an
epistemology of dance that is more friendly to the notion of practical vis-à-vis propositional knowledge
originally proposed by Gilbert Ryleʼs Concept of Mind, an onto-epistemological approach paralleled in thenotion of no-mind in Taoist and Zen literature.
The paperʼs proposal for no-mind, or mindless dancing unfolds in three parts: Part 1 indicatesparallels between descriptions of indigenous knowledges (ethno-epistemology) as know-how, on the one
hand, and Ryleʼs delineation of knowing-how (practical knowledge) vis-à-vis knowing-that (propositional
knowledge) in light of his demolition of the intellectualist fallacy. Part 2 explores resemblances of Ryleʼs antiintellectualism with selected Taoist and Zen texts, at the same time uncovering the resemblances of theironto-epistemological assumptions. Part 3 concludes with reﬂections on a productive interchange between
analytic and indigenous epistemologies of performance.

Narcisa Paredes-Canilao was Professor of Philosophy at the College of Social Sciences UP Baguio before

retiring in 2017 January. At the same institution, she was subsequently appointed Professorial Lecturer in MS
CARE (Conservation and Restoration), MA SDS (Social and Development Studies), and Ph.D. in Indigenous
Studies since 2018. She has authored and co-authored several publications, delivered papers in conferences,and served in local and international editorial/advisory boards, such as Philosophia an International Journal
in Philosophy since 2004 to date, and Journal of Multicultural Discourses 2005-2023.
The Heart-mind as a Field: Cultivation, Spirituality and Nature in Japanese Philosophy

byRoman PAȘCA, Akita University, Japan
There is an enormous amount of evidence that humankind is currently facing an almost irreversible

25environmental crisis. Scientists from diﬀerent disciplines and ﬁelds are trying to ﬁnd solutions to this crisis,
to trace its development and to propose sensible ways of dealing with its consequences. Philosophers havealso begun reﬂecting on the environmental crisis in an attempt to understand its enjeu and its consequences
for the way in which we as human beings are in the world. There are actually voices who have started calling
this an existential crisis. I share these concerns, and this is in fact the starting point for my research.
In my presentation, I propose a reexamination of early modern Japanese philosophy in an attempt
to bring forth new perspectives based on concepts and notions from diﬀerent intellectual traditions.
Speciﬁcally, I will focus on two Edo period thinkers - Andō Shōeki 安藤昌益 (1703-1762) and Ninomiya
Sontoku ⼆宮尊徳 (1787-1856) - and on the way in which they construct their own, original lexicon in order
to explain and deal with the complexities of Nature, thus challenging the dominant currents in the intellectual
landscape of the time and forcing the limits of language. I will show how these two philosophers, discontent
with the status quo, attempt to create their own terminology of Nature, and highlight how this terminology
can provide us with hints that might help us reassess our relationship with the environment in the context ofthe current global crisis.

Roman PAŞCA is an Associate Professor at Akita Universityʼs Faculty of Education and Human Studies, andvice president of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy. His current research focuses on the relation
between nature and human beings in Japanese philosophy from the perspective of environmental ethics.

Doxastic Transformation and Transformative Experiences That Cause Epistemic Conversions

by
Kunimasa Sato, Ibaraki University, Japan
Paul (2014) characterizes transformative experiences as consisting of epistemic and personal transformations.
Epistemic transformation concerns acquiring “what it is like” knowledge̶meaning the knowledge of what it
is like to have a speciﬁc experience, such as comprehending the emotional bond that can be built with animals
by having a pet dog. Conversely, personal transformation involves changing oneʼs core values, thereby altering
who one will be, such as an experience that gives one a positive attitude about living with animals. However,as Kind (2020) suggests, it remains unclear in what sense acquiring “what it is like” knowledge can transform
one epistemically rather than simply aﬀording one a singular, albeit distinctive, piece of knowledge.
This paper explores epistemic transformativeness in light of changes in oneʼs doxastic attitudes(belief/disbelief/suspension), the content of which one has deeply committed. I call this experience “doxastictransformation” and argue that an experience can be doxastically and personally transformative when it has
the normative power of subjecting one to the revision of a formerly committed belief. For instance, theexperience of living with animals could make one abandon the disbelief that having a pet is a valuable use of

26

time and, instead, come to believe that one can gain real pleasure from an emotional bond with animals.
The argument will advance as follows. First, I critique Paulʼs notion of epistemic transformation andpropose doxastic transformation. Second, I demonstrate that doxastic transformation involves the personaltransformation of a currently valued epistemic self, which I call an “epistemic conversion.” Third, I argue thatsuch transformative experiences have the normative power of subjecting one to deeply committed belief
revision, which can occur involitionally, such as with the experience of “aspect change” in oneʼs way ofrepresenting the world.

Kunimasa Sato is an associate professor at Ibaraki University in Japan. He hold a Ph.D in philosophy, and his

research centers on epistemic injustice and transformative experiences. He has published several papers in
Episteme, Informal logic, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Tetsugaku: International Journal of thePhilosophical Association of Japan, etc.
Strange VisitorsbyHannes Schumacher, Chaosmos ∞, Greece
Set in an utopian/dystopian future after a global calamity, STRANGE VISITORS explores the potential of
non-human agency in respect of the environmental crisis. A surrealist and dream-like sound & landscapetranscending the anthropocentric notions of reality and love.

Hannes Schumacher: Having studied all around the world, Hannes Schumacher works at the threshold

between philosophy and art focusing on multispecies agency, chaos theory and global mysticism. He has
published widely on cross-cultural philosophy and contemporary art; his recent article “Aﬃrmative Nirvāṇa:Cross-cultural encounters between Nāgārjuna and Gilles Deleuze” is forthcoming in Global Conversations.
Hannes is the founder of the Berlin-based publisher Freigeist Verlag, co-founder of the grassroots art space
Chaosmos ∞ in Athens and member of the art collective Vandaloop.

Environmentalism and the Sublime

byLucas Scripter, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
Kant and Schopenhauer both held that sublime aesthetic experiences possessed ethical signiﬁcance, albeit indiﬀerent ways. While today writers are rightfully hesitant to take on the substantial theoretical commitments
on which these ethical readings of the sublime rest, several philosophers have thought that experiences of the27sublime might be mobilized for and allied with the cause of environmental protection. While I appreciate thedesire to tap into aesthetic experiences to motivate environmental protection, I will argue that we should be
skeptical of whether sublime experiences as such are useful in motivating pro-environmental causes. Morespeciﬁcally, I will address three prominent arguments given in support of the claim that sublime experience
may play a positive role for environmentalism and argue that none provides compelling reasons to positively
link the sublime and pro-environmental concerns or narratives. Moreover, I go on to oﬀer a further argumentthat appealing to the sublime for protecting the environment suﬀers from internal incoherence as the featuresof sublime experience are not well aligned with experiences of ecological fragility and the capacity for positive
human intervention. Despite this critique, I remain optimistic that some aesthetic experiences have thepotential to do what the sublime cannot. I end by exploring those that may be more suitably aligned withmotivating ecological concern.

Dr. Lucas Scripter is a teaching fellow in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at The Hong Kong

Polytechnic University. His research interests are in ethics and aesthetics. His work has appeared in Ratio,
Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, AI and Society, Science and Engineering Ethics, International
Philosophical Quarterly, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and The Polish Journal of Aesthetics.
Home Away from Home: Migrant Culture and Allochthonous Nature

by
Ve-Yin Tee, Nanzan University, Japan
It is hard not to travel, even if we know the opportunity cost of the journeys we take is more environmental
destruction. If it is impossible not to go anywhere, then at the very least we should not travel 'to get back tonature'. As American ecologist Aldo Leopold's ʻA Sand County Almanacʼ (1949) lays out in no uncertain
terms, the most helpful thing his fellow Americans can do for the nature they feel such an 'appetite andaltruism' for is simply to stay home. The issue he takes is more than just the modern dependence of 'outdoor
recreation' on motorised transport, but also the unthinking rejection of the meaning and beauty that exist in
their own backyard: 'The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods'. Most of us live in thecity, and those of us who do often come from somewhere else. Amy Levy's 'A London Plane-Tree' (1889)
draws connections between the poetical persona and the only tree that is still green on the town square, 'theplane-tree' which does not 'droop and pine for country air'. Levy, whose ancestors had arrived in England in
the eighteenth century, was the ﬁrst Jewish woman at Newnham College, which together with Girton College,
were notoriously breeding grounds for the New Woman. As a thoroughly acculturated Londoner, she lived
almost all her life in the Bloomsbury area. Literary scholars have focused on her Jewish identity and lesbianism,
but there are many facets to her distinctiveness including her skepticism of Zionism and her explicit request
to be cremated: she became in fact the ﬁrst Jewish woman to be cremated in England. The London plane was28

ﬁrst discovered in Vauxhall Gardens in the mid-seventeenth century, a hybrid of an oriental plane andAmerican sycamore which had been planted in close proximity to each other. It was cultivated extensively inVictorian times due to its ability to weather atmospheric pollution and root compaction. Levy's poeticalcelebration of human and nonhuman newcomers is all the more important in the context of the enfolding
environmental catastrophe when more of us need to accept the city as our home, our recreation and ﬁnal
destination: neither the persona nor the London plane-tree see any reason to be anywhere else.

Ve-Yin Tee is associate professor with the department of British and American Studies, Nanzan University.

His most recent publication is *Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire* (2022), an
edited collection of essays for Edinburgh University Press. Basically interested in alternative and marginal
perspectives on the environment, he is currently looking at eighteenth-century British landscape garden
poetry and contemporary Japanese steampunk sculpture on marine life.
Ted Hughes and Nature: the Goddess of Complete Being and the Remains of Elmet

by
Fiona Tomkinson, Nagoya University, Japan
This presentation will attempt to give an overview of Ted Hughesʼ ongoing spiritual engagement with naturein his poetry and prose writings.
I would like to isolate four diﬀerent, though not mutually exclusive, ways in which Hughes gives a voice tonature in his poetry: ﬁrstly, through a version of the Wordsworthian spot of time as seen in early poems suchas ʻHorsesʼ, where nature is in a sense captured and contained by imagination and memory; secondly, throughattempts to come to terms with the violence of nature, already present in early poems such as “Thrushes” andepitomized in the volume Crow; thirdly, through mythic presentations of the Goddess of Complete Being,
the deity which takes centre stage in Hughesʼ work on Shakespeare, and which he saw as having being
dethroned by the Protestant Reformation. Fourthly and ﬁnally, I will focus on a lesser-known aspect of hiswork, the presentation of particular English landscapes in terms of myth, nature and history, which we ﬁnd
in the works of his middle period, in particular Remains of Elmet (1979), which celebrates the area ofYorkshire which was once part of the ancient Celtic kingdom of Elmet. I try to reconstruct something of what
Elmet meant to Hughes and to show how foregrounding this work suggests a reading of his oeuvre in termsof a dialectic between the perception of landscape as remnant and absence and the vision of Nature ascompleteness.

Dr. Fiona Tomkinson is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University,where she has taught since April 2017. She also teaches part-time at Nanzan University. Prior to that, she
lectured in the English Department at Yeditepe University, Istanbul (1997-2017), and also gave occasional

29

Philosophy classes at Yeditepe and Boğaziçi Universities. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Language andLiterature from Oxford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. She has
published widely in the areas of literature and philosophy, and is currently researching the inﬂuence of Central
and East Asian religion, philosophy and mythology on British authors of the twentieth century, including Iris
Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell and Ted Hughes. Email: fgtomkinson@yahoo.co.uk
Slowing Down in the Age of Involution: A Case Study of the Black Box Spaceby
Tsirogianni Stavroula, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
Amidst the pervasive competition and systemic pressures prevalent in China's education and job market,
urban youth contend with phenomena such as "lying ﬂat" and "involution," engendering feelings of isolationand powerlessness. These responses to prevailing narratives of success rooted in eﬃciency, productivity, andacceleration, raise spiritual questions about hope and how we imagine the future. In light of these questions,this paper takes as a case study the 'Black Box' project, a student-driven initiative at the Chinese Universityof Hong Kong Shenzhen, which serves as an example of how participatory methodologies may open spaces
for imagining otherwise (Olufemi, 2021). Drawing inspiration from the tenets of community psychology andaesthetic philosophy, as well as principles of commoning, preﬁguration, and speculative design, the project
employs sensorial and storytelling methodologies across two distinct realms: one fostering individual
reﬂection and contemplation, and the other facilitating collective exchange. Opening the Black Box is acollective endeavor aimed at bringing students in correspondence with each other and the world (Ingold,
2000), and empowering them to imagine otherwise. In our presentation, we would like to delve into thetemporal, sensory, and spatial conditions we tried to create within the Black Box to cultivate 'slow' and 'nonlinear' contemplations on history and time as dialogic and embodied experiences. Our endeavor was to carveout a private/public space that transcends mere escapism or the pursuit of 'positive energy', instead fostering
an atmospheric ambiance conducive to expanding our 'attentionality' towards alternative temporalities,
processes, relationships, and struggles. We seek to share the challenges encountered and the process ofcultivating practices of hope and ʻslownessʼ (Koepnick 2014) as a means of imagining history, ourselves, andthe world as ever in creation.

Tsirogianni Stavroula: After completing my B.Sc. in Psychology at the National Capodestrian University ofAthens in Greece, I then moved to the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK for my
M.Sc. and Ph.D. Life brought me to China where I currently work as an associate professor in teaching
Applied Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen. I am passionate by the use of social
sciences, humanities, arts, and participatory methods to catalyze transformative shifts in our habits of mind
and behaviors, ultimately fostering a more socially just, sustainable, and harmonious world. As an educator

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and a scholar, my praxis is rooted in the exploration of psycho-social and policy questions related to social
values, subjectivities, and the socio-cognitive mechanisms involved in community-driven visions of the futureand social change. This exploration takes place within the context of four key areas: (1) Chinese youth andsocial imagination (2) community development (3) science- society relations and (4) migration and identity.
Nature as “The Holy” in HeideggerʼsInterpretation of a Hölderlinʼs Hymn “As if it is a Day of

Festival…” ――An Approach to the Fundamental Eco-logy Baced on the Holiness of Natureby
Keiko Ueda, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan,
When considering the relationship between humans and nature, we can identify at least three attitudes ofhumankind toward nature. The ﬁrst attitude is based on humanʼs proﬁt- oriented thinking. People who holdthis viewpoint regard nature as a useful stockpile of materials right in front of us almost like gifts or presents,from which we can make our foods, clothes, houses, and other life-sustaining goods. This attitude is notalways harmful to nature, but a relentless pursuit of human proﬁts endangers the long-time survival of nature,including the human being itself. The second attitude is that of ecologists who seek to protect nature fromdestruction. The third attidude is trying to hear and learn from nature, rather than making use of it or trying
to protect it. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Kumagusu Minakata are example of philosophers, poets, andscientists who hold this viewpoint. This presentation will explore the third attitude through Heideggerʼsinterpretation of Hörderlinʼs hymn, “as if it is a day of festival…”
First, we attempt to clarify the structure of Heideggerʼs own way of thinking on “Being” and “Truthof Being” as the revelation of Being through Da-sein and the corresponding role of a poet who accepts thewords of the Holy and conveys them for his people. Second, we examine Heideggerʼs interpretation of natureas Φύσιςʼ, and how it is related to “nature” in Hölderlinʼs hymn. Third, we look at the meaning of “Holy”,
which is deﬁned by words like “omnipresent” (allgegenwärtig), “liveliness” (allebendige), and “divine beauty”(gottlich shöne).

Keiko Ueda: Part-time lecturer of modern philosophy at Tokyo Metropolitan Unibersity (2015-2024),

Doctorʼs Degree in Literature, Tokyo Metropolitan University (2014), Masterʼs Degree in Literature, Tokyo,
Metropolitan University (2011), Bachelorʼs Degree in Theology, Sophia University (2008), Bachelorʼs
Degree in Forestry, University of Tokyo (1989)
Topological Existential Engagements: Modern Local Identity and Postmodern Performativity

by
Ionut Untea, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

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The age-old “nature vs. nurture” debate has recently reached a new stage in the context of the treatment of
the inﬂuence of the characteristics of a speciﬁc geographical space or cultural place on the coherent
development of individuals. Malabou has emphasized that epigenetics, the study of the changes in thephenotype of individuals under the inﬂuence of their environment, points toward an “immediate biologicaltranslation” in the sense that the very “material shape of our brain” may be modiﬁed under the inﬂuence of“education, experiences, the encounters we make” (Malabou et al. 2017). But what are the odds of applying
this dimension to the particular discussion of the inﬂuence of the geographical and cultural milieu to the very
quality of living oneʼs identity? In short, what is the role of “place” considered as an “ontological structure,”or “event” happening in a certain “space” and time (Malpas 2022, 1,9)? By associating “place” with “home,”or “the familiar,” Scruton took this debate in a conservative direction (2015), and has directly inﬂuenced thecontent of the Paris Statement, a conservative view of Europe as a place of Christian civilization (2017), which
he signed, alongside other intellectuals (e.g. Rémi Brague, Pierre Manent, Lánczi András, Dalmacio Negro
Pavón). Nonetheless, can an approach involving the inﬂuence of the place go beyond an approach thatremains suspicious to accepting migrants? I attempt to go beyond any polarizing approach, by proposing totake as a key of interpretation the notion of performance. It is my hope that a better focus on theperformativity of identity may help both conservative and progressive approaches reach reconciliation bygetting closer to the very existential dimension of the engagement with the phenomenological potential of
the place and its external expressions (performances) that give contours, color and feeling to an individualʼsor a groupʼs attachment to a certain place. Historically, this attachment has been channeled, especially in themodern times, under the authority of the rising nation-state, for an attachment for “patria,” and later for“nation.” Still, one should not forget that the roots of “patria” (fatherland) may be found in Octavian Augustusʼ
act of conquering a certain land and transforming it into a province, symbolically represented as an act of
raping-as-civilizing (Strijdom 2015). So, the postmodern engagement with our patriotic feelings or national
identty needs to take into consideration the very aspect of the violence by which we have been forced into theengagement with, and allegiance for our (politically shaped) identities (in which we only “represent” rather
than “perform” our attachment to a place). Hence it is also important to take into account Butlerʼs “radical
performativity of identity” in the sense that identities are not given, but constructed agonistically, throughsocial signiﬁers (Cooke on Butler, 2006; Butler 2000). From this perspective, it may be enquired whether
performativity connected with the semiotic potential of a place (e.g. its primary iconicity, and latersymbolism) oﬀers a practical support for philosophy in the direction of the formulation of an ethos ofwholeness that would make emerge more inclusive cultural and collective identities. The semioticians John
Deely and Susan Petrilly, and the philosophers of intercultural relations Roger T. Ames and Alphonso Lingis
have gone in this direction. I will also use their views to emphasize the material and local cultural inﬂuenceson the very wholeness of an identity without the appeal to a political national allegiance, but opened rather
toward transcultural and intercultural dimensions of performativity of identity.

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Ionut Untea, PhD, Professor of Western Philosophy at Southeast University, Nanjing, China. Since March

2024, Dr. Untea is also editor of the “Ethical Issues in Public Philosophy” series of the American Philosophical
Association (APA) blog. In 2022-2023, Dr. Untea has been a fellow-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss
Solitude, Stuttgart. In 2021 he has been a stipendiary Visiting Professor in Cultural Semiotics at the
University of Bari Aldo Moro. In 2014-2015 he has been a postdoctoral fellow in Interfaith Dialogue at the
University of Geneva. Dr. Untea has obtained his French doctorate at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes(Religions and Systems of Thought), Paris.
Enlightenmentʼs “Good Mourning”: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment

byFelix S. H. Yeung, University of Essex, UK
Adorno and Horkheimerʼs Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that (Western) Enlightenment reason
originates from and propagates the fear of nature. The perceived need to preserve oneself against a fearful,alien nature drives enlightenment to render nature regular, predictable, and controllable. Subordinating
nature to reason is violent, as subjects implicated by this fearful project of ʻenlightenedʼ self-preservation areforced to repress their instincts, exploit nature, and persecute on social others perceived as threats to oneʼskind (Fascism).
I oﬀer a psychoanalytic reading of the Dialectic in this talk. While some interpreters of the Dialectic(e.g. Habermas and Honneth in the later Frankfurt School) accuse Adorno and Horkheimer of conﬂating thepsychological (self-relation), social (intersubjective relations), and objective/technical (subject-world/nature
relations), I argue that Dialecticʼs analysis of enlightenmentʼs fear converges with object-relations
psychoanalyst Melanie Kleinʼs description of paranoid anxieties. Reading the Enlightenment reason as an
instantiation of paranoia has three advantages:(i) it oﬀers a way of reading the account of Dialectic in seeing the Enlightenment as rooted in(psychologically-rooted) fear;(ii) it allows us to grapple with the psychodynamic challenges in overcoming the problems of our historicalpresent (including the rise of populism and the climate crisis).
(iii) it allows us to outline the necessary psychodynamic prerequisites for initiating eﬀective social change.
For Klein, the successful overcoming of paranoia requires the paranoid subject to painfully(“depressively”) accept an imperfect reality that is out of their control, and acknowledge their guilt inparanoically attacking imperfect-but-good objects. This paves the way for a genuine reconciliation with
objects. Kleinʼs proposal (echoing Adornoʼs and Horkheimerʼs call to reconcile with nature), applied to ourpresent, is a call for us to collectively mourn our phantasies of omnipotent, rationalist control, to become
responsible for the damages we have done to nature, our social others, and ultimately ourselves.

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Felix S. H. Yeung is a philosophy PhD candidate at the School of Philosophical, Historical andInterdisciplinary Studies, University of Essex, UK, and an aﬃliate of the Centre for Investigating
Contemporary Social Ills in Essex. He is currently a philosophy lecturer in Hong Kong with a research
specialization in the cultural theories of neoliberalism, critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and the ethics
of AI. His recent articles on AI and psychoanalysis appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the American
Philosophical Quarterly, AI and Society, and Constellations.
The Metaphor of Messiahʼs Chair from the Perspective of Modernity

byZhao Sikong, Institute of Philosophy, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, China
In her A Theory of Modernity, Agnes Heller writes, “We are sitting around the table of modernity. One cansee all chairs occupied by the things of the present (and the future of the present). … But one can also leave
one chair unoccupied. This chair waits for the Messiah. The Messiah might come or He might not come. Yet,
we will never know when He arrives or whether He arrives.” The metaphor of Messiahʼs chair is meant to
explain the diﬀerence between two propositions: one is unreﬂected postmodern consciousness which “doesnot leave an unoccupied chair ‒ there is no place here for the Messiah to come.” The other is the traditional
grand narratives which “believe in the false Messiah because they claim to know who (what) the Messiah isor, even worse, they claim to know what makes the Messiah arrive.”

Zhao Sikong, PhD, Full Professor. Her research interest is in Western Marxism, Neo-Marxism in Central andEastern Europe, Political theory and ideological trends of the transitional societies. PhD in philosophy at
Wuhan University, China (2007). Postdoctoral research at Fudan University, Shanghai. She has publishedarticles in Chinese and English and two books in Chinese about Budapest School, George Lukacs, politicaltrends after 1989 in Eastern Europe, ideology and morality changes in China. She has recently been a visiting
scholar at the University of Munich (LMU) as part of Historisches Seminar Abteilung für Geschichte Ost
und SüdostEuropas (2023).

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Colloquium Tips
1 Access
Train transfer information in Japan

https://world.jorudan.co.jp/mln/en/?sub_lang=ja
Directions to Nagano Station

https://www.u-nagano.ac.jp/en/about/access/From Tokyo to Nagano Station

1. From Narita Airport:
1.1 Shinkansen (Bullet Train):

You can take the Narita Express (N'EX) to Tokyo Station (about 1 hour) and transfer to the Hokuriku
Shinkansen.
The Shinkansen ride from Tokyo Station to Nagano Station takes about 90-100 minutes.
In this case, you will be using Japan Railway (JR) only, and all tickets can be purchased at JR stations at Narita
Terminal 1 or 2.
1.2 Keikyu Skyliner and Shinkansen Combo:

You can also take the Keikyu Line Skyliner from Narita Airport to Keikyu Ueno Station (about 40 minutes)
and transfer to the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Nagano Station.
1.3 Airport Limousine Bus:
Alternatively, you can take the Airport Limousine Bus directly from Narita Airport to Nagano Station. The
trip takes about 4-5 hours depending on traﬃc, but is cheaper than taking the train. Here are some bus
companies' websites in English.

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1.3.1 Alpico Bus

https://www.alpico.co.jp/en/timetable/nagano/r-tokyo-disney-resort-narita-airport-nagano/1.3.2 Willer Travel

https://willerexpress.com/en/bus_search/chiba/narita_airport/nagano/all/
2. From Haneda Airport:
2.1 Shinkansen (Bullet Train):

2.1.1 Monorail, Haneda via Mamamatsucho to Tokyo
You can take the Tokyo Monorail (From Haneda to Hamamatsucho, then change to JR Yamanote Line to go
to Tokyo Station)
2.1.2 Keikyu, Haneda via Shinagawa to Tokyo
Or you can take Keikyu Line from Haneda Airport to Shinagawa, then change to JR Yamanote Line or Keihin
Tohoku Line or Ueno Tokyo Line, to go to Tokyo Station) and transfer to the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Nagano
Station.
2.2 Airport Limousine Bus:

I could not ﬁnd an airport limousine bus from Haneda Airport to Nagano Station.
Please note: You can purchase Shinkansen ticket at the ticket counter or use automatic ticket machines ofeach stations. For Airport Limousine Bus, tickets can be purchased at the airport or booked online in advancefor added convenience.
Directions from Nagano Station36

2 How to pay
Credit cards are accepted in convenience stores and supermarkets. Currency exchange available at Tourist
Information

Centerin

NaganoStation

(For

more

info:

http://en.nagano-cvb.or.jp/modules/xelfinder/index.php/view/478/CurrencyExchangeMachine.pdf)

Colloquium Tips 3 (Hotels in Nagano)

3 Weather
Average temperature in June is between 20C to 26C during the day, between 10C to 18C during the night. 1stJune is just before the rainy season, but it may rain during 3 days of the colloquium.

4 Free Wi-Fi
Free Wi-Fi in Miwa Campus is available for the guests.
Nagano City Free Wi-Fi is available in following areas among others.

Around Nagano Station

Around Zenkoji Temple

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Togakushi Shrine Okusha (Approximately 1hr by bus from Nagano Station)

38