This paper summarizes the author’s view and research on the concept of ‘Spiritual Humanism’ as a cross-cultural, historical heritage and theoretical framework for contemporary research in philosophy. It builds on comprehensive scholarship conducted over the last decades within a plurality of leading academic communities. It reflects the author’s commitment to include Chinese Philosophy and intellectual history within the international scholarly canon.

Taking as the background the discourses on friendship initiated by ancient Confucian and Greek philosophers, this article is focused on Xunzi’s perspective on friends by examining where and how he engages effectively ethical justifications of friendship. It will be argued that although Xunzi shows a kind of consistency with Confucius and Mencius, he comes to justify friendship through his own deliberations on human nature, on learning and education, and on the nature and function of human community. We will then proceed to examine the three perspectives Xunzi takes to highlight the ethical value of friends: friendship can be justified as it is needed in overcoming the inborn tendencies towards competition and strife; friendship can be justified because it is taken as supplementary to learning and education where friends are made equivalent to teachers in terms of moral influence and exemplary models; friendship can be justified because it is necessary for communities to function well and for individuals to lead a good life. We will finally come to the conclusion that these justifications constitute a unique ethics of friendship, which is not only significantly divergent from Greek propositions on friends but also differentiable, one way or another, from those proposed or presumed by Confucius and Mencius, and that the Xunzian philosophy of friendship is still an invaluable resource for us to draw on in the age of globalisation and de-globalisation.

This is the full and official text of the Presidential address delivered at the Opening ceremony of the 25th World Congress of Philosophy in Rome, Italy, on August 1st 2025.

This article is the text of a Plenary Session lecture presented at the World Congress of Philosophy, Rome, 2024. In it I argue that archaeological evidence shows that the first written philosophy originated not in Greece, India, or China as is commonly believed, but, in Sumer, Mesopotamia, approximately 2600 BCE. The author, En Hedu’Anna, was a woman. I describe four writings by her, distinguish her views from then-prevailing Mesopotamian views about a variety of philosophic concepts and topics. I discuss her contributions to cosmology, scientific method, philosophy of religion, and principles of justice, amongst others. I relate her views on the just treatment of prisoners of war, transgenderism, and other seemingly contemporary philosophical issues. Lastly, I summarize evidence for what today would be called her Curriculum Vitae and her Impact Factor.

At first glance, in Valla’s thinking, his ‘poor’ conception of metaphysics seems to contrast with his appreciation of the ‘richness’ of rhetoric, as opposed to the indigence of dialectic. However, poverty can be understood in two senses: on the one hand, it designates a lack, even an insufficiency; on the other, it expresses the search for something simple, even essential. So, poverty, like nakedness (Séris 2021)1, is a concept with an opposite polarity. What is elementary can therefore be fundamental. Consequently, how can we understand, in Valla’s thought, the link between the ontological reduction of all transcendentals to the res and the opulence of rhetoric? To try to answer this question, this paper seeks to analyze the ambivalent nature of the opposition between poverty and wealth in order to reinterpret it in the opposition between simplicity and complexity. It is not certain that gain will be found on the side that we would expect to find it.

Fernando Ortiz introduced his account of transculturation to replace Melville Herskovits’s notion of acculturation as a way of describing the historical contact between cultures. Ortiz understood the idea of acculturation to be promoting a kind of assimilationist model very different from what he witnessed in his native Cuba. Transculturation conforms neither to the model of cosmopolitanism promoted by Kant’s universal history, nor to the kind of multiculturalism that is rooted in Herder’s rival approach to history. Instead, it presents a concept of cultural contact and cultural transformation that highlights the way the material and economic conditions of social existence shape the institutions in which cultures more narrowly conceived are embedded and relate to each other. By bringing transculturation into dialogue with the idea of the porosity of cultures initially promoted in 1925 by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Naples, we find a way to free transculturation from Ortiz’s tendency to lapse into biological metaphors with the danger of retaining a reference to cultural purity that he would not endorse. Transculturation, thus revised, recommends itself as a term helpful for thinking about a world shaped by mass migration and the new technological forms of ever more rapid cultural exchange. Properly understood, it promotes a future where openness and sharing are valued over ownership and preservation.

Japan is the world’s largest producer of love simulation games, revealing a curious feature: these games, in theory, assign female players to the unique task of seducing a male character, but, in reality, they promote the establishment of a network of friendship between women. Love cannot be achieved if this network is not carefully woven both in play and in real life. Based on the analysis of this double dynamics, outwardly contradictory, I would like to advance the following hypothesis: that such games enable their users to ‘outsmart’ gender expectations. These games, called otome games, became popular in the context of a national panic related to the declining birthrate: they target the market of women who – living alone or with their parents – are held responsible for the future shortfall of the system. These new generations of women don’t start a family. They have no children. How do they manage to ward off exclusion and stigma? The study will focus on the strategies collectively devised to turn otome games into an identity-building tool, promoting friendship between players as a means of resistance against social norms.

The topic of ‘global Islam’ has become a prominent focus of discussion in both academic and journalistic writing, as well as in broader political discourse. Yet the cumulative effect of this abundance of commentary has been to render the term global Islam increasingly unclear. As a response to this predicament, this essay proposes a working definition of global Islam that may serve to clarify the object/s of study and, in turn, enable future research to make sense of how, where, and when the phenomena originated. Particular attention is given to the necessity of grappling with the plurality and diversity of Islamic practice worldwide, as well as to the practical analytical problems of scale. In this manner, a distinction is made between ‘global Islam’ and ‘world Islam’. Overall, the essay argues that ‘global Islam’ can serve as an analytically precise category for specific religious actors and organizations who operate in the networked places and specific timeframe of modern globalization.

In the Roman time, Azania and its capital Rhapta had cultural and economic connections with diverse civilizations of the world, including those in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, India, the Far East, and the deep interior of Africa. Information about Azania was first provided by the Romans – Pliny the Elder, Claudius Ptolemy, and sources such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Apart from the Romans, other people of the Middle East, including the Homerites or Himyarites, were found to have lived and traded in Azania. Pliny the Elder reported that Azanian received spices from the Far East and sent them to the Great Lakes’ region where they were ferried via the Nile to the Mediterranean basin. The Periplus also reported other exported and imported trade goods. Indian and Chinese records provided evidence of connections with Azania. The most recent evidence of these connections is archeological. Materials recovered include beads and ceramics from Rome, the Middle East, and India. Archeology of submerged Rhapta also uncovered architectural remains of Roman technology. Material remains from the deep interior of Africa have been found on the coast of Azania. Roman connections with the deep interior of Africa are believed to have created caravan routes that facilitated cultural and technological exchanges.

Utopia is nominally a ‘nowhere’ that is also, as Thomas More tells us, a ‘good’ place. Although there are competing cognate notions, the Greek description looms large in most accounts of utopia. The details of this ideal are so specified that utopic literature consists in a catalogue (and critique) of specifications. This essay draws attention to the fragrance attributed to Lucian’s ‘Isles of the Blest’ together with Ivan Illich’s attention to ‘atmosphere’ and to the aura and the nose along with Nietzsche’s emphasis on the sense of smell. Utopic suspicion is discussed as parallels are drawn with pragmatic critiques of utopia as inherently totalitarian along with the ‘good life’ in political theory and the programmatic default of techno-utopic fantasy. In the historical context of ‘conspiracy’ and the politics of living and breathing together in community, I conclude with Illich on pax and breath.

This essay considers the philosophy of Tommaso Campanella by examining it in light of a metaphysics conceived from the relationship between history, science, and experience. The desire to reform scientific knowledge beyond Aristotelian boundaries, integrating history and experience as the foundations of science, leaves Campanella’s philosophy still steeped in the logical distinctions between natural science and metaphysics. After all, Campanella positioned the entire philosophy of nature as an intermediate knowledge capable of uniting logic and metaphysics. Nevertheless, his metaphysics breathes the cultural atmosphere of early modernity, which, while referencing the past, looks towards a future still uncertain, balancing between ancient concepts and new meanings that will eventually be attributed to the vocabulary of modern metaphysical language.

Despite its extraordinary predictive power, quantum mechanics has been hailed as a paradoxical, self-contradictory theory of nature. How does it question the intelligibility of physical worldview? The wave-particle dualism, the incompatibility of physical quantities, the complementarity between the space-time description and the causal description of phenomena question key-notions of the traditional metaphysics, such as substance and cause, but they also call attention to the vital dialectical contrast between the continuous and the discrete, the infinite and the finite, consciousness and matter, and to the essential relational character of measuring, seeing, and knowing. Does quantum physics also question the Western way of thinking? The aim of this article is to show how quantum monadology not only breathes new life into Leibniz’s and Nicholas of Cusa’s monads, but also echoes Nishida’s ‘dialectical monadology’ and orients our gaze towards a metaphysics of universal harmony, i.e., a metaphysics of the dialectical universal or a metaphysics of indeterminacy.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, globalization has become a central theme in the humanities. The increasing globalization of discourses in the humanities can already be observed in the 20th century. Within philosophy, the globalization of the thematic framework has been promoted in particular by the World Congresses of Philosophy since 1900. Stimulated by these developments, histories of different philosophies have emerged worldwide in many different languages. In addition, global histories of philosophy have increasingly been written since the beginning of the 21st century. This paper concludes by presenting the approach of a transformative phenomenology as a way of dealing with this thematic diversity in philosophy today.

This paper explains why and how we should introduce birth into the canon of subjects explored by philosophy. It focuses on the epistemology of birth, namely, on the nature, origin, and limits of the knowledge produced by and/or related to giving birth. The paper provides a view on the philosophy of birth, i.e., an approach to construct a new logos for genos.

Core moral concepts in Confucianism, such as benevolence, righteousness, and faithfulness, are often so vague that in moral teachings one must rely on intuitive understanding aided by metaphor and etymology that illustrate them. In addition, case stories play a crucial role in clarifying these abstract moral concepts. Confucian ethics heavily depends on stories of wise men and exemplary figures who have been revered throughout Confucian history. In this paper, I will explore the role of examples in Confucian ethics, particularly within the context of moral education.

The unprecedented power of China and its cultural expansion are increasing the need to examine its hegemonic impact in the field of literature. The new concept of ‘sinophone’, inspired by postcolonial criticism, reveals vigorous protests against Mainland’s centrality by advocating Chinese Diaspora literature, which has been too long relegated to a peripheral status. This study seeks to reconsider such debates through investigations of historical reasons, ideological issues, and perspectives they have widened. The sinophone literature is thus set up as a creative space, denationalized as well as transnationalized. Denying both the weight of the matrix and the chimerical archipelago, it follows the poetics of relation, the intermixture, and the Open.

Is Nicholas of Cusa’s neglect of Aristotelian logic and a theory of substance that is both underlying and, at the same time, dependent on that logic sufficient to say that metaphysics disappears from his thought? The answer is, of course, in the negative. In the following, I will attempt to illustrate the characteristics of what could be called a metaphysics of mind rather than being, which is linked in Nicholas of Cusa’s writings both to mysticism and to a measuring theory. Metaphysica paupera, mathesis, meta-mathesis, are non-asseverative knowledge, linked to a problematic nature, insufficiency, movement, shadow, rather than to the solidity and density of ontology, recognizable in those fields in which the disproportion between mensura and mesuratum, i.e., between the infinite and the finite, is most evident.

This paper begins with specific articulations of ‘care’ by three prominent care theorists - Eva Kittay (1999), Joan Tronto (2013), and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) - to analyze aspects of the Covid-19 reality in the US and in India. The central concern is to explore whether a care analysis of the pandemic can initiate radically different imaginings of ‘living with’ in a post-Covid world. After examining some roadblocks to adopting the deeply relational nature of life that Covid-19 foregrounded, I explore whether our response to the crises contains an implicit self-refutation of entrenched neoliberal frameworks based on atomized selfhood, individualized responsibility, and the values of market fundamentalism.