SINO-HELLENIC ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY
A Comparative Perspective on Environmental Thought in Early China and Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Thursday, 9 – Sunday, 12 December 2021
Online (Zoom)
Organized at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, Switzerland
The environmental crisis has been one of the most serious challenges of our age. It includes climate change, natural disasters, destabilised ecosystems, energy resource depletion, air, soil, and water pollution, animal abuse, and rapidly increasing population. All these issues we are facing today have raised certain doubts about the modern focus on high economic growth and consumption industries and technologies that have been developed since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in the 17-18th centuries. It is clear that the philosophy and sense of values which have urged great success in developed countries have also nonetheless left negative legacies. The question arises whether the implementation of environmental policies and technological countermeasures is enough to overcome them, or whether we also need to reflect on and change our mindset to coexist with nature and sustain the planet.
This workshop attempts to make a contribution to the current environmental interests from historical and cross-cultural perspectives by throwing fresh light on and comparing Greek and Chinese views of nature-human relations in antiquity. Those views are thought to have provided a fundamental epistemic framework of each of these two distinctive intellectual traditions. How did they observe and understand the natural world and its connection to human life? How did they construe natural events and phenomena? Did they find only instrumental values in non-human beings such as animals and plants? Did they notice any anthropogenic environmental degradation? If they did, what solution did they suggest? What did they think about the value of the natural world in general, and the role that humans play in it? To what extent are their ethics and politics anthropocentric, bio-centric, or cosmo-centric? Did they anticipate any ecological ideas or theories? Scholars in ethics and the histories and/or philosophies of science, especially biology, medicine, and cosmology, jointly discuss and propose answers to these questions.
SPEAKERS
(*Alphabetically by speaker’s surname. Titles subject to change.)
The Implications of Greek Ontology and Confucian “Zoetology” in Environmental Thinking
Roger T. Ames
(Peking University)
Plato’s Ecological Insights and His Environmental Ethics
J. Baird Callicott, Jorge Torres, and Jeffrey Gessas
(University of North Texas, University of Bern)
The Intrinsic Value of the Living Natural World according to Aristotle and It’s Relation to Contemporary Environmental Ethics
Sophia Connell
(Birkbeck, University of London)
The Stoic Contribution to Environmental Ethics
Christopher Gill
(University of Exeter)
A Little Bestiary of the Zhuangzi
Christoph Harbsmeier
(University of Oslo)
The Seasonality of the Emotions in Chinese Medicine
Elisabeth Hsu
(University of Oxford)
Introduction
Richard King
(University of Bern)
Aristotle on Winds That Impregnate
Mariska Leunissen
(The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The Ethics of Vitality in the Zhuangzi
David Machek
(University of Bern)
Porous Bodies and Mobile Spirits: Rethinking Inner and Outer in Early China
Lisa Raphals
(University of California, Riverside)
Death is Not Only a Natural Thing … Discussing the Human-Nature-Relationship in the Zhuāng zǐ
Dennis Schilling
(Renmin University)
Early Chinese Thought and Its Environmental Misreadings
Roel Sterckx
(University of Cambridge)
Plato and Xunzi on the Role of Humans in the Cosmic Order
Yumi Suzuki
(University of Bern)
Medical Ecology in Hippocratic Medicine
Jorge Torres
(University of Bern)
Towards a Shared Beauty of Nature and Human
Guorong Yang
(East China Normal University)
INVITED DISCUSSANTS
Lea Cantor (University of Oxford)
Thomas Crone (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Alba Curry (University of California, Riverside)
Paul J. D’Ambrosio (East China Normal University)
Betegh Gábor (University of Cambridge)
Eric Hutton (University of Utah)
Lisa Indraccolo (Tallin University)
Karyn Lai (The University of New South Wales)
Liangjian Liu (East China Normal University)
Eric Nelson (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Francesca Puglia (University of Bern)
Marco Schori (University of Bern)
Winnie Sung (Nanyang Technology University)
Anders Sydskjør (University of Bern)
Claudia Zetta (The American College of Greece)
Jingyi Jenny Zhao (University of Cambridge)
Workshop Organising Team
Richard King, Yumi Suzuki, Jorge Torres, Francesca Puglia, Marco Schori
Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, Switzerland
This event is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
