In 2004, the journal Diogenes devoted its Issue 208 to “Myths and Gender”, predominantly focused on the figures incarnating the in-between, from the androgyne to the third sex. The current issue represents an extension of this theme, but, if its title recalls the term “gender” - the choice of English translating the strangeness to which it seems condemned in France - it is to enunciate it less in relation to myths than to the theoretical mode.

This paper deals with the question whether muslims who live in the West might be considered as the future outsiders of the Islamic world. It suggests that the muslims of the West might become those through whom, in a totally unexpected and unforeseen fashion, could come the progress – even the salvation – of an Islamic civilization that the author considers as currently locked into a state of moral, social, intellectual and spiritual stagnation. To this effect, the author focuses mainly on the notion of individual and of human rights, and discusses how the Islamic and Western traditions might be brought together. The concept of God, in its relation to the human, plays here an essential role, which is discussed with reference, among others, to the work of mohammad Iqbal.

What I am planning to write for Diogenes is an essay of elucidating the original meaning of “kokoro” in ancient Japanese.

“Kokoro” is regarded as corresponding to mind in English; for example, we call philosophy of mind “philosophy of kokoro”. We can compare English with French in order to notice the problem concerning this notion. While we say in English “mind-body problem”, in French we call the problem (or rather “l’union”) of “l’âme et du corps”. But there are many cases where “mind” is translated with “l’esprit”. We can already ask the question from where comes this ambiguity. Much the more in Japanese.

I should explain how the philosophical terms are constructed in Japanese. When we say philosophy tout court in Japan, that means the Western philosophy or philosophy in the Western style. Most of its technical terms were made as translation from the Western languages, and when we dare to translate the Western words, the most usual way is to use Chinese characters that are ideograms. In ordinary Japanese, terms originating from Chinese are mixed into its vocabulary. We feel certain “difference” in such words, especially in technical terms borrowed from the Western languages: such is the case of philosophical terms. But “kokoro” is not such a translated word, but an original Japanese word. So personally I feel that this word sounds slightly strange as a philosophical term.

That is the motive of this paper of mine: I wish to conceive the original meaning of “kokoro” in its originating stage. I consult mainly Manyô-shû, ancient anthology of poem established about the mid 8th Century.

This paper traces the history of uses of the word “gender”. It suggests that though “gender” has been recuperated and become commonplace, many issues persist around the way “women” and “men”, and the power relations between them, are defined and are evolving. Provided it still allows us to question the meanings attached to the sexes, how they are established and in what contexts, gender remains a useful, because critical, analytical category.

This paper discusses the two representative philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe from the perspective of process theology and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue in Japan.

The first chapter explicates Nishida’s concept of “pure experience” in comparison with William James’ radical empiricism and with Kant’s dualism of sense and reason. Pure experience in Nishida’s sense is neither a passive reception of objective sense-data given before subjective mental operations, nor the raw material of experience which must be given “form” by experiencing subject. It is nothing but metaphysically ultimate activity from which both the experiencing subject and the whole range of the experienced objects from sense-perception to intellectual intuition emerge as its self-unfolding.

The second and third chapters discuss the two key concepts of process theology, “concrescence” and “the extensive continuum” with a special reference to the Mahayana Buddhist concept of “emptiness (sunyata)” and “dependent arising (pratityasamutpada)”. Nishida’s tripartite concept of topos, i.e. a topos of relative being, a topos of relative nothingness, and the topos of absolute nothingness will be applied to process theology in order to explicate the relation of two ultimates in Whitehead’s metaphysics, i.e. the relation of God as the religious ultimate to creativity as the metaphysical ultimate.

The fourth and fifth chapters discuss Hajime Tanabe as a critical successor of Nishida’s philosophy of Nothingness. Tanabe is more akin to Whitehead than to Nishida in that Tanabe reformulates Nishida’s concept of Nothingness from the temporal perspective of a finite human existence related essentially to “species” or “society” in the historical world. Tanabe transforms the unity of contradictories in the logic of topos into the contrasted opposites in the historical process of becoming, which involves novelty and discontinuous leaps at points of historical crisis. For him history has become “the overall Koan” in which the metaphysical topology of static being is to be superseded by the innovative principle of nothingness in the historical world.

This paper tries to show to what extent it is possible to make the democratic germs inherent to the arab-muslim tradition fruitful. To this effect, a double scheme is employed. The author argues first in favour of a re-appropriation of a particular Western legacy now largely occulted, that is, the Roman Republic. Then, she defends a specific vision of postmodern democracy as it appears, more or less explicitly, in some of John Rawls’ and Jurgen habermas’ writings. It appears, then, that inasmuch as some key concepts are amended and thick-skinned prejudices dismissed, it will be possible to highlight the conditions and compromises necessary for muslims to contribute to the building of a global concept of democracy.

Giovanni Puglisi presents here the theoretical and concrete context in which the Unesco Day of Philosophy took place in 2008 in Palermo, Italy. He insists on the importance for Unesco to publicly discuss issues that constitute the dialogical essence of our time, and argues that Unesco would not survive a loss of its capacity to carry out public reflection. Rights and Power, the general theme of the Palermo Day of Philosophy, appears as a very central issue for a global world, where the dynamic between formal law and social and cultural constraints need to be permanently redefined. Unesco is and must be committed to bringing together scholars, intellectuals, and other public actors of this crucial reflection.

This study reviews various discourses around female sexual mutilation from the perspective of the human and social sciences, and also current debates between supporters of the cultural argument and those defending the universality of human rights. An aside about the Dogon myth of world order recorded by Marcel Griaule in Dieu d’eau or Aristotle's philosophical discourse in the Reproduction of Animals is required in order to widen the debate and see its importance as regards the dignity of the human person. In Aristotle woman is a freak accident, she interrupts the circle that goes from man to man so that he can start off again. Woman is a “catastrophe” necessary to the exercise of the male genitalia; her body is naturally mutilated and incomplete. In the Dogon myth the clitoris rises up like a termite-hill, it is oversized and must be knocked down, that is, excised. Between excessive size, monstrousness and ugliness come discourses which have since time immemorial accompanied and justified wounding the female genitals. But today a medical type of discourse, which is widely accepted, is aiming to repair excised genitalia and give back to women the happiness of a recovered body. Thus we may ask what “woman's dignity” consists of and whether it is the same as the “dignity of the human person”.

Japanese feminist philosophy has in the last 15 years focused on the theme of‘ sexual slavery’, especially on the issue of ‘comfort women’. The issue of ‘comfort women’ was not only a highly charged social and political issue, but also the turning point in conceptualizing the category of ‘the other’ from the viewpoint of East Asian feminist philosophy. It enabled Asian women philosophers to rethink the feminine solidarity and also to create a new forum for a transnational feminist philosophy in East Asia. For this purpose of feminist philosophy in networking, a group of East Asian women philosopher is working together on the task of Asian philosophy of gender as well as on a new line in the philosophy of ‘the other’.

In my paper, I would like to describe the conceptual framework of this feminist philosophy in networking and want to try to redefine the concept of gender from East Asian feminist philosophy.

This paper discusses how it is possible to find, in the Islamic tradition, a universal concept of “humanity”. It insists on the concept of “ ummah” as a peculiar muslim way to define a comprehensive humanity, and try to point out its internal limits. It shows the communal implication of this concept and the ways it can, or cannot, be considered as constitutive of a we-group concept that may eventually lead to conflict and violence. It brings to the attention of the reader some historical examples, focusing, among others, on mohammad Iqbal’s contribution.

This article discusses the dynamic between modernization of Asian cultures and societies and the process of multi- or transculturalization that characterizes an increasingly globalized world. It discusses the concrete case of the Alliance of Civilizations, and studies the possible ways to combine specific Asian axiology with a democratic organization of society. It claims that modernization is not only a social process, but the result of an individual education, and argues in favor of a grow-ing network of civic society, calling for international development ethics and global governance as a resource for governments and citizens. It concludes that the more courses in the issues of international development are taught in those Asian universities that will accommodate them, the better. On the other hand, the concern with these issues should reach secondary education in every nation as awareness of both self and other is paramount to subjectivity.

This paper brings to the attention of the reader some examples of how the words of the Qur’an, when examined in their literal sense, appear to connect with languages or cultures other than those acknowledged by traditional muslim apologetics. as such, they may be echoing origins that these apologetics have dismissed from their discourse. In fact, whereas traditional exegesis has generally tended to limit the Qur’an exclusively to the arabic language as sufficient guarantee by itself of its authenticity, the words of the text reveal a linguistic and cultural multiplicity which demonstrates the richness of its roots. In pursuing this repression exerted on outside contextual influences, the author focuses on three avenues: the pre-Islamic culture of the nomadic arabs, the Judeo-Christian culture and the hellenic culture. Those languages which go wilfully unrecognized, those practices whose recollection is passed over, prove to be of great assistance to understanding the sense of certain verses of the Qur’an.

Japanese history is a part of the long history of Northeast Asia. Since Japan began to form a unified nation from the time of Shotoku-Taishi (AD. 574-622) in the early seventh century, it continued to cultivate a rather independent culture. In its long history, the most catastrophic era was the Asian-Pacific War in 1931-45, ending with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The recovery from the aftereffects and trauma of the War Japan has initiated is the topic I would like to write here as a problem of memory and reconciliation with other countries involved in the War.

In 2006, Prime Minister Jyun-ichiro Koizumi, when he worshiped at Yasukuni Shrine, spoke in the meeting of news reporters that “The freedom of the heart is protected by our Constitution, and cannot be violated by anyone.” It was completely unspeakable to me that Mr. Koizumi, in his official role as Prime Minister, made use of the Japanese Constitution for the purpose of defending his personal right to worship at Yasukuni Shrine. A half of the nation, however, accepted this way of speaking. As long as we Japanese insist on and are not liberated from Yasukuni Shrine, we cannot become reconciled and co-exist with other nations, because this shrine is seen as the symbol of the Japanese past militarism which was centered on the Emperor.

But the situation around Yasukuni becomes more complex if we go probe beneath the political dimension, because memory is always deeply connected with the problem of identity regard-less of whether it is personal or collective. For some conservative groups, the formation of modern Japan starts from the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which seeks to center the identity of the modern state in the Emperor, rather than in the democracy starting from the end of the War on August 15, 1945. The difference in the memory of the starting points of modern Japan between conservatives and others shapes the different identities in present-day Japan, sometimes becoming a hindrance to form a civil society. I will call this situation “Yasukuni fundamentalism” in today’s Japan.

The purpose of the present paper is to propose a way to overcome this Yasukuni fundamentalism by developing a public philosophy and by its application to today’s civil society.

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing “sex/gender arrangements”. A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually “queered” academic discourses by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated?

The UDHR posits a conjunction of dignity and rights as the basis of ‘‘freedom, justice and peace in the world’’. This paper distinguishes between the two, viewing human dignity itself as the ultimate - even though enigmatic - foundation of human rights. Although originally seen as under the purview of sovereign states (while still being international), human rights have travelled into the more amorphous territory of civil community. It is, indeed, now fashionable to address civil community (aka civil society) as both the locale for discussion of human rights and the provider of actors (aka NGOs) on the human rights stage. However, this well-meant move harbors a distancing from the centers of power, which should remain responsible and, more so, accountable for human rights. B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organization, is used as a case study and illustration of this problematic relation between civil community and political power.

The multiculturalism and multilingualism typical of Moroccan society not only act as a backdrop to women's participation in the public and political arena, but also provide a grid to analyse it. Upper-class women, whose level of education contrasted with very widespread illiteracy among the female population, were responsible for the birth of the modern feminist movement in Morocco in the 1940s. The heirs to historical figures who were prominent in building the nation, they fired the starting gun for women's emancipation. Moroccan women have struggled against colonialism and contributed to the progress of society. Their participation in politics is still limited mainly because of conservative ideas that stand in the way of their entry into political life.

All in all women's emancipation in Morocco has advanced since independence. Because of their fight women's associations, and democratic forces in general, succeeded in bringing about reform of the Mudawana (family code) in 2004. However the choice between modernity and tradition remains a big challenge.

This paper is devoted to an analysis of ma‘ruf ar-Rusafi’s work The Personality of Mohammed or the Elucidation of the Holy Enigma. While ar-Rusafi is traditionally known as a poet who combines great evocative power with a superb mastery of language and strict adherence to classical form, this canonical image is seriously complicated by the iconoclastic character of this book, completed in 1933 but unpublished until 2002. It totally rejects the orthodox theory of prophecy as passive transmission, and insists on the historic development behind orthodoxy. Rusafi puts forward a way of conceiving the Prophet’s mission that he considers more faithful to the sources and in greater conformity with the elementary requirements of reason. he proposes a “disenraptured” or “demythologized” reading of the Prophet’s life and work. The author considers ar-Rusafi’s book as the most serious assault on orthodoxy that has been launched on it from within in modern times.

In this article it is proposed to go beyond ontotheology, which has been seen as the start of totalitarian thought and totalitarianism. In order to do this and find the key to interpretation the author refers to narratology and Hayatology or Ehiyehlogy (a variety of Hebrew ontology). From the nar-ratological viewpoint he analyses and interpretes the following Old Testament texts: Abraham’s story and the narrative of the Exodus under the guidance of Moses.

By means of this narratological analysis the author identifies in these Old Testament texts Hebrew ontological thought, that is, Ehiyehlogy. He therefore sets out some features of the Hebrew being (hayâh and ehyeh) in the following respects:

1. i. it is an ecstatic becoming and differentiates;

2. ii. this ecstasy has an intentionality focused on the other;

3. iii. this intentionality tends towards creation of a community;

4. iv. intervention by such a being (hayâh or ehyeh) articulates time, the historical kairos;

5. v. this articulation takes the concrete form of an alliance;

6. vi. the Hebrew being acts through being incarnate in people (prophets, sages, writers who wrote for Abraham, Moses or others, etc.).

Taken together, these features of the being make up an ontology which has an open identity and is made manifest in the narrative identity that is not monopolistic but polyphonic, that is, in little stories or anonymous, marginal characters, or else people resisting totalitarianism.

This Ehiyehlogy is supported not only by studying the Hebrew text but also by Buddhist inspiration, which emphasizes the relativity aspect rather than the substantial one. Hence, by building up Ehiyehlogy the author looks onto overcoming the totalitarian nature of contemporary civilization and look for the possibility of coexistence.

This paper discusses crisis from the standpoint of philosophical ideas. It argues that philosophy, as a structure of our deep understanding of the world, has been derailed by metaphysics of things for a long time, and claims that a philosophical turn to a metaphysics of facts might be a useful tool to rethink the problems of the world. It considers ‘‘relational rationality’’ as a key theoretical feature to change human coexistence, and conceives coexistence as prior to individual existence. It finally discusses the relations between human duties or obligations and rights.