Hindu texts call into question our own gender conceptions; they tell us that desire for bisexual pleasure and the wish to belong to both sexes at the same time are very real, but unrealizable, except by those with magic gifts. Many myths bear witness to the existential perception of human beings as bisexual and to active bisexual transformations. Some may show the desire to be androgynous and, contrary to the dominant homophobic paradigm, present veiled images of a bisexuality fulfilled in happiness and satisfaction. The episode evoking Chudala as a mistress of initiation and some variants in the magical forests of Shiva and Parvati illustrate this carefree, joyous way of crossing the gender barrier.

Fengshui is a practice and skill whose origins go back to Chinese antiquity. It is about finding the best possible arrangement in space to position a grave or a habitation in such a way that human beings who have a link with that place might have success and happiness. The basic idea is that a good geomantic site will fill the distant ancestors with peace in their grave and that they will thus do everything to help their family. The text deals with the history of fengshui, its methods as well as its conception of nature.

There are several Africas; the continent does not have a single homogeneous reality. Instead we should talk of shifting territorialities. The crucial questions, when thinking about emergent humanisms, have to do with the exegesis of the political, and at its heart democracy, citizenship and the management of violence, which obstinately appears as a constant in the political experience in Africa. It operates as one of the political idioms at the very moment when democracy is becoming essential as a universal, unavoidable reference. The African state seems unable any longer to guarantee its citizens’ security. The human body is becoming an integral part of the territories where conflict is occurring. What is being challenged is the sovereignty of the state, which means that the symbolic construction of a people transforming the state into a nation state is no longer possible. So how can we imagine a space for interaction where collective issues are put up for discussion? The case of Côte d'Ivoire, the reform of the Family Code in Senegal, and the tragedy in Rwanda are examined. The author wishes to follow the perspective set out by Wiredu, the principle of compassionate impartiality, the principle on which moral universality is based and built up.

Early Buddhism was not interested in questions about existence and the nature of God, considering these unimportant in relation to the question of the release from earthly suffering which is at the heart of Buddhist soteriology. Later Buddhist thought considered theism incompatible with Buddhist doctrine, but at the same time Buddhism developed a dimension of devotion that resembled theistic faith. Conscious of their different religious heritage, Buddhist thinkers in more recent times have nevertheless embraced dialogue with monotheistic religions, emphasizing their common ethical preoccupations, while retaining the non-theistic viewpoint of traditional Buddhism.

The third sex, which for a long period of history meant the androgyne and the homosexual, took on a new sense around 1900, when it was applied to emancipated women, who were featured by novelists and analysed by psychiatrists. Assimilated with lesbians, ‘desexualized’ by their modern way of life, they were labelled ‘neuter’, worker bees in a hive-state where ‘female-male’ markers were tending to disappear. Neither men in sex, nor women in gender (at least according to traditional assumptions), they constituted a new ‘battalion’ which highlighted all the anxieties of the time: the involution of dimorphism, the threat of lack of differentiation and the ‘extinction of the race’. But for those who accepted the label, neuterdom evolved from a pejorative concept into an instrument of a kind of liberation and the strategic means to set up creative space cleared of sexual stigma, until political cooption, aware of the resurgence of a ‘superior species’, changed its meaning and tipped over into the worst sort of excess.

When town planning emerged at the end of the 19th century, its proponents did not envisage the city without nature. Some, such as Ebenezer Howard, believed the garden city would become the new face of the urban landscape, bringing together only the positive aspects of both city and country. Others, health experts and rationalists, advocated functional planning, where the ‘green space’ was part of the overall plan. And so nature was not forgotten. But what ‘nature’? A ‘nature’ external to the town-dweller, like an ornament or decoration? Something that enhanced the built environment and not the very condition of our existence as human beings? Behind the planners’ inclusion of ‘nature’ lie very different intentions, from one period to another and one culture to another. The globalized, standardized ‘nature’ that was subsequently part of marketing the city is just an image; whether wild or tamed, it is no longer localized, no longer a partner in our condition as denizens of the earth. Thierry Paquot examines these continuing processes of change.

The methods employed by structuralist anthropology in the European area to free lived Christianity from its categorization as a popular religion steeped in ‘pagan relics’ also facilitate the analytical description of social practices and rituals that in France are part of the anti-clerical struggle of the late 19th century. More than forms of philosophical or militant atheism, the spiritualist movements introduce ‘Science’ as a symbolic entity in order to revive learning of counter-empirical ideas at the heart of a mode of religious transmission that persists today and takes on board the demands of secular societies for religious pluralism.

The human race is defined in relation to the search for the meaning of life, but it is human beings’ search itself that constructs this meaning. As against the definition of the individual as a product of society (20th-century determinism) an integral being is sought in the intuition of Russian spirituality. Ethics is the foundation stone of everything: thought brings together within itself moral, artistic and ontological principles that help one to understand life at the level of personal participation. Between prosaic illuminism (which is the logical source of modern consumerism) and romantic poetry (which attempts to understand the ineffable nature of life), it can be argued that personal development and historical events are complementary. Life is tragic. Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche, when trying to understand the tragedy of human life (its meaninglessness), applied three form of ‘distancing’, and so bypassed suffering. Thus the meaning of life lies in the battles fought on behalf of great hopes in a world of suffering.

Of all Wagner's operas, the Tetralogy has a special status. Indeed, beyond the myth related by the plot, the four operas it comprises also contain the presentation of a myth of the origin of music and the total work of art. The latter is based on an androgynous myth uniting poetry and music, seen respectively as the incarnation of male and female principles, symbolized by the different characters - Siegfried, Brünnhilde, Fafner, Mime - who are all tied up with androgyny. The theme appears both in Wagner's theoretical writing penned around 1850 and between the lines of the libretto of the Ring, which concludes with the impossible reunification of the sexes on the Platonic model. Nevertheless, even if biological androgyny belongs to the world of utopia, the creative artist does have the opportunity to bring together the opera's two sexualized components, music and poetry, and thus produce the total work of art that Wagner aspired to.

For more than a century the shifts in western thought have witnessed: the death of God, the demise of political ideologies that appeared to have taken over from ‘divine’ values, and the solitude of the disoriented individual. The individual's malaise may be the symptom of a questioning of the very notion of being human. Adopting the critique of humanism introduced by Nietzsche, Sloterdijk highlights the fact that human beings may have escaped bestiality by the very means they use to tame animals to serve them. What should we say of what research currently allows us to do on human beings? Manipulation of the living has allowed us to glimpse the possibility of a factory for the human. The choices we shall have to make as to the future of the human remain above all political. The word ‘humanism’ is complex: there are two types of humanism. One thinks of the human as an essence. The second form considers that there is no human nature: we become human. The human world is open to creation, but fragile because it is placed under our responsibility.

The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the angel of death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo- Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world.

Chinese culture is distinguished among the world's other great traditions by the depth and intensity of its love for rock and stone. This enduring passion manifests itself both in the art of garden making, where rocks form the frame and the central focus of the classical Chinese garden, and also on a smaller scale, in the practice of collecting stones to be displayed on trays or on scholars’ desks indoors. This essay sketches a brief history of lithophilia in China, then adduces the most important philosophical presuppositions for it, and concludes by suggesting some implications for our experience of, and interactions with, the realm of stone and rock.

I speak of stones that have always lain out in the open or sleep in their lair and the dark night of the seam. They hold no interest for the archaeologist, artist or diamond-cutter. No one made palaces, statues, jewels from them; or dams, ramparts, tombs. They are neither useful nor famous. They do not sparkle in any ring, any diadem. They do not publicize lists of victories, laws of Empire, carved in ineffable characters. Neither boundaries nor memorials, yet exposed to the elements, but without honour or veneration, they are witnesses only to themselves.

The intention of this paper's title is not to position the notion of androgyny solely on the side of women writers, even though they are the most quoted. I have considered the phenomenon among both sexes, and the authors who ‘forgot’ their sex early on, in order to create. This ‘forgetting’ even seems to be the condition for genius. Indeed the androgyne, who is more an idea than a character, becomes for many writers the complete expression of that compulsory mixture of strength and grace without which art and its claims remain incomplete. In fact authors have showcased themselves and have certainly thrown the dice for their own lives by creating an androgynous character, since that character has very often been a pretext for finding themselves through words and poetry.

A dramatic image of death is reflected from a cycle of folktales (Aarne-Thompson Types 505 to 508) in which a man dying in debt is refused burial, until the hero of the tale pays the ransom and fulfills the ancestral funeral ritual. Then the tale may develop into a further sequence centred on the Grateful Dead. The texts alluded to here come from both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean area, and from ancient and modern tales.

John Gray argues that the modern conception of man is common for all variants of the liberal tradition. The version of liberalism which is defended in this paper cannot be called ‘classical’ because it refuses the conception in question (it refuses such elements of it as, for example, claims of universality, idea of neutral Reason, idea of human nature). That is why the best label which can be given to it is ‘postmodern’ or ‘communitarian’ liberalism. Moreover, postmodern liberalism does not express any reluctance toward community as such. It only requires a community which respects the rights of individuals to autonomous, moral and comprehensive choices. In this sense one can say that postmodern liberalism renounces anti-social biases while remaining faithful to individualism, which - starting with the social and the common - arrives at the truly individual. In this way it can revitalize the sense and meaning of humanism understood as the idea of life of human beings who can create their own lives independently and freely in the political and social milieu, promoting justice and solidarity.

In a poetic conversation with Thierry Zarcone, the painter and calligrapher Fabienne Verdier exposes her deep and harmonious connection to nature. She tells of her garden, her house and her osmosis with nature. Painting is to her an art of living and being that recalls the Tao masters as well as some Christan mystics.

Here we are dealing with the two central figures of the female gender in the Judeo-Christian tradition of Holy Scripture, or at least the texts that apply to the narrative of the first couple. The paper focuses on procreation and its symbolic implications in the Genesis narrative. There is a great difference between Eve and Lilith, the opposite archetypes of the female gender. So examining the forgotten existence of Lilith compared with the creation of Eve is an attempt to understand the schema of reproduction and distinction between the sexes.

If the revival of humanism depends on closing the gap between differences, western and eastern perspectives on the world diverge: the first uses History as its guide and the second uses the notion of destiny. Between the logical power of western instrumental rationalism and the affective power of the feeling modes of knowledge like liturgy and music, the West should be able to accept difference and reject both closed identities and absolute alterities.

Islamic culture may be labelled a ‘superculture’ on account of its richness, whose living message goes from the peasants of the Indian subcontinent to Africa, for instance, dating back fourteen centuries in time. The author contrasts with an Islam that is frozen in its medieval form an Islam capable of inventing new solutions. The drama of today's Muslim populations is living under the sign of a failure to adapt, because there has been no adequate analysis of the demands of their time. But there is a social message in Islam, of brotherhood, justice, effort, liberation, which remains to be translated into a project for joint action for current generations. There is integration, the complementarity of individual action, collective effort and spirituality. But the integration of the sacred into social life is so ‘un-contemporary’ that in Islamic lands an extra effort is required to grasp its true implications.