Yi Kyubo (1169–1241), a Koryŏ literatus, has long been read as a statesman whose Daoist references are ornamental, a consensus this paper challenges. Through close readings of his Tongguk Yi Sangguk chip, it argues that Yi engaged Daoist thought in a sustained philosophical manner across three interlocking dimensions: a non-teleological cosmogony aligned with Guo Xiang's doctrine of spontaneous self-generation 自生; a literary-aesthetic theory rooted in ziran 自然 that extends metaphysical spontaneity into creative practice; and, most originally, an affective engagement with the Zhuangzian figure of the Creator 造物. While accepting the denial of purposive creation at the cosmological level, Yi repeatedly addresses the Creator with emotional directness and irreverence with no clear parallel in Chinese Xuanxue, a tension between metaphysical denial and affective persistence that marks his most significant contribution and opens questions about the reception and transformation of Neo-Daoist ideas in Koryŏ Korea.
This paper argues that when addressing biodiversity loss and other urgent conservation challenges through Daoist environmental ethics, the concept of xiangran (相然), translated here as “mutually-so-ing,” in the Huainanzi (淮南子) provides more adequate environmental guidance than ziran (自然), or “self-so-ing,” in the Laozi (老子). Unlike ziran, which centers on the myriad things’ spontaneous modes of individual existence, xiangran emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things and events between heaven and earth. Accordingly, conservation efforts should prioritize preserving or recovering the mutually-so-ing of all elements within an ecosystem rather than the self-so-ing of individual organisms or species. Inspired by the Huainanzi, I formulate this conservation strategy as relying on the mutually-so-ing of things and pushing it in accordance with the right timing (因物之相然而推之以時).
This study undertakes a meta-theoretical critique of the value attribution framework that has structured environmental ethics since the 1970s: the assumption that ethical inquiry must begin by locating value in human beings alone or extending it to non-human nature. Rather than adjudicating between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, it examines two traditions that independently bypass this framework: the classical Confucianism of Xunzi, whose ethics rests on the relational character of the Heaven-Earth-Human triad, and the environmental pragmatism of Bryan Norton, whose convergence hypothesis renders the intrinsic-value debate practically irrelevant. Their convergence, an internal critic of the framework and an external tradition that never adopted it, offers diagnostic evidence that value attribution itself is the deeper obstacle, pointing toward a relational environmental ethics grounded in normativity from relationships, temporal integration, and the primacy of practice over theory.
In this paper, I argue that bringing Rawlsian public reason into dialogue with kapwâ provides a fuller explanatory account of how democratic deliberation may be sustained in the Filipino context. This dialogue broadens comparative democratic theory and makes a limited contribution to conceptual decolonization by allowing a Filipino relational concept to help formulate and explain the problem of civic formation. In this view, Rawls explains the standards governing public justification while kapwâ helps explain one culturally situated route through which citizens may develop the civic dispositions needed to sustain reciprocal public reasoning. This is important for their dialogue provides a fuller explanatory account of democratic deliberation in the Filipino context and enlarges the conceptual resources available to comparative democratic theory.
This article reconstructs the philosophical system of Tsuchida Kyōson (1891–1934) by examining the relationships among his three self-designations: personalism, culturalism, and social-idealism. Drawing on his major works from the 1920s and 1930s, it argues that these are not inconsistent but name different dimensions of a unified project. At its center lies the Neo-Kantian distinction between being and value, which Tsuchida inherits from Heinrich Rickert and Sōda Kiichirō and reformulates as a “democracy of values.” The article shows how personality functions as the source from which cultural values are produced, grounding a theory of society that mediates between socialist and anarchist orientations. Tsuchida’s involvement in the Free University movement illustrates these commitments, particularly his conception of education as an infinite and reciprocal process of self-formation. Finally, it argues that for Tsuchida the ideal is teleological rather than metaphysical, and that utopia works as a regulative principle that keeps democratic life open.
