Sino-hellenic Environmental Philosophy

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.