Robert Henry Scott

In order to preserve and ensure the vitality of freedom and democracy in democratic societies, it is important that citizens reflect deeply on the meaning of freedom and the conditions necessary to sustain it. The idea for this volume arose from discussions at the February 2019 annual meeting of the Georgia Philosophical Society held at Mercer University on the theme of "Freedom and Society," and drafts of many of the chapters were first presented there. Including contributions from both early-career and well-known scholars, the chapters are tied together by questions about the nature of political freedom and autonomy in democratic societies and about the ways in which the enactment of democratic freedom depends on awareness of and engagement with freedom's underlying conditions. These conditions include social responsibility, creative innovation, and strong democratic institutions. Other recurring themes in the volume include the pitfalls of atomistic models of autonomy and the importance of giving due consideration to intersubjectivity, embodiment, and plurality as integral elements of a free society. Countering models centered exclusively on negative freedom, (i.e. freedom from constraints imposed by others), several chapters highlight the crucial roles of social responsibility and creativity in confronting obstructions to freedom, such as systemic racism and other challenges currently facing democracies. Finally, several chapters emphasize the fundamental importance of strong and just democratic institutions as the primary means of reliably expressing the will of the people.

Wisdom and compassion are both inter-related in and integral to Buddhist conceptions of soteriology. In this chapter, I show how the merging of Hwaŏm and Sŏn Buddhist doctrines by the twelfth century Korean monk Chinul exemplifies and helps to clarify the interdependence of wisdom and compassion in Buddhist thought. I further show how Chinul's three awakening experiences led to distinct insights in the development of his thinking, which continues to be influential to this day, particularly in the distinctively ecumenical aspect of Korean Buddhism.

In a recent article appearing in this journal, Theresa Scavenius compellingly argues that the traditional “rational-individualistic” conception of responsibility is ill-suited to accounting for the sense in which moral agents share in responsibility for both contributing to the causes and, proactively, working towards solutions for climate change. Lacking an effective moral framework through which to make sense of individual moral responsibility for climate change, many who have good intentions and the means to contribute to solutions for climate change tend to dismiss or put off addressing the root causes. With this tendency arises the practical problem that climate change calls for urgent global collective action, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation, in order to prevent global temperature rise from exceeding 2C and avoid worst case climate scenarios. In this paper, I develop a phenomenological theory of ecological responsibility which addresses the conceptual problem Scavenius brings out and contributes to clarifying the sense in which moral agents share responsibility for both the causes and solutions for climate change. To develop this theory, I draw from, combine, and transform insights from the late work of Husserl on open horizons, transcendental intersubjectivity, and genetic phenomenology with breakthroughs from Emmanuel Levinas in articulating an original, asymmetrical theory of unlimited, diachronic responsibility. In drawing from Husserl, I show how what Levinas describes as the source of a demand for unlimited, diachronic responsibility can be phenomenologically reinterpreted in terms of a horizon of indeterminacy. I then show how horizons of indeterminacy arise in phenomenological descriptions of both human and nonhuman entities in such a way that discloses the demand for responsibility as a broad-ranging demand for unlimited, diachronic ecological responsibility. An important implication of this phenomenological theory of ecological responsibility is that it contributes to clarifying the sense in which individual moral agents share in responsibility for long range collective moral problems such as climate change.