Over forty years have passed since the death of Jean-Paul Sartre, still, his oeuvre stands out as a paramount achievement in existential-phenomenological thought. Among the numerous ideas and challenges he offered to contemporary continental philosophy, the problem of authenticity deserves a special place, for it connects many of existentialism’s key concerns. The ever reforming conceptualization of authenticity had spread from the mid-1930s (La transcendance de l’égo) till Sartre’s posthumously published Cahiers pour une morale that appeared in the early 1980s, and (...) it had a profound impact not only on ethical and literary theories, but also on psychiatry and psychotherapy. The present essay’s undertaking is to closely follow the trajectory of this celebrated concept, to contextualize its development in accordance with Sartre’s shifting philosophical as well as ethical projects over the years, and to point out some of the affinities this concept might have with East Asian thought, and with Buddhism in particular. (shrink)

Despite the fact that bioethics is, basically, an interdisciplinary scientific field, it is deeply intertwined with less objectivistic, yet important, threads of morality and religion. From the beginning, in the United States, the language of bioethics has been shaped by theologians and people who do not neglect the religious approaches of particular scientific issues. This paper examines the possibility of using religious and nonreligious terminologies in the bioethical discourse, paying close attention to the American bioethical debate. I shall argue that (...) no democratic, pluralistic societies of today should favor only one jargon of a sole moral tradition, as this attitude leads to the discrimination of others that are also affected by such discourse. Mutual tolerance is the way that can provide a violence-free territory for the discussion about different value-based moral systems and traditions (such as Christianity and Islam or, in a broader perspective, religion and irreligious humanism). (shrink)

In my paper, I propose to investigate the philosophical underpinnings of representative indigenous Japanese psychotherapeutic approaches, particularly that of Morita and Naikan therapies, that have, at their foundations, distinctly Buddhist psychological tenets, and that offer to deal with mental health issues in a manifestly different way compared with their western counterparts. I offer a comprehensive account of how the characterizations of madness and mental illness have been shifting over the last two hundred years in Japanese society and culture, and how (...) this has affected mental health care in Japan. Finally, the ways in which modern day thinkers, such as Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki and Keiji Nishitani have been re-shaping the concepts of the self in Japanese religion and philosophy while, at the same time, taking care to remain faithful to the original East Asian sensibilities will also be expounded and connected to the themes of mental health and mental illness. (shrink)