Introduction

At the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy held in Athens in August 2013 the Tomonobu Imamichi Institute for Eco-ethica organized a special session on Cosmopolitanism including Jürgen Habermas as honorary speaker and David Rasmussen from Boston College and Arne Johan Vetlesen from the University of Oslo as respondents.

This session became an unforgettable event, not only because Habermas is already famous for having played a central role on the world-scene of philosophy since the 1960s. His work began with his books on social sciences, such as Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ¹ and Knowledge and Human Interests, ² while Theory of Communicative Action ³ and Between Facts and Norms ⁴ made him a leading international theorist. His latest contributions on cosmopolitanism, religion and international law continue to draw attention and praise.

This session was also unforgettable because of the new way Habermas focused on the transnational solidarity that is necessary for creating a kind of world democracy able to prevent, as he discusses in the following article, and as the title of his most recent work signifies, ‘the slipstream of technocracy’ ⁵ . He took the necessity of solidarity between European states as a model for what must be realized on a global scale. As David Rasmussen points out in his comment, this can be considered as a new form of Cosmopolitanism more appropriate to our time than the old standard that we received from Kant and the Stoics. The old Cosmopolitianism was more an idea of a universal morality while the new Cosmopolitanism is a concrete political project.

It was exactly such a discussion that the Tomonobu Imamichi Institute for Eco-ethica wanted to induce at the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy in Athens. Tomonobu Imamichi, a Japanese philosopher who died in October 2012 at nearly the age of 90, was co-founder of the institute that bears his name. For nearly 30 years, he inspired an international group of philosophers who met every year in Japan and other countries in order to consider questions of what he called ‘eco-ethics’. These annual symposia continue, and the institute publishes their proceeds in Eco-ethica.

Eco-ethics means global ethics in the context of the technological environment that is the home – in Greek: oikos – of humanity in our time. To this ethics belong the questions of cosmopolitanism and the democratization of global law that are so fundamental for today’s society.

As early as 1983–4, Imamichi wanted ‘a philosophical thought for modern cosmopolitans’. He became convinced that ethics should be redefined in a world that is in the process of becoming a huge city, a single megapolis. This megapolis needs a new philosophy for thinking globally – urbanica – which, Imamichi claimed, should not be a philosophy of the state. Rather, it should be the philosophy of the city life that surpasses the life in the state because it is based on the logic of a technological cohesion that crosses all frontiers. He saw this life threatened by ‘a technological abstraction’ that focuses only on the result of labour, on ‘the efficiency, while abolishing every other value’. Instead he wanted a more modern cosmopolitanism that could ‘avoid the danger of dehumanization and depersonalization of humanity’.

Thus, Imamichi would certainly consent to Habermas’ idea of global solidarity in his paper ‘A Plea for a Constitutionalization of International Law’ that we publish here together with the comments of the two respondents.