Japanese Environmental Philosophy

Japanese Environmental Philosophy is an anthology that responds to the environmental problems of the 21st century by drawing from Japanese philosophical traditions to investigate our relationships with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. It contains chapters from fifteen top scholars from Japan, the United States, and Europe. The essays cover a broad range of Japanese thought, including Zen Buddhism, Shintoism, the Kyoto School, Japanese artand aesthetics, and traditional Japanese culture.

Japanese Environmental Philosophy provides timely perspectives on the ecological exigencies facing our world while also offering essential scholarship in the burgeoning field of Japanese philosophy... [for] it offers fresh perspectives on key debates. The quality of the work in this anthology is excellent. ... Working through the volume the reader will engage with foundational aspects of Japanese cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions, with an eye toward contemporary environmental concerns. Given the mounting ecological crises we are experiencing throughout the world, environmental philosophy should not be confined to a specialized subfield. ... Japanese Environmental Philosophy is a model of how an anthology can open up a space for productive cross-cultural environmental theory and action.

J. Baird Callicott is the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy and author or editor of a score of books and author of dozens of journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and book chapters in environmental philosophy and ethics. Callicott has served the International Society for Environmental Ethics as President, Yale University as Bioethicist-in-Residence, and the National Socio-environmental Synthesis Centeras Visiting Senior Research Scientist (funded by the National Science Foundation). His research goes forward simultaneously on four main fronts: theoretical environmental ethics, comparative environmental ethics and philosophy, the philosophy of ecology and conservation policy, and climate ethics. He taught theworld's first course in environmental ethics in 1971 at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His most recent book is Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic (Oxford University Press, 2013).James McRae serves as Vice-Chair of the Faculty and Associate Professor of Asian Philosophy and Religion at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. His publications include the books Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought (with J. Baird Callicott, SUNY Press, 2014) and The Philosophy of Ang Lee (with Robert Arp and Adam Barkman, University Press of Kentucky, 2013).