This volume is dedicated to culturally different ways of the exposition, reconstruction, and reformulation of a whole range of classical philosophical issues: Ethics and theology, cultural particularity and humanistic universality, man and nature, heaven and earth, Eastern and Western values, morality and economy, conceptual argumentation and literary imagination, far and near, truth and violence, science and humanities, and others more. It does not aim at an example of 'comparative studies' but at a fruitful enterprise of exchange and crossing over between living philosophical traditions, according to Ernst Cassirer's famous words: 'we do not pursue the idea of a passive intuition of spiritual reality, but situate ourselves in the midst of its activity. If we approach spiritual life, not as the static contemplation of being, but as functions and energies of formation, we shall find certain common and typical principles of formation, diverse and dissimilar as the forms may be. If the philosophy of culture succeeds in apprehending and elucidating such basic principles, it will have fulfilled, in a new sense, its task of demonstrating the unity of the spirit as opposed to the multiplicity of its manifestations - for the clearest evidence of this unity is precisely that the diversity of the products of the human spirit does not impair the unity of its productive process, but rather sustains and confirms it.'

Walter Schweidler ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Philosophie an der Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Zuvor war er Professor für Praktische Philosophie an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum - Forschungsschwerpunkte: Gegenwärtige und neuzeitliche Ansätze der Ethik und der Politischen Philosophie; Rechtsphilosophie und Theorie der Menschenrechte; Phänomenologie, Philosophie Heideggers im Kontext der Hauptströmungen des 20. Jahrhunderts; Metaphysik und Metaphysikkritik; Interkulturelle Philosophie; Bioethik.