Agricultural Ethics in East Asian Perspective

Kirill Thompson – b. Northfield, Minnesota. Received advanced degrees from the University of Hawaii. Teaches in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department & serves as Assoc. Dean for Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IHS) of NTU. Currently a short-term visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IAR) of Nagoya University. Thompson is broadly interested in the humanities.  Specialized in the philosophy of Zhu Xi and Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism, he also investigates early Chinese philosophy, e.g., Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Sophism, such later traditions as Buddhism, Japanese Confucianism, and Zen. He is also interested in Greek thought through Plato, modern philosophy, and 19th and 20th century philosophy, such as American transcendentalism, existentialism, early analytic philosophy, notably Wittgenstein, etc.  He has published book chapters, articles, and reviews in Chinese philosophy in Philosophy East and West, Asian Philosophy, China Review International, etc., and on Samuel Beckett, Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Gray, Henry David Thoreau, and other kindred spirits. He is currently involved in “humanities for the environment” projects. Professor Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, where he serves on the faculty in the departments of Philosophy, Community Sustainability and Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has held posts at Texas A&M University and Purdue University. Thompson’s research and teaching has focused on ethical and philosophical topics in food and agriculture. He is the author or co-author of over two hundred articles in refereed journals or scholarly books. His book From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. It won the “Book of the Year” award for 2015 from the North American Society for Social Philosophy.  His book The Spirit of the Soil: Agriculture and Environmental Ethics was released in a revised and updated second edition in 2017.

• 1. Seminal East Asian Backgrounds and Thinkers.- 2 Virtue Ethics and Agrarian Ethical Concerns.- 3 Local Care, Global Concerns.- Appendix 1 Consensus Building Revisited: Lessons from and Experiences in Japan.- Appendix 2 A Japanese Approach to Consensus Building and its Relevance to Australia.

“It has the merit of opening up prospects on agricultural ethics for the non-specialist reader while providing extremely well detailed analyses likely to enrich the reflections of the expert environmental ethics specialist. … This publication offers a valuable insight into how enriching a cross-cultural dialogue might be.” (Leila Chakroun, Environmental Values, Vol.28 (5), October, 2019)