This is the full and official text of the Presidential address delivered at the Opening ceremony of the 25th World Congress of Philosophy in Rome, Italy, on August 1st 2025.

This article is the text of a Plenary Session lecture presented at the World Congress of Philosophy, Rome, 2024. In it I argue that archaeological evidence shows that the first written philosophy originated not in Greece, India, or China as is commonly believed, but, in Sumer, Mesopotamia, approximately 2600 BCE. The author, En Hedu’Anna, was a woman. I describe four writings by her, distinguish her views from then-prevailing Mesopotamian views about a variety of philosophic concepts and topics. I discuss her contributions to cosmology, scientific method, philosophy of religion, and principles of justice, amongst others. I relate her views on the just treatment of prisoners of war, transgenderism, and other seemingly contemporary philosophical issues. Lastly, I summarize evidence for what today would be called her Curriculum Vitae and her Impact Factor.

In the Roman time, Azania and its capital Rhapta had cultural and economic connections with diverse civilizations of the world, including those in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, India, the Far East, and the deep interior of Africa. Information about Azania was first provided by the Romans – Pliny the Elder, Claudius Ptolemy, and sources such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Apart from the Romans, other people of the Middle East, including the Homerites or Himyarites, were found to have lived and traded in Azania. Pliny the Elder reported that Azanian received spices from the Far East and sent them to the Great Lakes’ region where they were ferried via the Nile to the Mediterranean basin. The Periplus also reported other exported and imported trade goods. Indian and Chinese records provided evidence of connections with Azania. The most recent evidence of these connections is archeological. Materials recovered include beads and ceramics from Rome, the Middle East, and India. Archeology of submerged Rhapta also uncovered architectural remains of Roman technology. Material remains from the deep interior of Africa have been found on the coast of Azania. Roman connections with the deep interior of Africa are believed to have created caravan routes that facilitated cultural and technological exchanges.

Core moral concepts in Confucianism, such as benevolence, righteousness, and faithfulness, are often so vague that in moral teachings one must rely on intuitive understanding aided by metaphor and etymology that illustrate them. In addition, case stories play a crucial role in clarifying these abstract moral concepts. Confucian ethics heavily depends on stories of wise men and exemplary figures who have been revered throughout Confucian history. In this paper, I will explore the role of examples in Confucian ethics, particularly within the context of moral education.

The unprecedented power of China and its cultural expansion are increasing the need to examine its hegemonic impact in the field of literature. The new concept of ‘sinophone’, inspired by postcolonial criticism, reveals vigorous protests against Mainland’s centrality by advocating Chinese Diaspora literature, which has been too long relegated to a peripheral status. This study seeks to reconsider such debates through investigations of historical reasons, ideological issues, and perspectives they have widened. The sinophone literature is thus set up as a creative space, denationalized as well as transnationalized. Denying both the weight of the matrix and the chimerical archipelago, it follows the poetics of relation, the intermixture, and the Open.

The Khmer Rouge period had a hugely negative impact on the knowledge and practices of Khmer divination. At present, Khmer divination and astrology has been revitalized with many forms of it being embedded in people’s everyday lives in both rural and urban settings, such as in the capital Phnom Penh. With the re-emergence of numerological fortune-telling, Khmer practitioners are now turning to Thai numerological books, such as ‘Patithin Neung Roi Pee (100-year calendar)’, ‘Tamra Phromachati’, and ‘Tamra Plu Luang’ to supplement the diminished body of traditional Khmer knowledge that survived the war. This paper aims to explore how Cambodia divinatory and astrologicalauthority have been revitalized and reinvented through that of their Thai counterparts within the flows of globalization and modernity.

The insular Indian oceanic space is distinguished by a long history of migrations, encounters, conflicts, exchanges, interbreeding, and interculturality. Violence and negotiation lie at the heart of their historical, anthropological, and linguistic processes. The literatures of the Indian Ocean islands, in particular, articulate their representations, their fictional universes and speeches, as well as their modes of writing, with a perpetual interrogation about travels, meetings, frontiers, which constitute the ways of living in places and telling about them. Composed on the basis of dialogue and intertextuality in order to account for complex worlds, they also house ghosts which make them labyrinthine. Experiences peculiar to each society also connect them with the global history of colonial predation and disobedience, migrations, and exchanges, as well as intercultural relationships. From this point of view, such literatures allow one to read the labyrinthine and spectral insertion of the colonial world into European literatures. This paper is based on a French-language Indian oceanic corpus and aims to put forward a political reading (in the sense of Jacques Rancière) of the aesthetics of intercultural meetings and of its unplanned effects.

Friendship occupies the last place in the five social relations in the Confucian tradition, yet it plays an important role in Confucian writings. In this article, I discuss the notion of friendship that lasts beyond death from ancient China. I examine how the friendship between Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi finds its continuation in that of Fan Shi and Zhang Shao, insofar as one of the two friends dies in both cases. These friendly bonds are tinged with a tragic tone and have fueled the imagination of the Chinese who sublimate or amplify them in all kinds of literary genres – poetry, theater, and novel – dating back to the pre-imperial period and to the Han Dynasty. All the authors underscore the faithfulness of these characters, which they consider to be the characters’ virtue. They also emphasize the spiritual link that transcends life and death. Based on the translation of these well-known and celebrated narratives, I intend to show how the exemplary nature of friendship is enhanced or mythologized, and how intertextuality has shaped the Chinese vocabulary itself in this regard.

Kim Dong-ri and Seo Jeong-ju were prodigious personalities of Korean literature in the 20th century. The friendship of these prominent writers began in the 1930s and lasted their entire lives. Together they contributed to the reconstruction of the literary world in Korea after the end of the Japanese Occupation. This paper examines their biographies, auto-biographies, and different testimonies in an attempt to understand and appreciate not only the development and depth of their friendship, but also their legacy to Korean literature that was based on the literary and humanistic values they shared.

The rejection of Mou Tun-fei’s End of Track (late 1960s), an ‘invisible’ film, never distributed, proves to what extent the themes it tackled (homosexuality, class difference, nihilism) were taboo for an entire generation. Banana Paradise (1980s) deals with the way two brothers in arms survive by usurping the identity of deceased comrades and eventually living in a society in exile tainted by the memory of the continent. Finally, Gf/Bf (2000s) develops themes that were once censored (homosexuality, democratization) and which resurface through the lens of a love triangle. Despite their heterogeneity, these films allow us to draw a history of this fraternal relationship in ambiguous and dissonant contexts. Through three films from different periods, I trace the evolution over time of the representation of friendship between men, an evolution that reveals a ‘paradigm shift’ within Taiwanese society itself.

This paper examines the friendship between Chŏng Yakyong and Yi Kigyŏng and its evolution. Their friendship rested on many commonalities: they both passed the doctorate competition together successfully in 1789, they belonged to the same political faction, the Namin, they were both officials at the court of King Chŏngjo in Chosŏn Korea, and both had important roles and contributions in this period of great socio-political, religious, cultural, and intellectual transformations. Being interested in different areas of knowedge from the West that had reached Chosŏn Korea, Chŏng Yakyong, or Tasan, adopted the Christian faith in 1784 before publicly renouncing it in 1797 due to criticism and slander. His friend Yi Kigyŏng, however, did not believe his apostasy and became his enemy. By studying the official and personal documents available, we attempt to reconstruct the vicissitudes of their friendship that resulted in Tasan’s long and painful banishment.

This article seeks to re-read and reassess the significance of the famous novel Kokoro by Natsume Sôseki (1867-1916), one of the main figures of Japanese modern literature. The novel is about two consecutive stories of friendship. A young student establishes friendship with an older man, the Master, who himself experienced a very strong friendship with a young man from the same village in his youth, until a love affair tragically separated them. We consider the ambiguous links, contrasts, and parallels between the different bonds in the novel, issues of generation gaps, relationships with the family, philosophical loneliness, and the belittling of women in the portrayal of friendship in the novel.

This paper seeks to understand He Xinyin’s reassessment of the notion of friendship and its subversive dimension in several of his major essays. This reassessment was part of an increase in discourses on friendship in China in the 16th-17th centuries, which was in some ways prompted by the decay of traditional structures, particularly the family structure, that served as the basis for the social functioning of the empire. He Xinyin was one of the most innovative and radical thinkers whose redefinition allowed friendship to take, for the first time, a foremost place among the five social relations, to be conceived as a subjective relationship where the individual emerges as a primary entity, and to form the ground of two major freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of association.