On July 21, 2025, at 3 P.M. (Lisbon time), Professor Koji Tachibana from Chiba University will deliver a seminar titled The reception history of the Aristotelian notion of virtue in Japan: its translation, transformation and transfusion at the Vítor de Matos Room, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra – FLUC. The event is organized by Dr. Mitsutake Ikeda.
The event is part of the IEF Advanced Studies Seminar series and will explore how Aristotle’s concept of virtue was interpreted, adapted and integrated into Japanese intellectual history from the late nineteenth century onward. Professor Tachibana will examine the philosophical, cultural and political implications of this process, shedding light on how key Japanese thinkers reshaped the Aristotelian legacy within modern East Asian contexts.
The seminar will also be accessible online via Zoom at https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/91748911835.
Koji Tachibana is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chiba (Japan), an international associate scholar at Georgetown University Medical Center (USA), and a research affiliate of the Department of Philosophy at Lund University (Sweden). He studies the notion of virtue from the viewpoints of ancient Greek philosophy (Aristotle’s ethics), contemporary virtue ethics, philosophy of science (neuroscience and human space exploration), and Japanese philosophy. He has published the latest Japanese translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (co-translated with K. Watanabe, Kobunsha, 2015/2016) and three edited volumes: Education and the Philosophy of Virtue: From Theory to Practice and Applications (Toyokan Publishing, 2023; in Japanese), Alternative Virtues: Japanese Perspectives on Christian and Confucian Traditions (Routledge, 2024), and Aristotle in Japan: Reception, Interpretation and Application (co-edited with T. Kondo, Routledge, 2025). He is currently working on a theory of virtue that is both globally adaptive and sensitive to cultural differences.