The First Symposium on Meditative Humanities第一屆「冥觀人文學」研討會

In an era of accelerating technology and escalating climate crisis, humanity confronts two interconnected emergencies. The AI-driven digital economy, with its relentless focus on speed and productivity, not only rewires our cognitive and emotional lives but also reconfigures our relationship with our physical surroundings and the more-than-human world. This digital "worlding" mirrors the very logic that fuels ecological collapse—instrumentalizing life, fragmenting relations, and deepening our alienation from both inner and outer realities.

The symposium “Inner and Outer Care: Planetary and Meditative Pathways” seeks to convene scholars from diverse disciplines to explore avenues of response to this existential impasse. Planetary pathways call for renewed ethical, ecological, and political commitments to rebuild fractured relations with our planet. In parallel, meditative pathways cultivate inner capacities of attention and care, enabling us to resist digital alienation and reweave more aesthetic, meditative, compassionate forms of life. Taken together, these pathways affirm that the spiritual and the material, the inner and the outer, are inseparable dimensions of care, essential for envisioning a more sustainable future.