UTokyo Frontier Lectures in Liberal Arts Watakushi tachi wa donoyouna sekai wo souzou subekika (How Should We Imagine the Future World?)

This book is a reprint of a series of lectures that was compiled after reorganizing the content of the lectures from “Towards the World in 30 Years’ Time — Thinking about the Future of the ‘World’ and ‘Humans’,” which were part of the ‘Academic Frontier Lecture Series’ in the spring semester of AY2020 of the University of Tokyo’s East Asian Academy for New Liberal Arts (EAA). The content of the lectures was restructured based on a question-and-answer session with the students. The EAA was developed as a joint program in 2019 between the University of Tokyo and Peking University with the aim to build a field of “East Asian Liberal Arts” from the dual perspectives of research and education. These omnibus lectures were designed to inform the first- and second-year undergraduate students about the new approach to liberal arts that the EAA strives to undertake.
 
There are many possible answers to the question “What is liberal arts?”. At EAA, we consider liberal arts to comprise of the art of learning that we can practice to get involved in the world, while effectuating the changes in ourselves in a world that often changes in an uncertain manner. Therefore, I think that rather than focusing on knowing something, liberal arts can be considered to be the practical process of asking questions about the world that we are living in, which then develops into a “habit.” Acquiring such a “habit” is one of the most important foundations in a university life, with the act of “learning to question” becoming the beginning of scholarship.
 
Therefore, in this lecture, we have created “Towards the World in 30 Years’ Time” as the common theme every year. In 30 years’ time, those who have gathered to hear these lectures will surely be playing a central role in society as humans of around 50 years of age, regardless of the field that they are in and the spaces in which they will be active. “What will the world look like at that time?” In order to answer this question, these lectures do not offer any specific knowledge or information, but they raise other questions. In other words, looking at the world of 30 years into the future, the question is: what kind of desired world should we hope for? This is because, rather than speculating as to what the future will hold, liberal arts is a form of academic learning in which we, ourselves, take part in the construction of the future. In particular, in the AY2020 lectures, we have tried to re-consider the two concepts of the “World” and “Humans” from both sides. The global novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, variabilities in the role of humans due to the development of new forms of science and technology such as brain science, AI and data collection, several national disasters and the accompanying breakdown in life, challenges in realizing a society in which diversity and inclusivity are valued, as well as the current state of the Anthropocene era that embraces all of these phenomena, and the state of ethics that arise from these phenomena are all urging us to redefine both the “World” and “Humans.” In this book, as part of the habit of learning liberal arts, the field that re-interrogates the “World” and “Humans” is dubbed as “World Human Studies,” with a total of 11 lectures from 12 faculty members approaching various problems from the perspective of specific case studies of their interest. It is our hope that this book will be read by many people as the beginning of the new hitherto non-existent academic field of “World Human Studies.”
 
The content of the lectures can be viewed on the University of Tokyo’s lesson distribution service UTokyo OCW.
https://ocw.u-tokyo.ac.jp/course_11440/
 

(Written by ISHII Tsuyoshi, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2021)