International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2020

Social changes and my “ecological turn”

(Abstract)

John B. Cobb Jr.  

The essay is my speech at Social Sciences in China Press on October 19, 2018. I put my academic career in the grand history of the world during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and connected thought, life, society and history together by revisiting social changes and my experiences of entry into process research and my “ecological turn”. Through the speech, the readers can understand both the connection between my academic thinking and the academic history in the 20th century and those between my new ideas and the 21st century. By listening to the accounts of an elder born in 1920s, the readers can truly feel the social and historical changes I have experienced, and the vulnerability of the civilisation under the influence of human behavior and the need to create a new civilisation.