Masahiro Morioka

Masahiro Morioka (森岡 正博, Morioka Masahiro, born September 25, 1958) is a Japanese philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of philosophy of life, bioethics, gender studies, media theory, and civilization studies. He is a professor of philosophy and ethics at Waseda University, Japan. He coined the term "life studies" for an integrated approach to the issues of life, death, and nature in contemporary society. Since 2006 he has proposed a new philosophical discipline he calls "philosophy of life". He has published numerous academic books and articles, mainly in Japanese, and has regularly contributed commentaries and book reviews to major Japanese newspapers and magazines. His books include Painless Civilization, which criticizes the incessant attempts to escape from pain and suffering in modern civilization, Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher's Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men's Sexuality, which illuminates some of the darker sides of male sexuality such as the "Lolita complex" and male frigidity, and Lessons in Love for Herbivore Boys, one of the books that helped popularize the term "herbivore men". He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Philosophy of Life and an associate editor of Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics.

Morioka was born in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan, in 1958 and entered The University of Tokyo in 1977. In the beginning he studied physics and mathematics but he later turned to philosophy and ethics. In graduate school he specialized in bioethics and environmental ethics, a newly emerging field at that time as well as Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. He published two books on bioethics, An Invitation to the Study of Life and Brain Dead Person, and moved to the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, in 1988. There he wrote several books including How to Live in a Post-religious Age and Consciousness Communication; the former is a philosophical and psychological analysis of Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that occurred in 1995 and the latter discusses subconscious interactions in the age of computer communications (Consciousness Communication won The Telecom Social Science award in 1993). "He spent one year as a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, USA, in 1991."