Atsuki Morishima is a researcher in philosophy at the Graduate School of Humanities at Osaka University (Japan), specialising in legal and political philosophy. He graduated from there in 2025. From 2023 to 2024, he studied at Heidelberg University. Since October 2025, he has also been a member of the Cross-Boundary Innovation Program at Osaka University.

His research focuses primarily on questions of the legitimacy of norms. In his thesis Norms and the Public Sphere in Habermas, he examined the problem of the legitimacy of legal norms using the concept of the ‘public sphere’. Following on from this, Morishima wrote the article Rethinking the Concept of the Public Sphere in 2025, in which he critically re-examines this concept from a contemporary perspective. His research interests are currently expanding to include global norms such as human rights and their global legitimation processes.

In the context of the center of advanced study, Morishima is particularly interested in how the structure of the public sphere is undergoing further change in the wake of the current digitalisation and what significance this change may have for the legitimacy of norms, especially cosmopolitan norms.