This essay attempts to contextualize the importance of Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 philosophy in terms of world philosophy in the manner of Goethe’s innovative plan for “world literature” (Weltliteratur). China has the long history of philosophizing rather than non-philosophy contrary to the glaring and inexcusable misunderstanding of Hegel the Eurocentric universalist or monist. In today’s globalizing world of multicultural pluralism, ethnocentric universalism has become outdated and outmoded. Transversality, which is at once intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial, is a far more befitting (...) response than universality. In this context, what is focused and emphasized in Wang’s world philosophy is mainly fourfold. First, there is the unity or circularity of knowledge and action, that is, knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the consummation of knowledge. Second, sincerity is the moral soul of Sinism as it is the enabling act of making perform all other virtues, including ren 仁. Third, in Sinism, including Wang’s philosophy, there is no Cartesian dualism in that the mind and the body are inseparable soulmates. Fourth, if ethics is prima philosophia, then geophilosophy is ultima philosophia to sustain and perpetuate all life-forms on earth (geo). (shrink)

(2013). The Beauty of Sport. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy: Vol. 7, Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport, pp. 100-120. doi: 10.1080/17511321.2013.761886.

Discussions of ‘cultural appropriation’ in popular culture suffer from an inherited politics of authenticity and ownership originating in a liberal legal–ethical framework. Here, I use Raymond Williams’s and Stuart Hall’s cultural theory to pinpoint the place at which cultural-appropriation discourse goes wrong – an essentialist and anti- historical notion of colonial encounters. We can overcome these limits through Marxist cultural and historical analysis. Outrage about colonial violence which most often roots appropriation discourse is better understood within the context of an (...) account of the transition to capitalism beginning with the Low Countries and their eastern colonies. Furthermore, the Marxist idea of the cosmopolitan cultures of both capital and labour offers a productive path for the history of culture rooted in the same colonial encounter. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)