This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that offer creative (...) pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies. (shrink)

The paper presents two empirical cases of expert musicians—a classical string quartet and a solo, free improvisation saxophonist—to analyze the explanatory power and reach of theories in the field of expertise studies and joint action. We argue that neither the positions stressing top-down capacities of prediction, planning or perspective-taking, nor those emphasizing bottom-up embodied processes of entrainment, motor-responses and emotional sharing can do justice to the empirical material. We then turn to hybrid theories in the expertise debate and interactionist accounts (...) of cognition. Attempting to strengthen and extend them, we offer ‘Arch’: an overarching conception of musical interaction as an externalized, cognitive scaffold that encompasses high and low-level cognition, internal and external processes, as well as the shared normative space including the musical materials in which the musicians perform. In other words, ‘Arch’ proposes interaction as a multivariate multimodal overarching scaffold necessary to explain not only cases of joint performance, but equally of solo improvisation. (shrink)

We explore the nature of expert minds in skilled performance by examining classic Japanese dramatist Zeami’s account of skilled expertise in Noh drama. Zeami characterizes expert minds by the co-existence of mushin and riken no ken. Mushin is an empty state of mind devoid of mental contents. Riken no ken is a distinctive form of self-awareness, where the actor embodies a common perspective with the audience upon one’s own performance. Conventional accounts of riken no ken present it as a form (...) of imagination: expert actors deliver their performance by imagining what it looks like from an external point of view. These imagination-based accounts, however, do not square well with the claim that riken no ken co-exists with mushin. We propose an alternative perception-based account that better accounts for this co-existence, drawing on the concept of “situated normativity” from embodied-ecological theories of cognition. The situated normativity account characterizes riken no ken as a form of “direct affective perception” in which actors are aware of their performance’s quality of attunement with the performative situation. Expert Noh actors realise a common perspective with the audience not by imagining an external point of view, but by perceiving the situation that encompasses their own performance from an aesthetic perspective cultivated and shared within the Noh community. (shrink)

In two recent papers, I introduced the idea of embodied Rilkean movement knowledge and perception into the current philosophical debate on sports knowledge. In this paper, I offer a new analysis of how embodied movement knowledge and perception help us to identify and define movement consciousness. I develop a phenomenological account of embodied movement consciousness and show how it is closely linked to self-consciousness by generating anticipations and affordances that implicate pre-reflective self-awareness. I also expand Rowlands’ Rilkean memory notion to (...) include affective phenomenological properties that rely on the constitutive fault-lines between bodily material sensations and the ingrained recollections they are based on. From this perspective, embodied movement consciousness comprises empirical sensations that phenomenologically unfold as physical acts grounded in materiality. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that ordinary conscious experience involves some form of sense of self or consciousness of oneself. Moreover, this claim is often restricted to a 'thin' or 'minimal' notion of self-consciousness, or even 'the simplest form of self-consciousness', as opposed to more sophisticated forms of self-consciousness which are not deemed ubiquitous in ordinary experience. These formulations suggest that self-consciousness comes in degrees, and that individual subjects may differ with respect to the degree of self-consciousness they exhibit at a (...) given time. In this article, I critically examine this assumption. I consider what the claim that self-consciousness comes in degrees may mean, raise some challenges against the different versions of the claim, and conclude that none of them is both coherent and particularly plausible. (shrink)