Pantheist thinking in Islamic East and its adequacy to western pantheism is complicated and controversy problem. To make the problem somewhat clearer, it needs first of all to emphasize that it is possible to divide the development of the theories of world outlook and trends relied on essence of Koran’s esoteric meaning and religion towards inner world in Islamic East, into two direction: pantheist and “vahdat al-vujud”. The trend, in organization and formation of which ismailism, hurufism, nogtavism (...) played important role and some sects of tasavvuf considered to be heretic may be referred to the first orientation. As far as the second one, only tasavvuf may be referred to it. Though some issues, categories of each of them (orientations) seem alike at first sight, however there are the important differences in their fundamental principles from both ontological and epistemological points of view, it stipulated that, first of all, by the factors and purposes of their formation. Each trends of the first direction, philosophy of which been significant part of thinking system in Islamic East, left its traces in history ofphilosophy and possessed a vast circle of influence. There were many prominent figures whose works ranked among the philosophical treatises of the period, need particular study to complete Islamic philosophical panorama. (shrink)

In the modern world, provincialism in reflective thinking is dangerous, possibly tragic. If philosophy is to fulfill one of its main functions—that of guiding the leaders of mankind toward a better world—its perspective must become worldwide and comprehensive in fact as well as in theory. This, the motivating theme of the Second East-West Philosophers' Conference held at the University of Hawaii in the summer of 1949, is likewise the theme of this volume, the complete report of that (...) Conference. The goal of the eminent philosophers participating was the discovery of avenues of progress toward a synthesis of Oriental and Occidental thought. They attempted to reach tentative conclusions in the fields of methodology, metaphysics, and ethical theory. Conference activities consisted of meetings, lectures, discussions, undergraduate courses, and graduate seminars. As far as possible, the proceedings were limited to the study of East-West philosophy; extensive attention was not given to the strictly religious aspects of any philosophical tradition. Participants in the Conference were convinced that philosophy is now entering upon a new stage of development which will be characterized by trans-cultural cooperation and world perspective. This development can be of tremendous significance in world thought and eventually in the lives and actions of the people of the world. Twenty-three of the formal papers presented at the Conference comprise the substance of this book; a significant proposal for synthesis is stated or implied in almost every one. A comprehensive introduction by the editor, a summary of the results and conclusions of the Conference seminars, a who's who of contributors, and an exhaustive index round out the volume. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 6–21. The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet , 1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. But this reference to Garcia’s youthfulness is not a form of condescension: by publishing a complete system of philosophy in the grand style, he has already done what none (...) of us in the older generation of speculative realists has done so far. His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist. The quality and scope of Forme et objet took few observers by surprise, since Garcia has been treated as an emerging philosopher to watch across half a decade of Parisian oral tradition. But Garcia was not just the subject of rumor, being already well known to the French public as a writer of fiction. His debut novel, La meilleure part des hommes , 2 was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore 3 and has already appeared in English as Hate: A Romance . 4 His follow-up novel, Mémoires de la jungle , 5 made clever use of a chimpanzee narrator. Nor was Garcia only published as a novelist before last November: his philosophical study L’Image 6 had already appeared when the author was just twenty-six, a year before he was crowned by the muses at the historic Café de Flore. And then in 2011, just months before the appearance of Forme et objet , Garcia published a widely distributed work entitled Nous, animaux et humains , 7 with its focus on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about animals. Given this prolific and versatile track record, an optimistic scenario might envisage the young Garcia as one of those combined literary/philosophical talents who appear intermittently in France across the centuries: Jean-Paul Sartre is merely the most famous recent case. While more time is needed to see how Garcia will channel his impressive mental energies, Forme et objet displays such breadth of insight that its author has a good chance to emerge as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. If we accept Aristotle’s dictum that the peak mental age is fifty-one, then to read Garcia’s massive book is to gain some idea of what European philosophy might look like in the futuristic-sounding 2030’s. The present article is confined to Forme et objet . At 486 pages, the work is obviously daunting in size. Indeed, it is even longer than it sounds, given that many of its early sections are printed in a smaller typeface to designate them as supplemental commentary to the main flow of the argument. But while the length of the book reportedly led to delays in French publication, and will probably slow the inevitable appearance of an English translation, the length of the book should not deter interested readers– much of it results from Garcia’s teacherly writing style. Whereas Quentin Meillassoux’s prose displays an arctic economy of means, Garcia’s style is reminiscent of the repeated lessons of oral classroom proceedings. Rarely is the reader given fewer than three or four chances to master an idea before the author moves on to the next. In practice, the style feels welcoming rather than long-winded. Otherwise, the structure of Forme et objet is surprisingly simple. There is a useful Introduction of less than twenty pages. Then comes Book I: Formally , running to approximately 135 pages. Here Garcia outlines the most basic features of a thing “no matter what it is,” or n’importe quoi , an everyday phrase that Garcia shapes into a technical term. This part of the book feels at times like a more amiable version of Hegel’s Science of Logic , a parallel emphasized further by the threefold articulation of its theme: 1. Thing; 2. Thing and World; 3. Being and Understanding. This is followed by the much longer Book II: Objectively , totaling more than 300 pages. It contains sixteen essay-like meditations on specific kinds of objects—including time, animals, humans, history, gender, and death. Here each chapter rolls smoothly into the next, making this second part of the book feel more like a different work of Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit . But these are merely analogies. Garcia is no Hegelian, even if the book contains a few dialectical flourishes that seem to reflect his early enthusiasm for the Frankfurt School. Forme et objet ends with a six-page Coda, followed by the usual page of acknowledgments. In what follows, I will briefly summarize each of these four parts of the book before ending with some more general remarks. Before doing so, it will be useful to situate Garcia biographically (as much as I am able) and philosophically. Though Toulouse is his native city, his formative years were spent largely in Algeria, where his family has deep roots. During our sole private conversation, Garcia mentioned that his parents are professors of literature. 8 As a student of philosopher Garcia flourished so early that many of his current ideas date to his teenaged years: “There are sentences in Forme et objet that I wrote when I was seventeen,” he said in response to a question on that cold night on the Canal St.-Martin. I recalled that remark when reading his brilliant account, late in the book, of the central role of adolescence in contemporary culture. While many prodigies blow through their formal academic training without serious obstruction, Garcia’s student memories are rich in tales of isolation and struggle, though equally rich in gratitude for a half-dozen or so exceptional teachers who provided the intellectual space he needed: Meillassoux and Alain Badiou are simply two of the most prominent figures on that list. Though there are many points of agreement between Garcia’s philosophical position and my own, he not only reached his position years before reading my work, 9 he arrived along a rather different path: not through phenomenology, but via the Frankfurt School, which may be one of the reasons for his profound fascination with aesthetics. Garcia’s cultural background is as broad as one could wish: he is no less informed about punk rock and European football leagues than about the spiritualist roots of Bergson’s philosophy. Curious about everything and contemptuous towards nothing, Garcia can be expected to write insightfully on dozens of topics in the years to come. Given that his philosophy is so personally tantalizing in its agreements and disagreements with my own, and given the great internal richness of Forme et objet itself, the present review is no better than a first effort at coming to terms with the challenges posed by this minstrel from the rising generation. This is especially intriguing for older Generation X’ers like me, since confrontation with the younger generation is one of the many themes treated insightfully in Garcia’s book. 1. Introduction Garcia begins in defense of a so-called “flat ontology,” in which all things are equally things. While Roy Bhaskar 10 used this term pejoratively to refer to anti-realist philosophies that flatten everything onto an epistemic plane of human access, Manuel DeLanda 11 (an admirer of Bhaskar) reversed it into the positive principle that all realities are equally realities. Similar notions can be found in the “absistence” of Alexius Meinong, 12 the “irreduction” of Bruno Latour, 13 and my own critique 14 of the undermining/overmining pair. Also noteworthy is Levi Bryant’s use of the term “flat ontology” throughout The Democracy of Objects 15 and his earlier essay “The Ontic Principle.” 16 But for Garcia, flatness is only one face of the cosmos, and one that he ultimately declares to be rather impoverished. Even so, he always remains an advocate of a flat ontology. Insofar as everything is equally something, no matter what it is ( n’importe qui ), everything is equally a thing, equally solitary in its relation with world. This is why his book abounds in those long lists of random, ontologically equivalent entities that Ian Bogost has playfully termed “Latour Litanies.” 17 The first litany in Garcia’s book runs as follows: “We live in this world of things, where a cutting of acacia, a gene, a computer-generated image, a transplantable hand, a musical sample, a trademarked name, or a sexual service are comparable things.” (7) Yet Garcia is frankly dualistic; his flat ontology only lasts until page 159 and the end of Book I (entitled “Formally”), which deals entirely with things that are equally things. Thereafter Garcia turns his attention from things to objects, which are not flat in the least, but engage in hierarchical relations with one another. In agreement with both DeLanda and the speculative realists, Garcia proclaims that his book “proposes to put to the test a thought about things rather than a thought about our thought about things .” (8) Just as ducklings are “imprinted” (9) after hatching and treat the first creature they see as their mother, philosophers are imprinted by the idea with which they begin. Hence, philosophies that begin with human access will never truly find their way back to things. This makes Garcia rather suspicious of twentieth century philosophy, since “the twentieth century—to which in some way this work proposes to bid adieu—has been a period of theorizing modes of access to things rather than things...” (9) Among other possible benefits of the philosophy of things that Garcia proposes, it is fully able to account for thought as a special variant of things, while the reverse is not possible.(10) In Book I of Forme et objet , Garcia’s “things” are so flat, so de-determined, that he is forced to renounce some of the most basic features ascribed to things by most realists. As he tells us in his foreboding third footnote: “We will maintain that the solitude [of things] is less than unity, less than identity, and that it does not imply acceptance (any more than refusal) of the principle of non-contradiction.” (11) In a contemporary world cluttered with too many things, Garcia’s flat and formal plane provides us with some breathing room: “The formal plan of thought enables or re-enables us to cut short all accumulation—whether of knowing, experience, or action—by a simplicity, an impoverished surface...” (13) As Garcia says elsewhere in responding to a Deleuzian critic of the book, his starting point in flat ontology is designed to obstruct the claims of both analytic philosophy and Hegelianism: “Hence, this work seeks to protect each thing—real, imaginary, inconsistent, contradictory—both against Ockham’s Razor and against the Aufhebung or dialectical process.” 18 Yet contrary to the equalizing spirit of many flat ontologies, “we will add to our formal ontology of the equal, an objective ontology of the unequal.” (13) But initially, Garcia joins all flat ontologists in holding that everything is irreducible: “this irreducibility, which we will term the ‘chance’ of each thing... also marks the refusal of a positive thought that reduces things exclusively to natural things, or social things, or historical things, etc.” (15) This irreducible “chance” of a thing emerges as an important technical term in the book, always paired with its inverted brother, the “price to pay” ( prix à payer ). On pages 17-19, we find the only diagrams in the book. What they illustrate is that Garcia wishes to avoid two equally dangerous extremes. The first is the philosophy of substance, featuring the thing-in-itself as a mighty river fed by attributes as if by subordinate tributary streams. This model can be found in many of the classic thinkers of West and East alike. In it, “there is obviously a hierarchization between that which is dragged towards something other than itself, and this other which serves it as an ontological support while supporting its proper being.” (16) For Garcia, the second extreme worth avoiding is the philosophy of events: “One thus conceives trajectories of being, identified as events, facts, powers, intensities, or intentionality. These vectors of being come first, bearing and supporting being, displacing it, but without ever finding a stopping point, a buffer, an objective consistency.” (17) The first model gives us a thing too wrapped up in itself, too compact . This word “compact” (the French and the English are the same) is another technical term for Garcia. But if the “compact” model of things leads us to something more than things, the philosophy of events gives us less than things, by dissolving them into a play of vectors. Garcia’s alternative lies midway between these two extremes: Being enters the thing, being comes out of it. And a thing is nothing other than the difference between the enters and the being that comes out. Thus, the circuit of being is never halted. In the thing, there is never the thing-in-itself. And the thing is never in-itself, but outside of itself. Nonetheless, being is not eventally “pollinated” by vectors: it possesses an objecting halting-point... (19) This single idea is the key to Garcia’s book: the thing is neither a self-contained durable lump nor some sort of evental flux. Instead, the thing is the difference between its various components and its relations with its environment. Or stated differently: “the price to pay for this disposition is a circulation of being that systematically distinguishes two senses of things: that which is in the thing , and that in which the thing is , or that which encompasses it and that which it encompasses,” (19) translating comprendre here as “encompass.” 19 In a beautiful description of a piece of black slate, Garcia sums up the various minerals, qualities, and shapes that compose [ comprend ] it, and calls them “that which is in the thing,” (20) noting that this tells us nothing about “that in which [the slate] is”—namely, all the various situations in which the black slate can be found. Instead, the slate is the difference between these two: the most characteristic principle of Garcia’s philosophy. 2. Formally Book One of Forme et objet , “Formally,” is concerned with the formal equality of all things in a flat world. “Two questions mark the boundaries of reflection: of what is everything composed [ composé ], and: what do all things compose?” (27) Looking downward, we wish to know what everything is made of; looking upward, we want to know the ultimate result of the combination of all things. Here we must turn our attention to the thing n’importe quoi— no matter what it is. (30) Anything with finite qualities is obviously too specific to be relevant to global ontological questions. To an equal degree, something possessing all qualities (think of Whitehead’s God) 20 would not be n’importe quoi either, since it would still be too definite, even if incredibly vast. The same holds for contradictions, since these all differ from each other. The square circle, the non-white black white, and the non-city city are all too distinct to count as the thing no matter what it is. The n’importe quoi must be devoid of all specific qualities, including contradictory ones. In one of the more intriguing points in his book, so reminiscent of Meinong, Garcia proclaims that “the ‘no matter what it is’ is neither a reality nor an abstract construction, nor both of these at once; the ‘no matter what it is’ is simply the plane of equality of that which is real, that which is possible, that which is inexistent, that which is past, that which is impossible, that which is true, that which is false, that which is bad.”(39-40) Since everything has two faces, it would be a grievous mistake to focus on just one of them at the expense of the other, as physicalism or materialism do when reducing the world to minuscule physical underpinnings. For scientistic materialism, “it is either atoms, particles, or fields of force... which are the things.” (47-48) Moreover, “these more-than-things are accompanied by less-than-things: for example, ideas or facts of consciousness are determined by the state of matter and are not autonomous things, but manifestations reduced to secondary effects of material processes...” (48) On this point, Garcia’s position is in complete accord with my own critique of undermining and overmining. 21 Where we disagree is that Garcia is more deeply suspicious of the notion of substance, which I view as salvageable with a few needed changes, while Garcia sees this operation as hopeless: “A substance, in the history of philosophy, is the more-than-thing par excellence.” (51) Another agreement between our positions is visible when Garcia claims (correctly, in my opinion) “that it is vain to distinguish between things which are material and those which are not.” (52) Yet we also find an even more important disagreement, since for Garcia withdrawal cannot be the quality of a thing. Instead, the absence of a thing is simultaneous with it, embodied in all that is not it– the absence of the sculpture of a woman is to be found in the mold that appears at the same time as it, and thus withdrawal must be viewed as an “event” rather than as something pertaining to an object. For Garcia, nothing withdraws beyond access. Since we must distinguish between “that which is something” and “that which something is,” and since the former is identified with “no matter what it is is” and the latter with “ not no matter what it is,” we can say that “everything is thus a milieu, a fragile link between ‘no matter what it is’ and ‘ not no matter what it is.’” (62) And here we find Garcia’s critique of the thing-in-itself: “A thing is never defined en bloc . We can affirm that a thing is this or that, but that does not suffice. It is still necessary to state precisely that which is this thing .” (62) Stated differently, “something is not in itself : for that which is in the thing is not the thing, and that in which the thing is is not the thing.” (62) And here Garcia and I, facing the same evidence, draw opposite conclusions. For me, the fact that nothing can be identified with either its components or its concrete location means that the thing must be something in-itself distinct from both of these. Yet for Garcia, to be in-itself would mean to be identified with just one of these two extreme terms, and hence the thing can only be the difference between them. Garcia is equally suspicious of the classical tendency to view “unity” as a property of the thing, since in his eyes unity is too relational a property to belong to things. (65) While specific things are situated determinately with respect to other things, we are still speaking here about the thing no matter what it is, and this can be viewed only in terms of solitude, which all things share: a human being, a hand, or a chair or all equally things insofar as they are on their own , not insofar as they are one . (64) A thing is alone, and relates only to the one thing that is not another thing: world. In a striking parallel to my own argument for a partial revival of occasionalism, Garcia tells us that “the things communicate only by their solitude: it is because everything is equally on its own in the world that things can be together, enmeshed in one another.” (67) Alone in their solitude, things all relate to world, which serves as a mediator allowing them to become mixed up in one another. As we have seen, one reason that nothing can be in itself is because everything is in something else. For Garcia, “to be in something and to be something are equivalent.” (69) Stated more broadly, “being is thus the difference between the two aspects of each thing: that which is it, and that which it is.” (70) And even more vividly: “a thing is almost like a sack: there is that which one puts in the sack and that which remains outside the sack.” (70) But not quite like a sack, “since a thing is not a thin skin or film. Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between that which is this thing and that which thing is, between content and container.” (71) Nothing can be in-itself because everything is two selves at once. For example, we cannot say that our self is defined by our consciousness: “Everything has a self because nothing is in itself. The self is not the quality of that which is related to itself (which is conscious, for example) or which thinks itself related to itself. Nonetheless, for an entity called ‘conscious’ to be related to itself, it is necessary that this very relation should be another thing than the self to which it is related.” (71) Consciousness cannot be the self, precisely because it is other than that of which it is conscious. Nothing is able to grasp itself. The self is “the function by which being and composition [ compréhension ] are mutually excluded...” (72) The self is “the point of shadow of everything that projects some light...” (72) The in-itself faces two opposite dangers: “For something to be in-itself is to be a self. Something which is a self flies out through one of its two sides... Stated differently, being in-itself is simply the possibility of a double failure.” (73) The in-itself can be termed compact : “There remains to us a means of thinking that which does not fully enter into the world, though without exiting from it. This means is what we call the compact.” (76) In a sense, the compact is the opposite of the world. For in the case of the world, everything enters it and it enters nothing; as for the compact, it enters the world (since it is something, after all) while nothing enters it. (77) The compact marks the presence of the impossible in the world. (78) It is not impossible, but possible only on the condition that it fails. (78) The time has come to speak of where a thing is located. “The sole condition of a thing is that of being in another thing than itself, and thus in another thing than something.” (78) A condition is “that which determines something, that which forms something, that in which something is.” (78) As for humans, “the condition of someone is his situation; my social condition is that which socially determines me, my place and my function...” (79) More generally, “to be conditioned is to find oneself reduced to that in which one is.” (79) Everything is conditioned, but nothing is reducible to this condition. To determine the condition of something is to determine in what it is. A thing is located in that which contradicts it, just as a statue exists in its mold, which is precisely that which it is not. Since the thing is finite and definite, its condition or form must be infinite and indefinite. That in which all things are is the world, which Garcia also terms “the whole.” (81) “To try to be in-itself is to attempt to remain outside the world. And indeed, to try to be in-itself is only a path of entry into the world.” (83) For Garcia, “the world is not the pre-existent container of the things it contains, a priori , nor the construction by the mind of a fictional ensemble of all things, a posteriori .” (85) Instead, the world is simultaneous with all things; the two always go together. The world cannot be a determinate world, such as the physical universe or mathematical space, since these are already too specific and limited. “Every determinate world, which is in fact a universe , is a ‘big thing’ [ grosse chose ]: it is a set, however vast, of composite things which itself embodies a thing.” (85) Every determinate world is really just a “big thing.” Stated differently, “it is nothing other than a balanced milieu between the things that compose it and the thing that it composes.” (85) We generally picture the world as a physical univer. (shrink)

In The Mysterious Relations to the East, Lin Ma takes a stance against a recent trend to see in Heidegger a thinker whose thought has been formed in an 'intercultural dialogue' with the Asian, Oriental tradition of thinking. In fact, Lin Ma demonstrates, words like 'Morning-Land', 'Orient', 'East' or 'Asia' can be shown to refer in each case to the beginning of philosophy in preSocratic, Greek thought. Thus to speak of the "mysterious relations [of (...) class='Hi'>philosophy] to the East" is not to speak of a relation of European philosophy with other traditions of thinking, but rather concerns an investigation into the very roots of European philosophy itself. Despite Heidegger's concerns with the possibility of 'inter-cultural' dialogue, as evidenced, for example, in A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer, such a dialogue has to be questioned in its very possibility in order to avoid relapsing into the universalistic language of metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relevance of Maurice Merleau- Ponty's criticism of what he labels "objective thinking", in the light of contemporary political discussions. I compare his critique of the mutually exclusive categories of objective thinking, with Edward W. Said's analysis of Orientalism and its dichotomies between Orient and Occident as constitutive of highly material relationships of power. Especially after the 9.11 events, reasoning in terms of dichotomies between East and West, islam and civilization/freedom and so (...) on has been prevalent in the discourse of politicians, journalists as well as intellectuals. Is there something that Merleau- Ponty's philosophy can teach us here? I claim that his view of the interdependency of language on the one hand, understanding and thinking on the other, is of highest importance here, since it shows that we have to undermine the established discourse from the inside, working out the complex differences of reality at the same time as forgin out new less rigid categories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion by Selusi AmbrogioCatherine König-Pralong (bio)Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion. By Selusi Ambrogio. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. How Modern Historians of Philosophy Drew Their World MapsIn his latest book, Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in (...) Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion, Selusi Ambrogio presents an extensive survey of how Indian and Chinese traditions were conceived of and staged in modern European historiography. This study, which surpasses in detail and scope other works devoted to the same topic,1 reconstructs 150 years of philosophical historiography. Otto van Heurn's Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum libri duo (published in 1600) included for the first time contemporary and ancient Indian thinkers in the philosophical doxography; at the other end of the time span considered, Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1744) sanctioned the exclusion of Chinese and Indian thinkers by means of a detailed criticism of their pseudo-philosophies. Moreover, Ambrogio makes the choice to focus on the history of philosophy, unlike Étiemble, for example,2 who was interested in philosophy in a broad sense—academic and non-academic—as well as in travel accounts, the writings of the Jesuits, and those of their opponents, among other sources. According to Ambrogio, the histories of philosophy were more representative of "the common European understanding of these civilizations," since they "were not openly written for controversialist aims" (p. 2). Even though one may wonder whether defining philosophy ("what philosophy is and its role"—ibid.) and legitimizing its scholarly practice is a less political or less polemical undertaking than pamphlets, letters, and philosophical essays,3 it is probably true that philosophical historiography produced an effect of objectification or an appearance of neutrality.The author's main thesis is that the exclusion of all non-Greeks or non-Europeans from the history of philosophy does not date from the nineteenth century and Hegel, as is generally thought, but precisely from the moment when Indian and Chinese "civilizations" were considered by historians of philosophy and included in the philosophical historiography: from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards (p. 3). Applying a segregationist model, modern historians of philosophy developed a dialectic of [End Page 203] identification—the author speaks of "reception"—and exclusion. They defined the European philosophical mind by demarcating it from other ways of thinking, which they situated in place and time on a civilizational world map. Encompassing the world from Europe produced in return processes of definition and situation. Philosophy was established in a territory and identified with a "culture" or "mind" that began to think itself in relation to the rest of the world under the name of Europe.4I will discuss Ambrogio's remarkable work in three moments. First, I will develop some particularly interesting conclusions drawn from the study; namely, they address periodization, the production of cultural categories, and the valorization of theory. I will then discuss the main thesis as well as some problematic issues, before concluding on the subject of a world absent from Ambrogio's book, the Near and Middle East.I. Logic of Time and Cultural TerritorializationAmbrogio's book is composed of three parts that address three successive historiographical models. First, the "perennialist universalism" (p. 57)—represented by, among others, Otto van Heurn, Thomas Burnet, Isaac Vossius, François Bernier, Georg Horn, and François de la Mothe le Vayer—included ancient India and then China in the "prisca theologia"; on the other hand, it described contemporary Indian and Chinese thinkers as "barbarian" philosophers. In this constellation, Buddhism began to function as the negative part of Oriental thought. According to the Jesuits, it had polluted and corrupted the original Chinese wisdom, often identified with Confucianism.The second model constructed an "Atheistic Asia," which was used either as a positive anthropological image (for example in Pierre Bayle), or as a negative foil for Lutheran philosophy and theology (for example in Johann Franz Buddeus). In the pages he dedicates to these endeavors, Ambrogio often moves away from philosophical doxography, represented by André-Fran... (shrink)

Western thought has dominated scientific development for a long time, and nursing has not escaped the influence of such ideology. Nurse scholars, in an attempt to fit the dominant scientific ideology, typically have had to struggle with non-empirical elements of nursing. This orientation in science, however, may have contributed inadvertently to a form of scientific ethnocentrism in the culture of inquiry in nursing as in other fields. The result has been a narrow view of science and knowledge and failure to (...) recognize the potential significance of Eastern philosophy in nursing knowledge development. Recently, intensive cultural exchanges between the East and the West have contributed to Western scientists becoming aware of the limits of Western linear thinking and concomitant efforts to explore the mysteries of Eastern philosophy. In this article, we explore Buddhism as one example of such philosophies that have great potential to enrich nursing as it continues to strive for definition and identity. (shrink)

The primary purpose here is to ascertain what Heidegger's comportment toward East-West dialogue is most plausibly like in the light of his philosophical concerns and orientations. Considering that one should not uncritically take at face value occasional remarks by Heidegger that seem to suggest that he is preparing an East-West dialogue, we will proceed from Heidegger's own path of thinking and bring to light fundamental presuppositions in his thought and the response he may accordingly give to the (...) issue of East-West dialogue. (shrink)

William Haas (1883-1956) was born in Nuremberg and received his PhD. at Munich in 1910. He traveled widely throughout the Middle East and taught at universities in Germany, Iran and the United States. After a lifetime studying the thoughts and cultures of the East, he formulated the thesis laid out here in his final book: that East and West are not mere geographical or even racial distinctions, but two radically different types of consciousness, two fundamentally different orientations (...) and ways of thinking. "Professor Haas attacks-and I believe, demolishes-an assumption that underlies almost all modern theories of history: that the minds of all human beings, if not defective or disordered, work in essentially the same way.... [He] has, I believe, done for the study of comparative history what Böhr did for atomic physics." - Revilo Oliver. (shrink)

Heidegger scholars have sometimes assumed that Heidegger’s experience of thinking was unprecedented and that the peculiarity of his idiom was related to the novelty of that experience. Reinhard May’s study suggests that Heidegger’s thought is fundamentally indebted to his early familiarity with Zen Buddhist ideas and to his reading of Taoist classics, including the Tao te Ching of Lao Tse and the works of Chuang Zu, in German translations Heidegger knew by Victor von Strauss, Martin Buber and Richard Wilhelm, (...) and, later, to his contact with Chinese and Japanese philosophers studying in Germany with Rickert, Husserl and Heidegger himself. Many European artists and intellectuals were engrossed by East Asian ideas, of course, but May’s conclusion is that Heidegger was in a sense a Taoist philosopher, and that the peculiarities of his philosophy are the same as those which inhere in East Asian philosophy, which prizes silence and rejects the hegemony of Western logic. While Heidegger’s appreciation for East Asian philosophy and his influence on modern Japanese thinkers have been noted often enough, the suggestion that the heart of Heidegger’s thought was profoundly oriented in the early 1920s by Taoist and Zen Buddhist ideas is provocative. The translator, Graham Parkes, who has supplemented his translation with an essay detailing Heidegger’s contact with Japanese philosophers, was among the first to suggest a deeper connection between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy in a series of essays he edited on Heidegger and Asian Thought, which includes contributions by Japanese and Chinese philosophers who knew Heidegger and were in contact with him for many years. (shrink)

Jung was fascinated by the east. Through his commentaries on such texts as the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and through his essays on such topics as Zen, meditation and the symbolism of the mandala, Jung attempted to build a bridge of understanding between western psychology and the ancient ideas and practices of eastern religion. By doing so he hoped to relate traditional eastern thought to modern western concerns. John Clarke's latest book seeks to uncover (...) Jung's dialogue with the east. The book will appeal to all those who wish to broaden their understanding of Jung's thought as well as to those who value eastern ways of thinking and who believe that by engaging with it westerners have much to gain both intellectually and spiritually. (shrink)

Starting from Kant's striking question 'What is orientation in thinking?', this book argues that the main challenge facing global normative theorising lies in its failure to acknowledge its conceptual inadequacies. We do not know how to reason globally; instead, we tend to apply our domestic political experiences to the global context. Katrin Flikschuh argues that we must develop a form of global reasoning that is sensitive to the variability of contexts: rather than trying to identify a uniquely shareable set (...) of substantive principles, we need to appreciate and understand local reasons for action. Her original and incisive study shows how such reasoning can benefit from the open-ended nature of Kant's systematic but non-dogmatic philosophical thinking, and from reorientation from a domestic to a non-domestic frame of thought. It will appeal to all those interested in global moral issues, as well as to Kant scholars. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs a contribution to comparative East-West poetics, this essay descries a common resource of Western and classical Chinese literatures in certain “apophatic” modes of thought and discourse that are oriented to what cannot be said, to what is manifest only in and through a certain evasion and defiance of all efforts to verbalize and conceptualize it. This argument is developed in critical counterpoint with the work of interpreting Chinese classical poetry and thought by the French philosopher and sinologist François (...) Jullien. Jullien acutely apprehends and elegantly expounds the deeply apophatic bent of Chinese poetics. However, he sets Chinese thought and poetry categorically apart from Western approaches, whereas my analysis brings them together under the aegis of their common inspiration from the experience of the limits of language vis-à-vis an unspeakable origin of thinking and its source in reality. (shrink)

This article critically extends Kant's 1786 discussion of “orientation in thinking” to ask what it means to “orient oneself in thinking” around the concepts of race and sex, addressed in the context of 1) the central place and historical importance of Kant in Western philosophy; and 2) Kant's theory of race and its relation to his critical philosophy. As presumptions about race and sex are already built into the history of philosophy, taking these concepts as (...) an explicit orientation is not the expression of subjective interests, but a reflection and criticism of some of the objective forces that shape the world and have shaped the history of philosophy. An intellectual orientation around the concepts of race or sex can thus be understood as a critical position in relation to the problematic “historical universality” of these concepts, with the aim of transforming the false universality of biological race thinking, in particular, into the historical universality of critical social analysis. (shrink)

In the past centuries, most Muslims have encountered modern science as a Western import. To avoid being overwhelmed by the military and commercial advantages enjoyed by technologically advanced nations, Middle Eastern Muslim societies had to begin adopting modern knowledge. As westernization started to shape social structures and institutions as well as technologies, conservative Muslim responses to modern science typically became conditioned by the demands of cultural defense. Many Muslim thinkers argued that upholding the religious character of Muslim civilization meant borrowing (...) technology but rejecting the perceived materialism pervading the conceptual frameworks of modern science. This defensive approach remains prominent in present Muslim thinking about science. Almost all religiously oriented Muslim thinkers take harmony between science and Islam for granted, but in practice, conservative Muslims often express deep reservations about the naturalistic perspectives dominating modern science. Especially in the popular literature, religiously motivated distortions of science are common. Darwinian evolution is a particular target of rejection. (shrink)

: The primary purpose here is to ascertain what Heidegger's comportment toward East-West dialogue is most plausibly like in the light of his philosophical concerns and orientations. Considering that one should not uncritically take at face value occasional remarks by Heidegger that seem to suggest that he is preparing an East-West dialogue, we will proceed from Heidegger's own path of thinking and bring to light fundamental presuppositions in his thought and the response he may accordingly give to (...) the issue of East-West dialogue. (shrink)

An introduction to comparative philosophy relates European and Oriental philosophies and brings to light such aspects of Eastern philosophy as intellectuality, reasoning, and logical analysis usually associated with Western thought.

The intended title was “Universe Oriented Ontology” or “Multiverse Oriented Ontology”, or “Universe or Multiverse Metaphysics”. I mention this as it gives an idea about the meaning and intention of the title and the work as well as the titles I considered and why I moved away from them to the present one. The sub-title provides a further hint towards the intentions of the work, namely: ” Beyond Earth- and Human-centricity’. I opted for ‘transcending’ rather than beyond, as I am (...) still in the process of describing the process of transcending and many of the ideas I am obliged to use from our conceptual system and practices are still earth- and anthropo-centered, And, they have not yet gone to a state beyond those two -isms. I say something about universe-centeredness, then about planet earth as point and frame of reference and anthropo-centricity. The socio-cultural practice of philosophy and the doing of philosophy is merely one of many human, social and cultural practices. I post different notions of philosophy by a number of writers, some of them philosophers. These notions are about their perceptions of what philosophy is. Few of them go into detail about the subject-matter of philosophy. No one really deal with the aims, purposes and objectives of the discipline and none deal with the nature of the doing of philosophy or philosophizing. Activities that I suggest resemble certain features of the processes of theorizing. I end with explorations of possible characteristics of original- and creative thinkers. I do this by mentioning a number of themes of meta-philosophy listed and described by Peter Suber. I make a number of comments in them and highlight aspects relevant to these type of thinkers. One find them of course in all disciplines and socio-cultural [racticesand disciplines be they the arts,humanities, sciences, etc. I am of course specifically concerned with original andcreative thinkers inthe Western tradition of philosophy. As I am a radical and absolute sceptic, I end with an article on this theme. It is said by everyone, for example Hume, Russell and Pascal, that such a radical position is psychologically impossible and that it cannot be lived 24/7. Pascal for example opted for believe or faith and he and a number of writers suggest that that is the only way out and the final position of radical sceptics. I disagree with him. (shrink)

This insightful explication of oriental philosophy meets a long felt need for a critical introduction to four systems of eastern thought—Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism—presented in familiar western terms. Students of comparative religion, eastern philosophy and civilization, and the philosophy of religion who have been trained in traditional western modes of thought often find the intuitive and aphorisic quality of eastern writing a major stumbling block to understanding. This is eastern philosophy presented to westerners by (...) a westerner, a practical and understandable guide for students and for others who wish to expand their understanding in this important area. (shrink)

Bhattacharyya, K. The Advaita concept of subjectivity.--Deutsch, E. Reflections on some aspects of the theory of rasa.--Nakamura, H. The dawn of modern thought in the East.--Organ, T. Causality, Indian and Greek.--Chatterjee, M. On types of classification.--Lacombe, O. Transcendental imagination.--Bahm, A. J. Standards for comparative philosophy.--Herring, H. Appearance, its significance and meaning in the history of philosophy.--Chang Chung-yuan. Pre-rational harmony in Heidegger's essential thinking and Chʼan thought.--Staal, J. F. Making sense of the Buddhist tetralemma.--Enomiya-Lassalle, H. M. The (...) mysticism of Carl Albrecht and Zen.--Parrinder, G. The nature of mysticism.--Cairns, G. E. Axiological contributions of East and West to the spiritual development of mankind.--Mayeda, S. Śaṇkara's view of ethics.--Mercier, A. On peace.--Barlingay, S. S. A discussion of some aspects of Gaudapāda's philosophy. (shrink)

Illustrations: 31 Figures Description: The present work is a masterful compilation which, from its nature and scope, and from the method followed in its preparation, exhibits that it is not merely a dictionary, but it is in fact more than that. Arranged alphabetically, this dictionary has been conceived on a large scale and written by a deft hand. The work is divided into two volumes. Volume I deals with India and the Middle East and contains 2250 titles, and volume (...) II deals with China and Japan and has 1500 titles, and together they cover the vast field of Oriental philosophy, encompassing all human experiences and disciplines. Captured in the pages of this monumental work are the lives of the prophets, social and religious reformers, Asian philosophies and spiritual disciplines of the living faiths of the east. The dictionary is destined to be welcomed as an exhaustive work on comparative religion also, inasmuch as it covers the whole ground of Oriental philosophy and its tangents. The entire volume is a combination of scholarly knowledge and spiritual awareness; their importance therefore is both to scholars and seekers of truth. There is perhaps no other work on record that accomplishes both ends-the propounding of the custom of the peoples of the Orient and an insight into their spiritual ideals both ancient and modern. All in all, the Dictionary of Oriental Philosophy may be judges to have been written by a hand of master dialectician with perception and exactitude. (shrink)

Another major event, still anticipated, and growing out of the first, is the expected publication of a new journal of comparative philosophy, Philosophy East and West, edited by Charles A. Moore, probably in April, 1951. Early plans called for a Board of Editors composed equally of Easterners and Westerners, with special editors for some countries, such as India, China, Japan, Ceylon. This project, which has many well-wishers, may prove to be one of the outstanding philosophical achievements of (...) the century. (shrink)

In this presentation I take a close look at Kant’s notion of “orientation” as it arises in a minor essay of 1786 in order to show how this relatively obscure moment forces us to reconsider the central division between epistemology and aesthetics. What makes Kant’s notion orientation difficult to place in a critical system that separates conceptually grounded cognition from the affective nature of aesthetics is that orientations turn out to be claims to knowledge which can not be had without (...) an irreducible aesthetic or “felt” discrimination. So what is philosophically at issue in examining Kant’s notion of orientation is the question of whether there are indeed some features of objects or states of affairs which are not properly recognized prior to or independently of feeling a certain way about them. In other words, are our feelings epistemologically relevant? The official Kantian answer is, of course, a resounding “no”. By reconstructing the logic of “orientation” as deployed in the 1786 essay I show where the attempt to separate cognition from feelings leads into a vicious “Kantian Circle”. This logical circularity anticipates similar problems in the third critique’s explanation of beauty and life. I end by returning to the notion of “orientation” in order to suggest a way out of this “Kantian Circle”. (shrink)

The late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, uniquely combined art historian, philosopher, orientalist, linguist, and expositor in his person. His knowledge of the arts and handcrafts of the Orient was unexcelled and his numerous monographs on Oriental art either established or revolutionized entire fields. He was also a great Orientalist, with an almost unmatched understanding of traditional culture. He covered the philosophic and religious experience of the entire premodern world, (...) class='Hi'>east and west, and for him primitive, medieval European, and classical Indian experiences of truth and art were only different dialects in a common language. Finally, Coomaraswamy was a provocative writer, whose erudition was expressed in a delightful, aphoristic style. The nine essays in this book are among his most stimulating. They discuss such matters as the true function of aesthetics in art, the importance of symbolism, and the importance of intellectual and philosophical background to the artists; they demonstrate that abstract art and primitive art, despite superficial resemblances, are completely divergent; and they deal with the common philosophy which pervades all great art, the nature of medieval art, folklore, and modern art, the beauty inherent in mathematics, and the union of traditional symbolism and individual portraiture in premodern cultures. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

An important question in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and its associated literature is how OOO relates to its competitor theories. This article is a meta-philosophical investigation into OOO and its grounding, which hopes to fully theorise this relation, deriving ultimately a “negative dialectic” that emphasises the irreducible differences between OOO and non-OOO. Beginning by analysing the use of OOO as a “starting point”, I consider Althusser’s various contributions to meta-philosophical debates. This leads me to focus on Harman’s notion of “hyperbolic reading”, (...) and on how attempts to hyperbolically ground OOO force it to immanently include its competitors. Finally, I apply these insights to systematise both the negative dialectical relation between OOO and non-OOO and the becoming-OOO of thinking, by applying Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy. (shrink)

"Special attention is paid to the sacred texts in each system, as well as to the life stories of such major figures as the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-Tzu."--Cover.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is "Chinese Philosophy" a Proper Name?A Response to Rein RaudCarine DefoortIn the preface to his Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, Hu Shi wrote: "Today, the two main branches of philosophy meet and influence each other. Whether or not in fifty years or one hundred a sort of world philosophy will finally arise cannot yet be ascertained."1 Although uncertain, Hu was still hopeful, since (...) he believed that the two major traditions of modern world philosophy, founded in Europe and China, had finally met. That was in 1919. Now, almost a century later, we can respond to Hu's speculation with relative certainty: a world philosophy has not arisen and is not on the rise. In fact, the situation is much worse: Chinese ancient thought is not even considered "philosophy" by most Western specialists in the field.For Feng Youlan, Hu's contemporary, this lack of recognition had become a major frustration by the end of his life. Feng earnestly felt that "parts of classical Chinese philosophy have a contribution to make to the elevating of man's spiritual sphere and in solving universal problems in human life."2 But on the last page of the last volume of his New Edition of the History of Chinese Philosophy, completed a few weeks before his death in November 1990, Feng concluded that Western philosophers had not even begun to consider ancient Chinese thought to be worthy of their attention: "Chinese traditional philosophy has always been regarded as a part of sinological studies and is considered as having no relation to philosophy."3 Feng's sentiment is still widely shared today; for instance, in the Yearbook of Chinese Philosophy for 2001, Zheng Jiadong remarks that "in the West, especially in Europe, the legitimacy of 'Chinese philosophy' has always been questioned; 'Chinese philosophy' [End Page 625] has to a large extent been considered a strange thing of questionable antecedents."4 Others confirm that "Chinese thinking has been all but excluded from the discipline of philosophy in Western seats of learning."5Indeed, various eminent European philosophers, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and, more recently, Jacques Derrida on his visit to Shanghai in 2001,6 have proclaimed that ancient Chinese thought is not really philosophy. Kant, for example, stated that "Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.... Their teacher Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for the princes."7 Even sinology scholars sometimes wonder whether ancient Chinese thought ought to be labeled "philosophy."8 But more powerful than such explicit rejections of the legitimacy of "Chinese philosophy," which are nowadays relatively rare, is the dominant and implicit Western (especially European) view, embedded in the organization of academic conferences, journals, university curricula (as Feng Youlan remarked), and bookstores, that ancient China did not have philosophy. The average European bookstore, for instance, does not display the Laozi or Yijing on the "philosophy" shelf, but rather among various types of wisdom or practical knowledge, between Celtic myths, herbal medicine, and the art of astrology. However unobtrusive, this organizational given reveals more clearly and influentially than any contemporary scholar explicitly states, that the name "Chinese philosophy" for the Chinese masters and some Classics is not proper—or, to put it in ancient Chinese terms: this ming 名 is not zheng 正.9The twenty-first century, however, has seen strong indications of change, not in the sense that "Chinese philosophy" is now being generally accepted as one of the two main branches of world philosophy, as Hu Shi had hoped, but in the sense that the debate has been reopened, both in China and in the West. In China, the appropriateness of the label "Chinese philosophy" for ancient Chinese thought was questioned by some leading scholars in the first part of the twentieth century. But in the last decade the matter has been experienced as a crisis and challenge, and has been discussed much more broadly and vividly by Chinese academia: conferences are being dedicated to the question of the "legitimacy of 'Chinese philosophy"' (Zhongguo zhexue hefaxing 中国哲学的合法性), newspapers report on it, and some journals devote whole forums to it.10 About one hundred articles or chapters related... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural DifferenceDavid Jones and John A. SweeneyIntimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. By Thomas P. Kasulis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 183. Paper $14.95.Back in the early days of cross-cultural inquiry, scholars gained some territory in the understanding of cultural difference by focusing their attention on the distinction between the individualistic and the collective. Asians, especially (...) East Asians, were seen as motivated by collectivism, whereas Westerners were firmly rooted in individuality. This distinction afforded some comprehension of cultural difference and served a limited purpose in those early days of trying to understand Asia as a whole and the vast reach of difference among various Asian groups. However, we quickly outgrew our dependence on this distinction, although we continued to insist on making use of it. Thomas Kasulis offers us a new heuristic in his recent book Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference, which is based on his 1998 Gilbert Ryle Lectures at Trent University.The book begins with a series of anecdotes, which is most fitting for what the author has in mind. These seemingly simple stories of cultural misunderstanding actually point to profound differences between Asian and Western cultural perspectives. Kasulis, however, rightly extends the boundaries of his discussion to traverse not only Asian/Western differences but also variations between cultures and subcultures as well. The thesis of the book addresses the too simplistic notion that Asians are simply more collectivist than their Western counterparts, and this thesis applies as well to differences within the structure of any culture's grand narrative. Put directly, the thesis is that there are recursive cultural patterns that orient themselves in two basic ways: "intimacy" and "integrity." These patterns reiterate themselves into complex theoretical manifestations through understandings of fact/value, what is and what should be (p. 11).Aware that he might easily fall into the old trap of a simplistic differentiating between "them and us," Kasulis is quick to point out that "it is unlikely that any culture is ever a perfect example of either an intimacy-dominant or integrity-dominant culture" (p. 11). In other words, "intimacy" and "integrity" (unlike collectivism and individualism) are both positive terms that continually, and recursively, foreground and background themselves in any given culture. For example, Americans, with their penchant for individuality and the benefits arising from it, such as the notion of rights, also value and understand intimacy as a feeling that is primary to one's being either a member of a family, a member of a group, or a citizen of a country. And to think that individuality has no value whatsoever in Asia or that there are no "individuals" in Asia is just being simpleminded. These two different ways of relating—intimacy and integrity—are explored in connection to the key relations of self/world, self/other, knower/known, thing/thing, and so forth (p. 13) throughout the book, as reflected in the chapter titles: "Cultural Orientations," "What Is Intimacy?" "What [End Page 603] Is Integrity?" "Intimacy and Integrity as Worldviews: Epistemology, Analysis and Argument, and Metaphysics," "The Normative Dimensions of Intimacy and Integrity: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics," and "Intercultural Conflict: When Intimacy and Integrity Collide."An important concern of this book, and an issue that is often overlooked by philosophers, is that philosophy is both a product and a producer of culture. If culture even becomes a matter of philosophical discussion, it is often cast in terms of a "philosophy of culture," that is, a part of our understanding of the role that culture plays in the more universal context of human existence (p. 13). Kasulis reminds us, however, of another (and perhaps more important) dimension of the study of what he calls "cultural philosophy," and that is that "philosophy itself is a cultural enterprise" (p. 14). By viewing philosophy in this way philosophers are able to check their tendency to believe erroneously that philosophy is a discipline that can achieve an understanding of, or even attempt to search for, universal, eternal, and transcultural truths. Kasulis points out that this too is a "tendency... related to cultural conditions" (p. 14); hence, "philosophy and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shape of Ancient ThoughtWill S. RasmussenThe Shape of Ancient Thought. By Thomas McEvilley. New York: Allworth Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvi + 732. $35.00.The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilley's magnum opus of over thirty years' preparation, draws together an encyclopedic array of texts and archaeological evidence from Greece and India, which he employs in clearly written arguments toward an answer to a volatile question: just how indebted (...) to each other are India and Greece for their philosophical ideas and techniques? The subject is volatile in that it often arouses the rancor of challenged claims to intellectual property or cultural superiority, and the author shows admirable sensitivity by arguing to his conclusions in a way that explicitly eschews the lesser motives of rivalry and self-aggrandizement; instead he promotes the appreciation of a passion and genius for philosophy that is shared equally in the East and the West. McEvilley has collected for his purposes a treasury of key passages from Greek and Indian philosophy, and this review will seek to give some idea of the vast scope of his work and to assess its contribution to our understanding of philosophy.In his Foreword McEvilley says that his book will challenge a dichotomy, which prevails in Western thinking, that divides the ancient world of thought into Greek and non-Greek. Greek thought is characterized as that which is rational, and non Greek thought as that which is irrational, antirational, or at least nonrational. He faults E. R. Dodds' The Greek and the Irrational for supporting this dichotomy, by which Orphism and even certain elements of Plato become assigned, solely by virtue of their nonrational character, to Oriental provenance. He condemns as "deeply and glaringly false" W.K.C. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy for disparaging the comparison of Indian and Greek philosophy on the grounds that their motives, methods, and background of thought are so utterly different. In such a spirit he undertakes to prove by argumentation and a "sea of evidence" the invalidity of so brusque a dismissal of Indian philosophy.The rest of the Foreword explores how the post-Enlightenment "Oriental Renaissance," that is, the discovery by nineteenth-century Europe of India as "the primal [End Page 182] font of wisdom," aroused troubling questions about racial and cultural superiority. McEvilley traces claims and counterclaims made by philologists, historians, philosophers, and art historians who asserted the hierarchical status of India relative to classical Greece as the source of Western culture. He shows how attitudes toward colonialism in India from the eighteenth century up to the present day have further fueled the politicization of scholarship about India. The scope of this controversy ranges from the view that in the second millennium B.C.E. white invaders called Aryans brought into India both Sanskrit and all that is of any cultural value there, to the view that the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion is a racist myth, that there was virtually no foreign intervention in Indian history, and that India was the origin of all the world's civilizations. He commends the attempts since World War II to approach afresh the question of intercultural influence between East and West, including the founding of Philosophy East and West in 1951, and he declares his own view, which forms the main thesis of the book, namely that there were "significant intrusions first from India to Greece in the pre-Socratic period, and then from Greece back to India in the Hellenistic period" (p. xxxi).In chapter 1 McEvilley presents archaeological evidence from as early as the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. of trade between the Near East and India, and between the Near East and Greece. He argues for "full East-West transport of goods" through the intermediary of the Near East around 1500 to 1300 B.C.E. (p. 4). He argues that by the seventh century B.C.E. the activity of Phoenician merchants and the Persian conquests eastward and westward facilitated the transmission of ideas between the Near East and Greece via the "diffusion channels" of merchants, artisans, mercenaries, philosophers, physicians, and seers. He argues for similar diffusion channels between the... (shrink)

This essay investigates, via the concepts of the philosophy of orientation, Annie Duke’s decision-making theory in "Thinking in Bets" and scrutinizes as to what extent one can universalize the 'orientation skill' of decision-making with regard to our everyday and professional life.

Abstract. Scholars have long debated the possibility of a mystical or illuminationist strain of thought in Ibn Sīnā 's body of writing. This debate has often focused on the meaning and contents of his partly lost work al-Mashriqiyyūn (The Easterners), also known as al-Ḥikma al-Mashriqiyya (EasternWisdom), mentioned by Ibn Sīnā himself as well as by numerous Western writers including Ibn Rushd and Ibn Ṭufayl. A handful of references to what is called Ibn Sīnā 's “Oriental Philosophy” are also (...) found in the Castilian and Hebrew works of the Castilian Jew Abner of Burgos (ca. 1270-ca.1347), known after his conversion to Christianity as Alfonso of Valladolid. Although the content of these citations has not been identified, it has been proposed that they may preserve otherwise unknown passages from Ibn Sīnā's lost work. This study considers the references to Ibn Sīnā 's so-called “Oriental Philosophy” within Abner's writings and concludes that rather than preserving lost passages from Ibn Sīnā's writing, Abner's references were drawn primarily from Ibn Ṭufayl and offer no support for the argument of a possible mystical or illuminationist strain in Ibn Sīnā 's thinking. -/- Résumé. Depuis longtemps, on a discuté de la possible présence d'une orientation mystique ou “illuminative” dans l'oeuvre d'Ibn Sīnā . Le sens et le contenu de son ouvrage (partiellement perdu) al-Mashriqiyyūn (Les Orientaux), également connu comme al-Ḥikma al-Mashriqiyya (La Sagesse orientale), mentionné par Ibn Sīnā lui-même et par des écrivains occidentaux comme Ibn Rushd et Ibn Ṭufayl, ont souvent été au centre de ce débat. On trouve aussi quelques références à ce qui est appelé la “philosophie orientale” d'Ibn Sīnā dans l'oeuvre du juif castillan Abner de Burgos (ca. 1270-ca. 1347) connu après sa conversion au christianisme sous le nom d'Alphonse de Valladolid. Sans avoir au préalable identifié le contenu de ces citations, on a fait l'hypothèse qu'elles auraient permis de conserver des passages, inconnus par ailleurs, de l'ouvrage perdu d'Ibn Sīnā. Cette étude porte sur les références à la “philosophie orientale” d'Ibn Sīnā dans l'oeuvre d'Abner de Burgos. Elle montre que les références d'Abner semblent avoir été essentiellement tirées d'Ibn Ṭufayl et ne renvoient donc pas aux passages perdus de l'ouvrage d'Ibn Sīnā. En conséquence elles ne peuvent servir d'argument pour confirmer la présence d'une orientation mystique ou “illuminative” dans l'oeuvre d'Ibn Sīnā. (shrink)

Official Czech philosophy has been dominated by a mix of Engelsian philosophy of science and positivism, a combination explained in part by the survival of positivism in Czechoslovakia and the failure of analytic philosophy to make inroads into Czech thinking. However, due to Jan Patoka' 's influence in espousing the works of Husserl and Heidegger, there was an anthropologically oriented Marxism although its successes were greater abroad than in Czechoslovakia. A more neopositivistic variant of Marxism also (...) appeared, but it was a short-lived phenomenon without purchase on mainstream philosophy.A certain renewal of Czech philosophy was evident before 1968, once again largely due to Patoka' 's influence. Foreign guests who took part in informally organized, often secret, seminars and discussion groups were very instrumental in spreading new ideas. Despite these positive occurrences, Czech philosophy is experiencing a crisis at the level of the middle generation of non-academic, philosophically competent intellectuals among whom sceptical and nihilist attitudes prevail. A rebirth of spirit may be in the offing if the recovery of the specific sense of the Czech Reformation' 's idea of truth is pursued. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi MorisatoLance H. Gracy (bio)Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond. By Takeshi Morisato. England: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Pp. viii + 269. Hardcover $116.00, isbn 978-1-350-09251-8.Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond by Takeshi Morisato is (...) an informative and insightful read on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and relevant areas of interest. Morisato's stated objective in the introduction is (a) to investigate the possibility of comparative philosophy through William Desmond's metaxological way of thinking, and (b) to examine how the "absolute dialectic" in Tanabe Hajime's metanoesis can help us understand the relationship between one framework of thinking and another (p. 16). Morisato's book proceeds in five parts. Part One orients the reader to the scope of the project through an overview of comparative philosophy and its methodological frameworks--namely, the metaxological methodology of William Desmond, which deals importantly with the (modern) predicament of religion as expressed in the "transcendental univocity" of the Kantian system; and the metanoetic methodology of Tanabe Hajime, which deals importantly with the issue of "rational progress" in Hegelian dialectic. Yet each intellectual framework deals with both Kant's and Hegel's systems. Part Two addresses what the problem of religion in Kantian and Hegelian philosophy is in more detail. Part Three, "Metaxology and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," and Part Four, "Metanoetics and the Problems of the Philosophy of Religion," offer a more detailed account concerning how Desmond's and Tanabe's philosophies tackle conceptual problems in modern philosophy of religion. Morisato's conclusion follows from these along with an endnotes section, bibliography, and index.According to Morisato, overcoming the problem of comparative philosophy--i.e., the "philosophical problem of comparing two systems of thinking rooted in different cultural and intellectual contexts" (p. 22)--means, at least in part, clarifying the extent to which philosophers of different culturalintellectual contexts and backgrounds share, as "kindred spirits" or as "intellectual companions," a consonance of thought regarding their philosophical perspectives. Desmond and Tanabe represent just such a pair, whose consonance of thought, expressed by Morisato en passant and expressed more definitively in the conclusion, is unified in a struggle against hegemonic structures in the [End Page 1] philosophy of religion, specifically those of Kant's and Hegel's philosophies of religion. William Desmond (1951–present) is a Catholic philosopher who currently holds the David R. Cook Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University. He has worked extensively on metaphysics, ontology, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and German idealism. Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto school and is perhaps most well-known for his Philosophy as Metanoetics. Morisato does a commendable job elucidating issues in modern systems of religion, which have undoubtedly been influenced by Kant's and Hegel's systems. As it concerns Kant, contemporary philosophy of religion still struggles with the claims of transcendental idealism, particularly its reduction of religious belief to mere postulates of practical reason. And as it concerns Hegel, what seems to be an unending, "progressive" self-return of dialectical monism has deeply influenced the way, and manner, in which religious adherents deal with societal views of the individual and individuals' views of society. By this token, Morisato's attempt to get beyond the so-called "extirpation" of the source of religious truth as the "creative power behind our understanding of reality and our existence" is refreshing, to say the least (p. 46). In what follows, I offer a relatively brief overview of Morisato's book and conclude with a reflection on the text.Morisato's critique of the Kantian and Hegelian systems begins with the argument that Kantian transcendental univocity implies that reason's autonomy, as dictates of the moral law as absolute duties, not only precedes divine legislation, but becomes one with it or else is reduced to it. In other words, for Kant, the rational-moral universal is divine law. However, reason's autonomy fails to comprehend the divine origination of finite particulars due to... (shrink)

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel characterizes Arabic/Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. The meaning and motivation of this characterization are not obvious. In this paper, I address his treatment and outline the key ideas that lead Hegel to describe Islamic philosophy as ‘Oriental’. By highlighting similarities and differences in relation to Oriental philosophy, I shed light on Hegel's approach to Islamic philosophy, which is connected to his view of Oriental (...) philosophy, the East and Islam in its various aspects, and to his more general view of the history of philosophy and of the Absolute as spirit. (shrink)

In recent years, Confucian ethics has been considered as an alternative to the individual-oriented model of medical decision-making that is dominating in the modern West.

Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I begin to rectify these deficiencies by critically discussing (...) the way harmony has figured into political philosophies from three major traditions in the Global South, namely, African ubuntu, East Asian Confucianism, and South American buen vivir. I point out that, although harmony is at the core of all three political philosophies, it is conceived in different ways, entailing incompatible prescriptions about things such as who should make laws and which sorts of beings have rights against the state. Such contrasting views call for rigorous cross-cultural dialogue amongst theorists of harmony, beyond mounting challenges to more individualist approaches that have been salient in modern Western political thought. (shrink)