Applies Dogen Kigen's religious philosophy and the philosophy of Nishida Kitaro to the philosophical problem of personal identity, probing the applicability of the concept of non-self to the philosophical problems of selfhood, otherness, and temporality which culminate in the conundrum of personal identity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Encounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese EthicsGereon KopfEncounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese Ethics. By Robert E. Carter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. 258.Ever since Robert Carter mentioned the topic of his latest work to me a few years ago, I have been looking forward to reading it. It has been worth the wait. In Encounter with Enlightenment, Carter evokes a plethora (...) of religious and philosophical traditions within Japanese intellectual history to counter forcefully the prejudice, perpetuated far too long on both sides of the Pacific, that Japan does not have an ethics. More precisely, Carter chooses as his main counterfoil and methodological hook Arthur Danto's contention that "the West has nothing to learn from the East, ethically speaking at least." Carter proceeds to challenge the two basic assumptions of Danto's argument: the belief evoking a fundamental if not essential difference between "East" and "West" on the one side, and the assumption that worldviews are static and "unable to undergo modification in the light of encounters with 'alien representations,"' (p. 7) on the other. He does so by marking the supposed difference between "East" and "West" as one in tendency rather than in essence, by indicating the transitions that encounters between traditions engender and by tracing ethical theories and practices in the various intellectual traditions in Japan in direct application to the more fundamental ethical questions humanity faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century.Setting up the perceived differences between "East" and "West" as cultural representations open to transformation rather than as irreconcilable, static world-views, Carter takes an interesting stance. In one sense, he echoes much of recent scholarship, which has criticized orientalism for, to use J. J. Clarke's words, setting up "East" and "West" as "quasi-entities" separated by a "glass curtain," which deludes the onlooker into believing that direct understanding of a foreign culture is possible without actually entering it. Clarke's terminology of the "glass curtain" brings out the paradox underlying the orientalist position, which postulates a radical difference between one's own culture and that of the other without, at the same time, recognizing that this very position implies knowledge of that which is presumably so absolutely different. Carter does not fall into this trap. On the contrary, he takes pains to point out the generalizations in his argument and to add consistently that every generalization has its counterexamples and thus indicates nothing but a cultural mainstream. Using his own experience, Carter makes sure that the reader understands that he talks about tendencies within and not essences of intellectual traditions, about cultural ideals and not uniform realities. He thus slowly [End Page 411] chips away bit by bit at cultural stereotypes perpetuated by word of mouth, travel reports, and academic discourse over the centuries.However, it is not clear to me how far Carter is willing to take his challenge to the orientalist dichotomy and the deconstruction of stereotypes without which the goals he envisions cannot be accomplished. I wholeheartedly support Carter in his project to break out of the incompatibility thesis proposed by the orientalist discourse and, at least as far as ethics is concerned, by Danto. It is important to reject the talk of cultural essences in order to allow for cultural exchange and to break down the artificially constructed barriers between cultures. A further benefit of Carter's study is not only that it shows what the former colonial powers from Europe and North America can learn from the traditions of the countries they colonized—or, as in the case of Japan, tried to colonize not too long ago—but that it also complements the traditional European curricula by including the philosophical and ethical traditions of, for example, East Asia. But to accomplish this, I think the use of terminology of ethical or cultural ideals, which Carter uses for the most part in his argument, might be more fruitful than his occasional evocation of a "Japanese character," which could easily be interpreted to reinforce Danto's prejudice rather than to undercut it.Carter's second main point—proposing that cultural encounters transform rather than alienate—is... (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers including Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. The book offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world.

The Euro-American philosophical traditions offer two extreme positions to the problem of identity over time: G. W. Leibniz' essentialism and Derek Parfit's reductionism. A third alternative conception of personal identity is presented here, more appropriately named personal nonduality, which is based on Nishida Kitarō's conception of personal unity as nonrelative contradictory self-identity.

The volume introduces the central themes in and the main figures of Japanese Buddhist philosophy. It will have two sections, one that discusses general topics relevant to Japanese Buddhist philosophy and one that reads the work of the main Japanese Buddhist philosophers in the context of comparative philosophy. It combines basic information with cutting edge scholarship considering recent publications in Japanese, Chinese, English, and other European languages. As such, it will be an invaluable tool for professors teaching courses in Asian (...) and global philosophy, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the people generally interested in philosophy and/or Buddhism. (shrink)

Most mainstream theories of selfhood and personhood in the European and North-American tradition, regardless of whether they are naturalistic or dualistic, presuppose an egocentric paradigm. This means, they assume that consciousness is primary in our conceptions of self and person. From its very beginning, the Buddhist traditions provide alternative models to this egocentric paradigm, be it the network model of early Buddhist scriptures, the distinctively phenomenological approaches of Yogācāra Buddhism, or the deconstructive approaches of Zen Buddhist thinkers and texts. The (...) philosophers of the Kyoto School have also inherited a critical stance towards the egocentric paradigm, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In this chapter, I will interrogate a plethora of approaches discussed in Japanese Buddhism and twentieth century Japanese philosophy. Concretely, I will introduce language developed by these philosophers to highlight four different modalities of the self, namely the thetic, a-thetic, bi-thetic, and non-thetic modalities. The goal is to envision a complex conception of consciousness that is relational rather than egocentric and that is grounded in a second-person, rather than a first- or a third-person, approach. The result will be an innovative conception of the self that is inspired by various philosophers in the Buddhist and/or Japanese philosophical traditions. (shrink)

The theism-atheism debate is foreign to many Mahāyāna Buddhist thinkers such as the Japanese Zen Master Dōgen. Nevertheless, his philosophy of ‘expression’ is able to shine a new light on the various incarnations of this debate throughout history. This paper will explore a/theism from Dōgen’s philosophical standpoint. Dōgen introduces the notion of ‘expression’ to describe the concomitant vertical and horizontal relationships of the religious project, namely the relationship between the individual and the divine as well as the relationship among a (...) multiplicity of individuals, each of which Dōgen conceives of as an expression of the divine and/or the oneness of the cosmos. Dōgen’s philosophy presupposes the ‘way of emptiness’ and Chengguan’s ‘four dharma worlds’. To Dōgen, the former indicates the conventional nature of predication and signification, while the latter denotes the existential interwovenness of numerous individuals and the divine oneness of the cosmos. Such a philosophy implies that all truth claims and philosophical positions are mere intellectual and discursive constructions that are formulated against a perceived other. Therefore, Dōgen observes laconically that ‘when one side is expressed, the other is obscured’ or, as Dōgen says elsewhere, ‘when expression is expressed, non-expression is not expressed.’ Dōgen’s philosophical framework provides some interesting insights about one or more discourses on atheism: Again, the basic assumption is that all philosophical paradigms, systems, and positions are devoid of an absolute truth value, framed in a specific cultural and historical context which they express, and formulated vis-à-vis a perceived other. In this paper, I will look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s atheism from the perspective of Dōgen’s philosophical standpoint. Concretely, I will present Nietzsche’s position on his own terms, translate his philosophy into Dōgen’s terminology, interpret his philosophy from the standpoint of Dōgen’s philosophical approach, and assess the utility of such an exercise. I believe that such a project enables us to read theism through the eyes of atheism, atheism through the eyes of theism, both through the eyes of Dōgen, and Dōgen through the eyes of the a/theism debate. In this last section, I will introduce the language of Nishida Kitarō who attempted a similar project in his The Logic of Basho and the Religious Worldview. The goal of this project is to determine what atheism denies, what atheism contributes, and why a multi-faceted and multi-cultural engagement of atheism is important today. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the easing of East- West tensions, Samuel Huntington presented his theory of a “clash of civilizations.” He announced that conflicts between ideologies had come to an end and were to be replaced by a new kind of confrontation, this time between cultures and religions. This essay attempts to show how misled Huntington’s thesis can be by referring to forms of humanism from Africa as well as to some (...) ideas developed in Arabian-Islamic philosophy. In the early 1930s, African intellectuals such as Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire already tried to oppose their own conception of humanism to Western individualistic humanism. The distinction can be found in the concept of Ubuntu, or “African humanism,” which incorporates notions of respect for the other, collective responsibility and solidarity. The Arab-Islamic world has also had similar concerns from an early stage. Its heritage from classical Greek philosophy, which placed human being at the centre of its thinking and ethical acting, came indeed under the significant influence of Islamic values, such as equality, fraternity and the community. Thus the essay offers an alternative to Huntington’s post-modern model of “clash of civilizations” beyond the frontiers set by Western humanism and that is more relevant to our current globalising world – a new trans- and intercultural humanism that favours the ways human beings can relate to each other as persons regardless of race, culture and religion. Human dignity and respect for the “other,” including the environment, are therefore central to this new humanism. (shrink)

In contemporary western philosophy, there are two major positions on the issue of personal identity, the one upholding the substantive notion of an enduring ego, the other rejecting the idea of an enduring subject completely. While the substantive position seems to be untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind, the rejection of an enduring agency has left unanswered the questions of subjective agency, ethical responsibility and accountability. In contrast to these approaches, Buddhism has long upheld (...) a conception which, while rejecting the problematic notion of an enduring person or self, does not dispense with the notion of subjective agency. My dissertation will formulate such a non-substantive notion of personhood based on the Buddhist theory of self-cultivation. ;My dissertation commences with a critique of the present theories of personal identity and the assumptions underlying the very notion of personal identity. In the light of this criticism, the notion of "Mensch-sein" seems to be more appropriate than the notion of "personal identity." With this as a basis, the dissertation offers a new conception of Mensch-sein, drawing on Dogen's theory of self-cultivation and Jung's notion of individuation. It will especially investigate the phenomena of selfhood, alterity, and continuity. It is my belief that such an understanding of Mensch-sein not only contributes to a comparative philosophy of personhood and of the mind but also provides a conceptual tool to understand latest developments in cognitive science and psychology. Thus, it illustrates that the study of religion contributes to the systematized understanding of the world. (shrink)

The past decades have seen an increase in theories envisioning multi-cultural encounters and analyzing the hidden and obvious power dynamics that govern them. This essay suggests an innovative approach to assess and negotiate these theories. It introduces a metapsychology, illustrated by original pictures and poems, to examine multi- cultural engagement, to negotiate the major representatives among the leading theoretical responses to diversity and globalism, to develop a heuristic model that interprets each theory in their own right, and to envision innovative (...) strategies that enable co-existence across boundaries, imagined and historically sedimented. Finally, it proposes a brand new theoretical approach to the study of both cultures and theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Encounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese EthicsGereon KopfEncounter with Enlightenment: A Study of Japanese Ethics. By Robert E. Carter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. 258.Ever since Robert Carter mentioned the topic of his latest work to me a few years ago, I have been looking forward to reading it. It has been worth the wait. In Encounter with Enlightenment, Carter evokes a plethora (...) of religious and philosophical traditions within Japanese intellectual history to counter forcefully the prejudice, perpetuated far too long on both sides of the Pacific, that Japan does not have an ethics. More precisely, Carter chooses as his main counterfoil and methodological hook Arthur Danto's contention that "the West has nothing to learn from the East, ethically speaking at least." Carter proceeds to challenge the two basic assumptions of Danto's argument: the belief evoking a fundamental if not essential difference between "East" and "West" on the one side, and the assumption that worldviews are static and "unable to undergo modification in the light of encounters with 'alien representations,"' (p. 7) on the other. He does so by marking the supposed difference between "East" and "West" as one in tendency rather than in essence, by indicating the transitions that encounters between traditions engender and by tracing ethical theories and practices in the various intellectual traditions in Japan in direct application to the more fundamental ethical questions humanity faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century.Setting up the perceived differences between "East" and "West" as cultural representations open to transformation rather than as irreconcilable, static world-views, Carter takes an interesting stance. In one sense, he echoes much of recent scholarship, which has criticized orientalism for, to use J. J. Clarke's words, setting up "East" and "West" as "quasi-entities" separated by a "glass curtain," which deludes the onlooker into believing that direct understanding of a foreign culture is possible without actually entering it. Clarke's terminology of the "glass curtain" brings out the paradox underlying the orientalist position, which postulates a radical difference between one's own culture and that of the other without, at the same time, recognizing that this very position implies knowledge of that which is presumably so absolutely different. Carter does not fall into this trap. On the contrary, he takes pains to point out the generalizations in his argument and to add consistently that every generalization has its counterexamples and thus indicates nothing but a cultural mainstream. Using his own experience, Carter makes sure that the reader understands that he talks about tendencies within and not essences of intellectual traditions, about cultural ideals and not uniform realities. He thus slowly [End Page 411] chips away bit by bit at cultural stereotypes perpetuated by word of mouth, travel reports, and academic discourse over the centuries.However, it is not clear to me how far Carter is willing to take his challenge to the orientalist dichotomy and the deconstruction of stereotypes without which the goals he envisions cannot be accomplished. I wholeheartedly support Carter in his project to break out of the incompatibility thesis proposed by the orientalist discourse and, at least as far as ethics is concerned, by Danto. It is important to reject the talk of cultural essences in order to allow for cultural exchange and to break down the artificially constructed barriers between cultures. A further benefit of Carter's study is not only that it shows what the former colonial powers from Europe and North America can learn from the traditions of the countries they colonized—or, as in the case of Japan, tried to colonize not too long ago—but that it also complements the traditional European curricula by including the philosophical and ethical traditions of, for example, East Asia. But to accomplish this, I think the use of terminology of ethical or cultural ideals, which Carter uses for the most part in his argument, might be more fruitful than his occasional evocation of a "Japanese character," which could easily be interpreted to reinforce Danto's prejudice rather than to undercut it.Carter's second main point—proposing that cultural encounters transform rather than alienate—is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in LackGereon KopfDavid R. Loy. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 244.David Loy's most recent work, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, constitutes an intellectual history of Europe from what he calls a "Buddhist perspective." His obvious goals in (...) this book are (1) to develop a heuristic device, if not a mature methodology, out of the Buddhist intellectual tradition and to apply it to matters that are not necessarily related to the Buddhist tradition, and (2) to reread European history from a new standpoint. I have to confess that I am not a historian and thus cannot evaluate Loy's historical claims; however, from my perspective as a scholar of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, it seems to me that not only does Loy succeed on both counts but his study of European history from what he calls the perspective of lack reveals astonishing yet previously barely highlighted insights into European thought. It also undermines, in a methodological slight of hand that at times evokes Michel Foucault's approach, the conventional assumptions about the dominant paradigms of the generally accepted periods of European history. I do not want to claim that Loy's methodology resembles Foucault's "archaeology" in any way; however, it does demonstrate that discourses and time periods are fluid rather than static and that their paradigm depends on, and changes in accordance with, the perspective of the historian.For example, seen from Loy's perspective of lack, the central and most formative event of European history was neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, but the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh century. In general, Loy's book is filled with observations and indictments of common myths that are not only provocative in nature but sure to challenge many of the presuppositions that the proponents of the so-called Western World hold dear. In concrete terms, Loy seems to focus on and examine not so much European intellectual history but the myths that are used to argue for the superiority of the "West": freedom, progress, romantic love, the sanctity of the nation-state, and free-market capitalism.Loy chooses as his standpoint "a Buddhist perspective," namely the "perspective of lack." He takes as his basic assumption the dictum he borrows from early Buddhism and, as he adds, psychotherapy, namely that humans have to live with the basic frustration-Loy's translation of dukkha, which is usually rendered as "suffering"-that reality does not conform to our innermost desires. We desire immortality but cannot avoid the impermanence of all living beings. The awareness of our impermanence not only shatters our sense of and quest for a self, but it also [End Page 580] arouses the "immediate and terrifying (because quite valid) suspicion... that "'I' am not real right now" (p. 3).This frightening sense of lack propels humans onto what Norman Brown calls the Oedipal project, that is, the attempt to create oneself. This sense of lack, Loy remarks, is common to all religions, but what separates Buddhism from most other religious traditions is that it does not offer a self and some kind of immortality, on the one hand, and refrains from reifying this sense of lack as, for example, "sin," on the other. Rather, Buddhism, to Loy, can be "understood as a way to resolve our sense of lack" (p. 6). With regard to his present project, Loy asks, "[i]f that (the sense-of-the-self's sense of lack) gives us insight into the individual human condition, can it also shed light on the collective dynamics of society and nations?" (p. 8). In other words, Loy asks how the interpretation of European history would change if one were to choose the primary Buddhist assumption, namely the deep anxiety over one's future death and present-day insignificance and groundlessness, as one's starting point.However, Loy is quick to argue that this standpoint is not unique to Buddhism, and he corroborates his perspective on lack with the findings of psychotherapy, mostly the... (shrink)

In Nietzsche, Buddha, Zarathustra: Eine West-Ost Konfiguration, Michael Skowron sets out to develop a comparative philosophy of "self-overcoming," "transformation," and "process" (p. 7). Skowron's main interest is to retrace Friedrich Nietzsche's "genealogical thinking back to where the Eastern and the Western way began their separate direction in order to unearth the only place where they can be unified in its original form." The goal of this project is "to uncover the religious and postreligious dimensions of his [Nietzsche's] thinking" (p. 5). (...) This work thus promises to contribute to the contemporary understanding of Nietzsche; to compare the philosophies of Nietzsche, Buddha, and Zarathustra; and to facilitate .. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers including Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. The book offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world.

Beyond Personal Identity. Dogen, Nishida and a Phenomenology of No-Self. Gereon Kopf. Curzon Press, Richmond 2001. xx, 298 pp. 40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1217-8.

Nähere Informationen zu diesem Buch erhalten Sie direkt vom Verlag / For further information about this title please contact Mohr Siebeck.

Noam Chomsky is responsible for creating the field of research on grammatical theory in its present form, and he has also been material in providing frameworks for syntactic analysis, from early transformational grammar to current implementations of the minimalist program. Against the background of these syntactic frameworks, a huge number of constraints on grammatical dependencies have been proposed over the years. Constraints initially suggested by Chomsky have a more troubled history, in the sense that they have variously been claimed to (...) be empirically falsified, considered conceptually flawed, or simply consigned to oblivion. This chapter aims to argue that some of the constraints arguably belonging to this latter group can, upon closer scrutiny, in fact be shown to be at the heart of current syntactic theory, and qualify as “good”, whereas this does not necessarily hold for constraints in the former group. (shrink)

In recent decades, English has become the uncontestable lingua franca of philosophy of science and of most other areas of philosophy and of the humanities. To have a lingua franca produces enormous benefits for the entire scientific community. The price for those benefits, however, is paid almost exclusively by non-native speakers of English. Section 1 identifies three asymmetries that individual NoNES researchers encounter: ‘publication asymmetry’, ‘resources asymmetry’, and ‘team asymmetry’. Section 2 deals with ‘globalized parochialism asymmetry’: thanks to English being (...) a lingua franca, a special perspective, mostly US and British, is being globalized and is replacing European topics and approaches. This has serious consequences for history of philosophy as well as for philosophical theory: thinkers of the past tend to be dealt with on the global level at best only if and insofar they are translated into English. Similarly, the theoretical agenda of globalized philosophy of scien... (shrink)