ABSTRACT This essay explores in depth one aspect of a topic that looms large in Song dynasty philosophy—the mutual interaction between Confucianism and Chan Buddhism. Under these reciprocal influences, both experience meaningful and definitive changes. This Song philosophical legacy became emblematic, and has remained so until now, of the Chinese way of thinking. Yü Ying-shih describes this exchange as a bi-directional development: “the process of Confucianization of Northern Song Buddhism,” in other words, “the process of becoming proficient as Confucian scholars (...) undergone by Buddhist monks”; and “the influence of Chan Buddhism on the Confucian literati”. The present research focuses on the former and examines an original strategy that the Northern Song Chan scholar-monk Qisong契嵩 used in order to demonstrate the affinities between the two teachings: a particular interrelatedness between heart-mind and names. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Review essay of Imitation, a novel by Leonhard Praeg. This analysis addresses the intertextual relationship between Imitation and Immortality. It focuses on the way the titular notion is examined from both an artistic and existential perspective. The philosophical qualities of the work are discussed in order to exemplify how the form of the novel provides the author with a creative way to acknowledge and explore the complex influence of imitation in the development our personal selves and the invention of (...) original forms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the way that she reads Marx – as forming “not a doctrine but a method of understanding and action.” My claim is that Weil’s method is likewise twofold: she attempts to understand the world through inquiry, then she tests her understanding through action. First, I read “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression”. In that essay, inquiry, exemplified by Weil’s calling into question the term “revolution,” is her (...) way of understanding reality around her, including forces of oppression and possibilities for liberation. Second, I read her “Factory Journal”, which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections” by placing herself in French factories. My conclusion states the fruits of Weil’s method for philosophy today: an interrogation of present political keywords and a practice of philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As a welcome contribution to the burgeoning literature addressing the promising intersection between biology and ontology in contemporary continental philosophy, Marjolein Oele's E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life's Material Interfaces investigates the themes of affectivity and life in their multiple and divergent forms: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. By seeking out new unexplored territory through (...) her remarkably erudite interventions into the life sciences, Oele critically interrogates the relationship between affectivity and materiality to uncover their shared depth and potential for cultivating ecological interdependence, ethical responsibility, and a renewed political commitment to the local spaces and places constituting e-co-affective communities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A review of Songs of Nature, a study by John Sallis of the landscapes of the modern Chinese artist Cao Jun, with philosophical emphases on the notion of landscape, this analysis widens out to a relevance to all creative work. It homes in on the comparative or intercultural overlap between Western and Eastern traditions. as well as that between painting and music and the other senses. The focus is on the elemental. Art is at base a return to nature (...) with earth and sky as the horizons of what it means to be human. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s Time in Exile illuminates being in “gerundive time.” The gerundive tense captures how our being is always already “suspended” between worlds and meanings—how our being is a “non-final verb.” Schuback considers such existence in the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Clarice Lispector. Of the three thinkers, Lispector’s writing best reveals how existence is an “immense struggle for presence.” Schuback’s hope is that we may find a home in our homelessness.

One of several life-affirming themes in Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning is the inviolate character of human freedom. Contrasting what he calls “inner freedom” with the dire external restrictions he experienced as a prisoner at Auschwitz and other concentration camps, Frankl insists that no matter how restrictive and dehumanizing one’s situation, the exercise of this internal freedom is always a possibility. Similar sentiments are found in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. Though it contains elements of a typical 1980s (...) American action movie, on closer inspection, Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1985 film, Runaway Train, proves far from typical. In interviews, Konchalovsky draws parallels between the film—based on an original screenplay by Akira Kurosawa—and philosophical themes in Dostoyevsky, and identifies the “relativity of freedom” as one of its primary concerns. My article uses Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train to shed light on the hard-won vision of the inviolate nature of human freedom on display in Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper presents an analysis of motherhood as potentially ambiguous and empowering, using the Beauvoirian concept of the erotic. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of the erotic can allow us to reevaluate “nonproductive,” repetitive, apparently immanent activities—such as going through pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding, and raising a child—as projects through which we disclose freedom, and, thus, as projects that possibly lead to transcendence.It is often argued that Beauvoir considered these experiences to be ways of embracing immanence and avoiding transcendence. (...) Yet even supposing Beauvoir’s argument was against not maternity per se, but the oppressive construction of the institution of motherhood under patriarchy, can maternal engagement be viewed as an existentialist, phenomenological project? I claim that Beauvoir’s own premises show that it must be so considered once motherhood is recognized as potentially joyful, ambiguously erotic, and creative. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article examines Michel Foucault’s views concerning the ethical salience of critique and compares those views to the Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition. As a critic of the Enlightenment, Foucault’s approach to ethics vacillated between deconstructing moral concepts such as “self” and “freedom,” and affirming them as the basis of an ethics conceived as “self-fashioning.” Madhyamaka thought provides a critical account of social reality that resonates with Foucault, particularly concerning the emancipatory potential of critique, but it arrives at different ethical conclusions, (...) viewing compassion rather than vertiginous freedom as the outcome of any thorough critique of the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT “: We cannot say psychoanalysts are very jolly people; see the dead look they have, their stiff necks.” In 1972, the tone Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used in Anti-Oedipus caused an immediate public reaction: it was regarded as the mark of a fatal critique of psychoanalysis. However, critique, in philosophy, is used in certain technical and precise senses. We will try to demonstrate that, technically, Anti-Oedipus is a delimitation of a Kantian sort, an evaluation of a Nietzschean kind, (...) and, finally, a divergence in terms of Deleuze himself. Thanks to this precision, we will find that the target of Anti-Oedipus is not psychoanalysis in general but what Deleuze and Guattari call, respectively, “the illegitimate use of the synthesis of the unconscious,” a conception of life presupposed by psychoanalysis, and a configuration of desire that explains both psychoanalysis and the system in which it functions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Friedrich Nietzsche offers different opinions of the ancient Skeptics. On certain occasions, he praises them as philosophers of intellectual integrity, because they constantly question dogma and continue to inquire into the truth. He insists, however, that it is indispensable for every individual to adopt her own perspective in specific conditions, rather than suspend judgment as the Skeptics do. On other occasions, Nietzsche criticizes the ancient Skeptics because they separate their academic investigations from their philosophy of life and only comply (...) with conventions or apparent phenomena observed through sensations. Furthermore, he ridicules their ultimate goal – tranquility of mind – as a product of feeble exhaustion. He himself is ready to embrace torments of life as part of the will to power. Although some similarities can be traced between Nietzsche and the ancient Skeptics, Nietzsche is more consistent in connecting his theoretical investigation and his philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A continuation of Das’s deep engagement with political theology, this text undertakes a deep and provocative reading of Kierkegaard’s political theology that strikes to the depths of our ontology. Positioned versus Church and State, a refutation of Christendom and its continuations in secular modernity, Kierkegaard’s political theology also exposes the limits and issues of Schmitt’s project. Tracing the influence of Schelling’s eschatological political theology upon Kierkegaard’s thought, Das articulates a political theology “to come” that is based upon the scandalous (...) event of the crucifixion and in turn creates the scandalous ontology of the event. The result is an ontology lived in response to a negative political theology in which we live without probability within the event of Kierkegaardian sovereign love. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Prima facie, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas would seem to be inherently averse to literature as an ethical mode. Indeed, in his early work, up to and including Totality and Infinity, literary art is often censured with what amounts to Platonic zeal. However, as I will demonstrate, this criticism stands alongside what is seemingly an incongruous use of literary art as a means of ethical exemplification. By exploring this tension, I will show how the contra-epistemic aesthetic of S. Y. (...) Agnon can be read within ethical terms consistent with Levinas’s philosophical position. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Many recent works on the methodology of intercultural philosophy point to a fundamental dilemma of the discipline: if there is a common ground for intercultural understanding, then the essence of this ground is universal instead of multi-cultural; if there are irreducible and incommunicable factors in different cultures, then complete understanding seems to be impossible. In this paper, I propose that this dilemma is founded on the assumption that intercultural philosophy is equivalent to intercultural understanding. I argue that, however, intercultural (...) philosophy should begin with questioning. Instead of understanding another culture using one’s own conceptual scheme, intercultural questioning puts one’s conceptual scheme and traditional worldview into question. The new questions obtained by phenomenologically reducing traditional thought will become a ground for intercultural dialogue without reducing one’s culture to another culture. Finally, I will use a case in Chinese philosophy to demonstrate the process of intercultural questioning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “perceptual ontologies” lead to other notions of self, spirituality, and faith, bringing out the distinctive and comparable religious paths of Buddhism and embodied phenomenology entered by deepening the prereflective openness to the world’s “voices of silence.” Loughnane’s study highlights how Nishida’s and Merleau-Ponty’s turn towards a series of artists in their respective cultural contexts brings out the particular groundedness in the materiality of the beings of the world in this “mutual interexpressivity” or “reversibility.” Faith is revisioned (...) as the dropping of egoistic control to allow perception to be carried into the depths of the world of spiritual hearkening. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores and critiques Sartre’s conception of being-for-others from a non-dual perspective. His conception of intersubjectivity as being-for-others views the primary relation between oneself and others as oppressive and objectifying; the other, he says, is the death of my possibilities. It will be argued, however, that others also represent precisely the birth of one’s possibilities. To this end, we will interpret the relation of being to being from a non-dual orientation through the work of the contemporary Indian philosopher (...) Ramchandra Gandhi and the medieval Kashmiri polymath Abhinavagupta. Both of these thinkers emphasize the act of address as the primary relation between self-conscious beings, a relation that is fundamentally subjectifying rather than objectifying. Through address, we achieve what Sartre argues is impossible: a free recognition of each other as free self-conscious subjects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Starting from a comparative, textual investigation, the present research proposes a transcultural analysis of the early interaction between Confucianism and Buddhism in China, Korea, and Japan, and of their historical movement from tension/disconnection to mutual acceptance and reciprocal influence.

ABSTRACT In spite of the supposed lack of attention paid to it by Husserl in his early works on time, the future is an important topic for phenomenology that gains increasing relevance in his late works. Regarding the experience of the future, phenomenology can approach the subjective possibility of anticipating what is not yet given, both actively and passively. A new perspective on the subject’s relation to the future arises thanks to the consideration of practical phenomena. What is at stake (...) here is the possibility of doing something with what is not yet given. In this sense, our principal concern is to contextualize Husserĺs reference to the relationship between willing and future in the framework of his more general analysis of the future; at the same time, we seek to answer a question that arises in the analysis of time: the problem of novelty, and the possibility of creativity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, one important issue is which of the concepts works as a foundation for the others. People, nation, language, state, or education are all possible candidates to take a central place. First, this paper analyzes the problems presented by the notions of “people” and “nation,” such as their ambiguous and even contradictory aspects. Second, we focus on how the concept of education needs a solid ground from which an educational plan can develop. Finally, (...) we show that the fundamental concept of Fichte’s Addresses is the same one as in his Natural Right: the State. According to Fichte, only the rational State can guarantee the realization of education, people, and nation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay is dedicated to Elliot Wolfson’s new book on Heidegger and Kabbalah. Wolfson’s project is read here as a philosophical reflection and scholarly intervention on the “and,” that is, on pluralism in thought. Wolfson juxtaposes Heideggerian and kabbalistic corpora as expressing the same conception of non-totalitarian, plural thought, and criticizes both Heidegger and Kabbalah for betraying this pluralism in their ethnocentric tendencies. As a scholarly “ethical corrective,” Wolfson indicates in both corpora a countermeasure: A Gnostic disengagement of thought (...) from politics, in favor of poetics. The essay critiques this corrective by pointing at the different constellations of Gnosis and politics in Heidegger and Kabbalah. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay will explore the constitution of a transcendental theory of space through an examination of the notion of spatial synthesis in the works of Husserl, Paliard, and Deleuze. First, we shall explore the constitution of the sensorial fields in Husserl’s phenomenology. In Husserlian terms, space is not originally an empty form that can eventually be filled with a certain empirical content. Accordingly, the philosopher claims that spatiality is a consequence of the immanent synthesis of sensations. Then, we will (...) move on to Jacques Paliard’s psychology of perception, where we will find both aesthetic and noetic synthesis as transcendental conditions for the perception of space. Lastly, we will explore Deleuze’s theory of intensive space, specifically the concept of depth developed in a dialogue with Paliard. This comparative analysis shows that purely intensive fields of individuation are a transcendental a priori for the perception of an extensive space. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, we show that Kant’s complex concept of an “intuitive understanding”, which operates in his work as a tool for defining the peculiar character of our understanding, is critically absorbed by Hegel’s concept of “objective thought.” By means of this concept, Hegel first rejects the representational conception of thought that is implied by the Kantian concept of an intuitive understanding and, second, he proposes a way of comprehending thought that allows a new conception of the relationship between (...) the subject and reality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Argentina has a rich history of social movements, of which the transgender is one of the most notorious and resilient. In this work, I present South American Transvestite Theory, its latest theoretical development, in the light of Deleuzian thought. Although Deleuze is not an actual source for this current, both can be productively connected as sharing several themes and concerns, such as the tight relation between creative thought and political practice, the ontological and practical consequences of the concepts of (...) identity and becoming, and the rejection of binary models as an underlying structure of hierarchical thought and social oppression. The potentiality of the encounter between Deleuze and South American Transvestite Theory will be explored via four heuristic questions, reminiscent of the Aristotelian causes, which respectively ask about their concrete intersections, their formal connections, the effects they could trigger and the reasons to read them together. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is a widely accepted idea that German Idealism stands on two pillars: Kant and Spinoza. The aim of this essay is to critically reflect on this way of understanding the history of philosophy through a study of the reception of Spinoza in the early writings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This analysis will show that each of them builds a different image of Spinoza that is not based on the scholarly study of his works, but rather deeply conditioned (...) by other readings and controversies of the time. Each assigns a central role to that image of Spinoza in the justification of his own system, and in each case that theoretical function is different: Spinoza is viewed as an enemy, a possibility and a source of inspiration, and a model of true philosophy. (shrink)