This article sketches some of the main ideas that informed the work of the post-colonial Indian philosopher Margaret Chatterjee. A philosopher of language and religion, her work straddles the “frozen” traditions of the east and the west, and astutely philosophizes about Gandhian thought in the realm of religious alterity and coevality.

Over the last few decades the study of Shīʿī Islam has witnessed a growing interest in specific aspects and perspectives of Shīʿī philosophers and theologians. The monograph authored by Sayeh Meisami focuses on the views of two of the most influential thinkers in Shīʿī, namely the eleventh century Ismāʿīlī thinker Ḥāmid al-Kirmānī and the Twelver mystic and thinker Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, better known as Mullā Ṣadrā. Throughout the five chapters, the textual comparative analysis of their thought shows how multifaceted epistemological (...) and cosmological keys are transmitted from al-Kirmānī to Mullā Ṣadra, and ultimately become interwoven with their respective theories about the legitimacy of the Imām. Epistemology, cosmology, and political theory thus become, in the author’s analysis, the fil rouge that characterize the development of Shīʿī mystical and political philosophies up to the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran. (shrink)

Most accounts of Vasubandhu’s philosophy present Vasubandhu’s view as accepting mind as a substantially existing entity. Jonathan Gold presents an argument that this is not true. He argues that, according to Vasubandhu, the phenomenal world, the totality of appearances, is mental, but it is a constructed reality. Thus, it too is emptiness, beyond conception.

Martin Buber’s essay “False Prophets” was written in Hebrew in Jerusalem two years after he fled Nazi Germany and assumed a professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The essay offers a political analysis of the dramatic confrontation between the prophets Jeremiah and Hananiah. It speaks about the dangers of nationalism in Jeremiah’s biblical Jerusalem and in Buber’s own modern Jerusalem, eight years before the proclamation of the State of Israel. Who is the real lover of the homeland, Buber asks, (...) the patriot who cares not about human beings, or the concerned individual who is willing to compromise in order to avoid destruction and save lives? When does nationalism become malignant? What is the difference between a true prophet and a false one? (shrink)

Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different aspects of bodiliness.

In this paper I put together insights from the ordinary-language approach and perspectival realism, and use them in developing and clarifying themes in African philosophy. I therefore appeal to language and how African individuals are using it in a particular context. In order to achieve this, I will firstly introduce the analytic philosophical framework in the context of Anglophone African philosophy. This exposition also aims at identifying gaps in the general studies that build on this approach. Secondly, I will clarify (...) the perspectival approach, indicating further how it is reflected in African thought. Thirdly, I will demonstrate the abstraction of philosophical themes using the perspectival approach through the analysis of how Africans are using language. It is argued that this approach leads to the development of African philosophy from the grassroots and helps in opening up a multiplicity of philosophical themes on the African continent. (shrink)

The article deals with the structure and function of perceptual judgment in the perception theories of the Buddhist Diṅṅāga and the Vaiśeṣika Praśastapāda. I show their indebtedness to the Vyākaraṇa tradition and particularly to Patañjali. Following Shōryū Katsura’s idea that the status of perceptual judgment with regard to the Buddhist system of instruments of valid cognition was first established by Dharmakīrti, I argue that Diṅṅāga’s examples in his definition of perception in Pramāṇasamuccaya-vṛtti I,3d could be considered as perceptual judgments in (...) the sense of Charles Peirce. After the examination of Diṅṅāga’s and Praśastapāda’s examples of perceptual judgments, I come to the conclusion that Diṅṅāga, as a nominalist, sees in them an expression of ordinary linguistic behaviour shaped by convention and grammatical tradition, while Praśastapāda, as a realist, seeks to show that perceptual judgments follow the Vaiśeṣika ontological categories. If in Diṅṅāga’s epistemology perceptual judgement remains outside the pramāṇa system, in Praśastapāda’s Vaiśeṣika it pertains to the pramāṇa of perception. (shrink)

This paper explores my personal journey of where, when, and how I have “landed” to now. It is a sketch of my intellectual development and the impact of cross-cultural sources on my work, my thinking, and my visual practice. I follow a chronological way of looking at how I became informed about philosophy, art history, practice, and Indigenous ways of knowing for the sake of clarity. Although one’s life is not linear and operates in a more cyclic way, I reveal (...) how I was influenced by the diverse lived experiences from childhood up until now. (shrink)

While Kwasi Wiredu’s name is associated with the genesis of modern African philosophy, there are some aspects of his work that are in tension. Although Wiredu is an advocate of a modernized and science-based philosophical orientation, on the African continent, he is also equally committed to a possibility of the existence of philosophy in traditional African society. In the development of his philosophical theses, it appears that he relies on both sources for his method and argument. It is this dual (...) usage of two conflicting systems that leads to a tension in some aspects of his philosophy. In addition, Wiredu’s philosophy is in serious respects shaped by the postcolonial era it emerges from. In part, his thinking is a response to colonialism, and in another part, an attempt at overcoming the effects of colonialism. My aim is to show how Wiredu’s philosophy is ultimately a product of these contradictory forces. (shrink)

Why decolonize knowledge and philosophy? Pascah Mungwini proposes that epistemic decolonization should be implemented to remain true to the spirit of philosophy and to the idea of humanity. Aaron Creller, Michael Monahan, and Esme Murdock focus on different aspects of Mungwini’s proposal in their individual responses. Creller suggests some “best practices” so that comparative epistemology can take into account the parochial embeddedness of universal reason. While Monahan underscores that world philosophy as a project must openly acknowledge its own incompleteness and (...) its instantiation in different world philosophies, Esme Murdock uses Glissant’s thoughts to make a case for the right to opacity as a strategy for subverting the dominating power of Euroamerican reason. In his reply, Mungwini underscores that philosophy will be able to increase the amount of justice, beauty, and truth in this world only when its practitioners begin to exhibit genuine pluralism in their work. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the genealogy of the figure of the “global south” from the 1970s to current uses in policy, academic, and political discourses in several countries, to point out its limitations and its unintended ideological consequences. It discusses its connections with similar earlier figures like Antonio Gramsci’s “southern question” and the “third world,” establishing continuities and differences. After tracing the uses of the “global south” in several disciplinary fields, it contrasts them, through specific examples, with the way in which (...) scholars in Latin American Studies have analyzed the history of capitalist globalization and the social and political responses to it more effectively. (shrink)

What is the role of pleasure in Chinese intellectual traditions? Do Chinese thinkers shun all desire for pleasure? Contrary to received opinion, The Chinese Pleasure Book illustrates and argues that early Chinese thinkers across traditions, from the fourth century BCE to the eleventh century CE, all assume that pleasure-seeking and pleasure-taking are part of the human condition and that it is right to engage in such actions. The volume is an ambitious project and Nylan has done a superb job.

My intellectual journey in philosophy proceeded along two mountainous paths that coincided at their base, but forked less than halfway up the incline. The first is that of my philosophical development, a steep but steady and continuous ascent. It began in my family, and accelerated in high school, art school, college, and graduate school. Those foundations propelled my philosophical research into the nature of rationality and its relation to the structure of the self, a long-term project focused on the Kantian (...) and Humean metaethical traditions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It would have been impossible to bring this project to completion without the anchor, compass, and conceptual mapping provided by my prior, longstanding involvement in the practice and theory of Vedic philosophy. The second path is that of my professional route through the field of academic philosophy, which branched onto a rocky detour in graduate school, followed by a short but steep ascent, followed next by a much steeper, sustained descent off that road, into the ravine, down in flames, and out of the profession. In order to reach the summit of the first path, I had to reach the nadir of the second. It was the right decision. My yoga practice cushioned my landing. (shrink)

This book rightly argues for greater inclusion of the natural and social sciences in the humanities, especially philosophy. The author draws from psychology, especially folk psychology, to show that a basic trait of universal human cognition contains a form of weak dualism. It is a dualism based on the embodied awareness that one’s own thoughts are different from external objects, which generates the belief in a mind/body dualism. The book offers a great deal of evidence that the ancient Chinese embraced (...) a weak mind/body dualism. The author criticizes most philosophers who have proposed a mind/body holism. Because the author admits that correlative thinking is also a function of universal human cognition, I propose that what he refers to as weak mind/body dualism is actually a form of mind/body nondualism. The book cites many examples of how cross-culturally people depict the disembodied spirit in a spiritual-bodily or ghostly-apparition form. The author of this review argues that dualism is another form of the Orientalism that the book wants to avoid, and one way to avoid Orientalism-dualism would be to embrace the correlative, nondual mind/body relationship. (shrink)

What happens when a gallery space dedicated to exhibiting European art is interrupted by introducing African art objects? This essay reviews a temporary exhibition that introduced works of art from Africa, the property of Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum, into the exhibition space of the Bode Museum, whose collection consists of European art objects from the Classical to the Baroque periods. I offer a reading that is quite different than the curators’, proposing art museums as institutions where philosophies are expressed in the (...) form of art objects. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that the past holds the potential for liberating us from modern categories and thus for helping us envision alternative political futures. More specifically, I show how China’s non-feudal past offers resources for a future model of governance based on unity and social mobility.

More than a decade has passed since North American Indigenous scholars began a public dialogue on how we might “Indigenize the academy.” Discussions around how to “Indigenize” and whether it’s possible to “decolonize” the academy in Canada have proliferated as a result of the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada, which calls upon Canadians to learn the truth about colonial relations and reconcile the damage that is ongoing. Indigenous scholars are increasingly leading and writing about efforts in their institutions; efforts include (...) land- and Indigenous language-based pedagogies, transformative community-based research, Indigenous theorizing, and dual governance structures. Kim Anderson’s paper invites dialogue about how Indigenous feminist approaches can spark unique Indigenizing practices, with a focus on how we might activate Indigenous feminist spaces and places in the academy. In their responses, Elena Flores Ruíz uses Mexican feminist Indigenizing discourse to ask what can be done to promote plurifeminist indigenizing practices and North-South dialogues that acknowledge dynamic Indigenous pasts and diverse contexts for present interactions on Turtle Island. Georgina Tuari Stewart proceeds to describe Mana Wahine indigenous feminist theory from Aotearoa before proceeding to develop a “kitchen logic” of mana, which parallels Anderson’s understanding of tawow. Finally, Madina Tlostanova reflects on how several ways of advancing indigenous feminist academic activism described by Anderson intersect with examples from her own native Adyghe indigenous culture divided between the neocolonial situation and the post-Soviet trauma. (shrink)

This paper shows how both Jacques Derrida and Zhuangzi use their respective ways of subverting philosophical systems, by and large through language systems, to arrive at an subversion of political power or political systems or institutions. Political institutions are presented as including more general institutions such as the media, press, and academic and other kinds of institutions that influence the way our societies function, the way we live, work, and think. The paper first highlights the similarities and differences in the (...) application of subversive techniques in Derrida and Zhuangzi as they battle against their respective opponents. After that it shows how their subversion of philosophical systems and language flows over into the subversion of political systems. The hope or goal of subversion or critique is often understood to be not only overthrowing the old system, but replacing it with a better one, even when the change or overthrow comes from within the system itself. But this paper aims to show that both Derrida and Zhuangzi, although in very different contexts, also seem to subvert that hope, and that they may or may not offer some kind of way out of this conundrum. (shrink)

This review details Jonardon Ganeri’s laudable attempt to move Buddhist philosophy further into the center of contemporary philosophical debates about self, personhood, agency, action, perception, attention, and kinds of mental content. This book is a must read for any contemporary philosopher interested in these debates. My only concern is that Ganeri is reading too much of P.F. Strawson into Buddhghosa’s philosophy.

In this essay, I will sketch how from specializing in Greek philosophy, and Plato in particular, I came to learn Arabic and to know more about Islamic Studies. The focus will be on how philosophy can transcend linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, while still taking into account the linguistic, cultural, and religious particularities, as this leads to a richer philosophical approach.

I summarize and critically respond to Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria’s paper on panentheism. I show that their suggested concept of panentheism is useless for academic discourse because it refers to contradictory positions.

In this paper I argue that the concept of pilgrimage provides a unifying trope for the otherwise seemingly unfocused travel accounts of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Interior and Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland’s Voyage aux régions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent. I begin with a brief description of debates regarding the notion of pilgrimage. After that I show how pilgrimage as trope may be applied to the texts of these authors. This is followed by an application of the classical (...) stages of pilgrimage to particular phases of Bashō’s and Humboldt’s recounted experiences. I conclude that pilgrimage offers an illuminating new way to understand the travel accounts of these two writers. (shrink)

The History of Indian Philosophy consists of fifty-eight chapters, written by specialists across a diverse range of general and particularized topics on Indic philosophical traditions. The editorial credit for this extensive volume also belongs to a number of associate editors, including Amy Rayner, John Powers, Christopher Chapple, Stephen Phillips, and Richard King. There is, however, a shift evident in the methodological approach of this volume as compared to earlier orientalist and historical accounts. As Bilimoria notes in his preface, the editors (...) have endeavored not only “to bring out the historical development of philosophical ideas within particular schools or against other critical systems, but also... their interaction with broader cultural, social and paradigm shifts within Indian civilization that may have influenced or thwarted the optimal achievement in the area”. (shrink)

As a young scholar, Eric Voegelin wanted to prove whether the ‘race idea’ could function as a means of political integration. He published two books on race that, after his flight to the USA, were eventually passed off as an early critique of racism. This is a complete misinterpretation and inversion of his endeavor. In his tracts, Voegelin only criticized a certain direction of race thinking that he identified as a materialistic biological approach to the problem. At the same time, (...) he advocated another spiritual and metaphysical attempt, represented by the examples of Carl Gustav Carus, Othmar Spann, and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß. Both versions of race thinking were abundant in different types of fascism and also in Nazi Germany. That is why Voegelin could publish his books in Germany—and one of them even at the recommendation of a Nazi philosopher, with a publisher close to völkisch and fascist ideology. The revaluation of his racist texts was only possible on the basis of their affirmative or superficial and uncritical reading against the backdrop of the development of a one-dimensional conception of racism. (shrink)

Zhan Ruoshui 湛若水 is a prominent scholar-official and Confucian philosopher of Ming China. Like his contemporary Wang Yangming, he served in several official capacities during the reigns ofthree mid-Ming emperors, earned a reputation as an important Confucian teacher, gained a substantial following of students, and was critical to the onset of the jiangxue 講學 movement of the mid-Ming and the academy building associated with it. He also elaborated a sophisticated Confucian philosophy, leaving behind a corpus of work and a school (...) of thought. In 1517, when he was fifty-one, Zhan Ruoshui left office and retired to Mount Xiqiao 西樵山 in Guangdong, where he constructed both a hermitage for his family and an academy for his students. He remained there for four years until he was recommended for reappointment to office in 1521. These years were critical not only for his having established his first academy and writing the regulations for operating it but also because he produced a substantial volume of philosophical writings that were foundational to his becoming recognized as a Confucian master and establishing his school of thought. This study provides an overview of the biographical and historical setting, Zhan’s pedagogy, and his philosophy at a time when this lesser-known Ming Confucian passed through a crucial stage in the development of his Way. (shrink)

This review article puts two recent publications —Existence and Heritage: Hermeneutic Explorations in African and Continental Philosophies by Tsenay Serequeberhan and What Fanon Said. A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought by Lewis R. Gordon—in conversation with Achille Mbembe’s renowned On the Postcolony, first published in French in 2000, in English in 2001, and here reviewed in the 2015 Wits University Press edition. The opportunity for such a literary dialogue to take place across fifteen years is occasioned both by (...) the latest South African edition of On the Postcolony, which in itself invites a fresh reading of Mbembe’s manifesto on postcolonial authoritarianism in Africa, as well as by the different potential outcome of the postcolonial condition that Gordon and Serequeberhan envision and propose with respect to Mbembe. I argue that while Mbembe’s pessimistic portrayal of the postcolonial present is one whereby it is difficult to envision transformation, both Serequeberhan and Gordon’s books offer a rich philosophical terrain from which to imagine possible futures, grounded in notions of dialogue and solidarity, that, however, vary significantly for each author. (shrink)

In a recent paper on panentheism, Raphael Lataster and Purushottama Bilimoria offer a critique of several contemporary attempts to define what panentheism is and what panentheism is not. Lataster and Bilimoria find the recent attempts to define panentheism deficient. In particular, they find my approach to panentheism to be riddled with problems. In my reply, I explain that Lataster and Bilimoria have failed to explain what panentheism is and what it is not.

Comparative studies between Latin America and Asia can be productive if they reflect the structural necessities based on history and geopolitics that these regions have experienced in relation to the western countries since the nineteenth century. These non-western regions have developed themselves in a parallel way without direct communication with each other. Stephanie Rivera Berruz and Leah Kalmanson detect this parallelism precisely and sketch a possible productivity of this new area. This book serves as a starting point for further studies.

This paper explores two types of investment in the current People’s Republic of China, both of which promote fantasies about the past and future, presumably as a way to forestall uncomfortable conversations about the present. But the author is less interested in state decisions than in what makes an unofficial person “buy into” such fantasies. Her answer is, “misperceptions about tradition”, longstanding cultural preoccupations, and genuine desires to secure honor and glory in an insecure world. Her largely diagnostic paper briefly (...) considers possible responses to the question, “What, in such a dire situation, can be done to introduce more complex notions of sedimented identities?”. (shrink)

Throughout my philosophical journey, I have tried to bridge the gap between contemporary western philosophy and the analytical traditions of the Indian philosophical systems, especially Navya-Nyāya. Hence my aim has been to promote a dialogue between these two traditions where each can derive insights from the other. I have focused on new or better solutions to some contemporary problems of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, as well as global issues, and think Indian philosophy can be integrated with current (...) western philosophy, adding a new dimension to global culture and understanding. (shrink)