These essays engage Jin Y. Park’s recent translation of the work of Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun and public intellectual in early twentieth-century Korea. Park’s translation of Iryŏp’s Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun was the subject of two book panels at recent conferences: the first a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the second at the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on a group program session sponsored by the (...) International Society for Buddhist Philosophy. This exchange also includes a response from Park. (shrink)

David Johnson’s book introduces the enormous explanatory potential of Watsuji’s view of nature and one of his most original conceptual creations, fūdo, into the current philosophical discussion. Within the framework of phenomenology and hermeneutics, Johnson brings the idea that nature is part of the very structure of human existence into the limelight. In contrast to the value-free world of nature described by science, at least in a conventional and positivist sense, Watsuji’s nature is a meaningful setting in which subjective and (...) objective elements form a unity. This study shows how conceptual resources from different cultural traditions can enrich our view of the self and nature and, at the same time, pave the way to a reenchantment of nature. (shrink)

Ambiguous Adventure, one of the most iconic novels in Senegalese history, recounts the plight of a traditional African society in the face of an encroaching western modernity, with its main character, Samba Diallo, as the face of this momentous struggle. The captivating story inspired numerous critiques that address the text from sociological, religious, and philosophical perspectives. Not surprisingly, most of the interpretations are based on the textual connection to Islam, the religion embraced and practiced by the Diallobé community in the (...) novel, and deal with universal topics such as death, identity, colonialism, initiation, tradition, and modernity. Building on the work done before me on Samba’s own search for identity within the Muslim context, I look to pre-Islamic Fulani traditions articulated by Amadou Hampaté Bâ, which better illuminate the process of initiation that leads the human being to transform into a self-realized person. I argue, based on this Fulani metaphysical context, that from the very beginning, Samba Diallo’s journey is initiatic in itself, in the traditional Fulani conception of the term, one that is connected to the sacred dimension. In this sense, the Fulani indigenous traditions anticipate Samba’s journey toward a sacred identity, highlight a clear roadmap to that very process, and, contrary to many critics, lead the initiate to success. (shrink)

Ahmad S. Dallal’s book is an informative and easily readable study of the thought of six leading twelfth/eighteenth century Muslim scholars. The author treats these scholars as the representatives of distinct intellectual trends of Islamic thought in the premodern period, while asserting that they belonged to the same thought-world and focused on the value of the present and the study of the ḥadīth. The monograph is a valuable contribution to the subject that is likely to cater to the needs of (...) graduate students. (shrink)

The rivalry among the philosophical schools in India was not purely intellectual, but had far-reaching social implications. The rivalry between vedic and non-vedic schools had a socio-political dimension. This paper claims that commentaries of the source texts of schools on both sides played an important role in development of inter-darśana politics. This paper deals with some of the interpretative moves made by Vācaspatimiśra in his two famous commentaries: Sāṅkhyatattvakaumudī, the commentary on Sāṅkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, and Nyāyavārtikatātparyaṭīkā, the commentary on Nyāyavārtika (...) of Udyotakara. The paper argues that some of Vācaspatimiśra’s interpretative moves in these commentaries can be called “political moves.” The paper shows how these interpretative moves deviate from the natural or unforced meanings of the texts. It argues that these deviations aim at strengthening the orthodox front of Indian philosophy. (shrink)

How does creolization fare as a social-scientific concept? While Jane Gordon seeks to underscore the potential such a concept might have in the social sciences and philosophy, her discussants Gopal Guru, Kipton E. Jensen, Mickaella Perina, and Sundar Sarukkai draw attention to descriptive and normative issues that need to be addressed before arguments formulating and enacting creolization processes can be brought into domains of life from which they have been historically excluded.

This paper is an account of the author’s emergence as an Afro-Caribbean philosopher, although formally trained and still working in the discipline of sociology. In order to complete this account, I made use of an Akan theory of the self and the circular path of its development, in order to integrate the details of the influences, major phases, and changes leading to my emergence as a Caribbean philosopher, as well as some of the academic challenges to the field of Caribbean (...) philosophy as a whole that had to be overcome. (shrink)

An analysis of my personal journey growing up in a dominated society and studying in an American university. I recount my quest for a de-centered knowledge, which the problématique of second-wave feminist theory enabled me to partially achieve as I started writing about power, gender, and social theory.

The collected volume Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions aspires to explore the growing phenomenon of Jews adopting a meat-free way of life from different perspectives and disciplines. Despite a number of standout contributions, it does little to advance scholarship in the field. The present review first discusses the various articles included in the volume and then reflects on the problematic editorial approach that hinders its enormous scholarly potential.

A brief celebration of the contributions of the late Eliot Deutsch to Asian, comparative, and world philosophy, and to the academic community more generally.

On the premise that the good knowing is the originary reality, this article provides a synopsis of Wang Yangming’s exposition of the fundamental essence of liangzhi. The self-existent resemblances of the originary reality are outlined and summarized as the eight virtues of liangzhi: voidness, intelligence, luminousness, awareness, constancy, happiness, true I, and purity. These eight virtues are, however, ultimately subsumed by the middle, which governs them in common. The middle is the original state and true form of the fundamental essence (...) of liangzhi, which Wang Yangming describes as a transparent mirror and level balance. (shrink)

This essay highlights Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s major philosophical projects: first, philosophizing that includes nonwestern philosophies, especially Chinese and Indian, and that creates a dialogue between philosophers and philosophical traditions without prioritizing any of them, and without taking western philosophy as the point of departure. Second, a similar, inclusive move in the field of art, art without borders if you wish. Here the inclusivity applies not just to east and west, north and south, but even to animal-made art. Just as he wrote (...) about philosophy in China and India, attempting to say something broader about humanity and humanism, so too does Scharfstein’s argument about animals and art have far-reaching implications, above and beyond the question of the demarcation of art. He aims to tell us something about the human-animal relationship, about lack of solidarity between fellow inhabitants of planet earth, not just humans, and about cruelty and exploitation and blindness to the other, whichever other. And finally, I touch on Scharfstein’s work The Philosophers, beautifully translated into Hebrew as Philosophers as Human Beings, where “he dares to imply that philosophizing is in fact a sublimated expression of the unconscious,” as Yoav Ariel—sinologist and much more—puts it. Such a move, Ariel continues to argue, “dethrones philosophy of its unique position of honor and supremacy, and disperses the atmosphere of conceptual terror that philosophy created generation after generation.”. (shrink)

“Suu ulimwengu bahari tesi [This world is a tempestuous sea],” laments the poet Sayyid Abdallah bin Ali bin Nasir in his poem Al-Inkishafi, in which he seeks a stable point in the stormy ocean of historical upheavals. Al-Inkishafi has been translated as “The Soul’s Awakening”, as self-examination or revelation. Against the backdrop of a depiction of the economic decline of the Pate sultanate at the end of the seventeenth century, the poem dwells on the vanity of earthly life and worldly (...) pleasures and questions the presence of the self in the world and whether the self can withdraw itself from the world in search of a transcendent stable point. The poem arose in the context of an ongoing poetic discourse along the East African coast, where Sufism and religious asceticism found expression in poetry, and my paper reads it alongside other poems from this period as evidence of the constitution of introspection, interiority, and a new kind of self-consciousness. I will specifically examine the role of attention in this process. In addition to being a cognitive filter that removes confusion and error from thought and ensures the self—a relational construct arising from the interaction of reason, passions, and the world—constructs an adequate intellectual representation of the world, attention acquires ethical and pragmatic connotations in facilitating the self’s resistance to temptation as well as its focus on salvation. It is, effectively, only thanks to attention that the self is able to discriminate both cognitively and morally and, crucially, to maintain agency through exercising control over its desires and actions. (shrink)

In celebrating the epistemological reform and empowerment of non-white peoples in the academy, we propose a manifesto that seeks to dislodge the complacencies within Sikh Studies and within Sikh communities, and invite non-Sikhs to engage with radical Sikhi social justice. By dwelling at feminist intersections of postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and decolonization studies, we are inspired to share the radical possibilities of Sikh Studies, and we also urge Sikh Studies and Sikh people to inhabit an explicit political orientation of insurrection (...) and subversion. Importantly, such a feminist decolonial orientation may well hold promise for other fields of study on the margins as well. In particular, we foreground eight points of action: gendering Sikh Studies; de-policing intimate desire and the diversity of relationships; disrupting Eurocentric knowledge production; de-territorializing diasporas; challenging caste politics; disrupting Islamophobia; undoing our roles in contemporary colonialisms; and fostering care and responsibility for the nonhuman world. In this manifesto we hope to develop interdisciplinary connections, critical interventions, and broader alliances to cultivate debates and action that both challenge tradition and participate within broader political campaigns for social justice. (shrink)

This article reviews Shaun O’Dwyer’s latest book, Confucianism’s Prospects: A Reassessment. By critiquing philosophical theories of “Confucian democracy” and their shared sociological assumption that Confucianism still functions as a cultural matrix for East Asian societies, O’Dwyer argues that visions on the future of Confucianism alternative to what the currently fixed institutional infrastructure of liberal democracy entails are flawed. This is mainly because if unconstrained by the infrastructure, the hardwired paternalism and elitism of Confucian ethics would necessarily impose morally taxing burdens (...) upon a de facto pluralistic society. This article assesses O’Dwyer’s counterarguments to “Confucian democracy,” and proposes a different approach to estimate the prospects of Confucianism in the contemporary world. (shrink)

The questions raised by Māori identity are not static, but complex and changing over time. The ethnicity known as “Māori” came into existence in colonial New Zealand as a new, pan-tribal identity concept, in response to the trauma of invasion and dispossession by large numbers of mainly British settlers. Ideas of Māori identity have changed over the course of succeeding generations in response to wider social and economic changes. While inter-ethnic marriages and other sexual liaisons have been common throughout the (...) Māori-Pākehā relationship, the nature of such unions, and the identity choices available to their descendants, have varied according to era and social locus. In colonial families, the memory of a Māori ancestor was often deliberately suppressed, and children were encouraged to deny that part of their history and “become” European New Zealanders: a classic form of what we call “trans-ethnicity.” From a Māori perspective, the relationship with Pākehā has been marked by a series of losses: loss of land, language, social cohesion, even loss of knowledge of whakapapa. This article explores this last form of loss, which leads to “suppressed” Māori identities, and possible effects of attempting to recover such lost Māori identity rights. (shrink)

Transnational Cosmopolitanism is a text that aims to build upon Kant’s account of cosmopolitanism through the post-WWI writings and political life of W.E.B. Du Bois. Through the work of these two figures, Valdez constructs the notion of “transnational cosmopolitanism” to describe situations of global injustice and to imagine worlds otherwise. By demonstrating the limits of Kantian cosmopolitanism through an anti-colonial reading of “Perpetual Peace,” Transnational Cosmopolitanism illustrates how these limits still emerge within neo-Kantian frameworks and writing. In order to overcome (...) these limitations, Valdez artfully utilizes Du Bois’ political writings and his radical coalitional politics to argue that Du Bois’ writings and actions should inform our theorization and normative insights. This text provides a unique and robust contribution to the literature of cosmopolitanism that questions the current use of Kant’s canonical approach and enlists overlooked readings and resources to compose a transnational cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Hailing from the American South, I was a slow student, awakened by Plato in high school and introduced to philosophy in college. Alienated from analytic trivia and minutia, I did graduate work in Greek philosophy at Syracuse University. My first academic job at Memphis State University involved me in the Southern Civil Rights Movement; my second at the Wisconsin State University-Stevens Point involved me in the environmental movement and inspired me to create first environmental ethics and then, in collaboration with (...) Roger Ames, comparative environmental philosophy. In the face of unprecedented challenges, such as global climate change, academic philosophy must abandon its preoccupation with arcane puzzles and its studied intellectual isolation and work collaboratively with the natural and social sciences if it is to survive in the competitive and accountable academic climate of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Ueda Shizuteru 上田閑照, one of the most consequential and celebrated Japanese philosophers of the last hundred years, passed away on June 28, 2019, at the age of 93. A professor of religious studies at Kyoto University, he was not only a leading scholar of Meister Eckhart and Nishida Kitarō, he was a highly original philosopher in his own right and widely recognized as the central figure in the third generation of the Kyoto School. Moreover, he was not only one of (...) the foremost philosophical interpreters of Rinzai Zen Buddhism, he was himself an inka certified lay master. (shrink)

This review examines the main topics and the main thesis of Thomas Kasulis’s Engaging Japanese Philosophy. The book covers the entire fourteen-hundred-year history of philosophical thinking in Japan, with a focus on seven key Buddhist, Confucian, Native Studies, and modern academic philosophers. The author’s main thesis is that Japanese philosophers have predominantly aimed at an existentially “engaged knowing” rather than the kind of objectively “detached knowing” that has come to dominate modern western and—by colonial extension—most of modern Japanese academic philosophy.

This essay develops on the aesthetic dimensions of decolonial thought in the work of Rodolfo Kusch and Enrique Dussel, who both point us to non-objectifying modes of thinking and being. Beyond a strictly epistemological approach, decolonial critique ought to offer an account of bodies, spaces, and movements that are the very condition of thought—that is to say, the condition of a mode of thinking otherwise, beyond the dominant colonial paradigm. This account of aesthetics involves the spacing and temporalizing of bodies (...) as they live and move through the world, or what Alejandro Vallega calls living-thinking. The spacing-temporalizing of life points us also to the rhythm of life—life as movement, flow, and spacing. Turning to resistant epistemologies alongside the work of Omar Rivera, I consider how these epistemologies go beyond disembodied and abstracted ways of knowing as they sidestep the subject/object divide and engage sensuous and embodied dimensions of thinking, aesthetic experiences, diverse geographies, and histories. In closing, I argue that decolonial aesthetics also points us to a critique of the coloniality of space. Moving beyond a cartographic grid that attempts to capture subjects and spaces in advance on its coordinate plane, decolonial aesthetics opens onto the richness of embodied and cosmic spaces. (shrink)

At the centre of Powers' (2019) China and England is an extraordinary forgotten episode in the history of political ideas. There was a time when English radicals critiqued the corruption and injustice of the English political system by contrasting it with the superior example of China. There was a time when they advocated adopting a Chinese conceptual framework for thinking about politics. So dominant and prevalent was the English radicals' use of this framework, that their opponents took to dismissing their (...) points as 'the argument from the Chinese'. In my review of Powers' book, I welcome the profound reconfiguration of our political understandings that knowledge of this historical episode brings. However, I question Powers' framing presumption that the generic problems of any complex society lead to convergence on a single master political value of 'social justice'. Surely there are deep and enduring differences amongst thinkers of political value, even within a single society, let alone across different societies. Taking this point seriously would challenge the simple linear directionality of Powers' story of moral and political progress. (shrink)

Sandra Field, Jeffrey Flynn, Stephen Macedo, Longxi Zhang, and Martin Powers discussed Powers’ book China and England: The Preindustrial Struggle for Social Justice in Word and Image at the American Philosophical Association’s 2020 Eastern Division meeting in Philadelphia. The panel was sponsored by the APA’s “Committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies” and organized by Brian Bruya.

This collection of Charles Mills’ writings includes his famous “White Ignorance” and “Kant’s Untermenschen,” along with his most extensive engagement with the writings of John Rawls. Fleischacker’s review endorses and expands Mills’ critique of what Rawls calls “ideal theory,” while disputing Mills’ characterization of Kant’s moral theory as intrinsically racist. It proposes a different way of understanding how Kant and other philosophers have been able to maintain egalitarian principles while still being racist.

This essay examines several contemporary works in cultural studies that critique universalizing tendencies in western intellectual discourse. Michael Wiedorn rereads Glissant as a philosophical and political thinker, focusing on the concept of paradox in Glissant’s method of archipelagic thinking, aimed at transforming the imaginaire of collective consciousness. Fred Moten examines a variety of works of interactive, auditory, visual, and textual formats that are representative of black aesthetics to track the affectability of the trauma of antiblackness and the entanglements between blackness (...) and anti-blackness that blur or resist a stabilized definition of black subjectivity and expression. Sharon Suh recovers the Buddhist practice of gazing to critically examine images of Buddhist ideas and practitioners in western and Asian films to challenge a racialized and gendered hierarchy of Buddhism in mainstream culture. Such a project seeks to recover the laywoman’s Buddhist subjectivities and reimagine Buddhism in ways that overcomes the problematic depictions enabled by orientalist studies. (shrink)

The interest of this essay is meta-philosophical: I seek to reconstruct neglected concepts of thought available to us given the diverse use South Asian Buddhist philosophers have made of the term-of-art vikalpa. In contemporary Anglophone engagements with Buddhist philosophy, it has come to mean either the categorization and reidentification of particulars in terms of the construction of equivalence classes and/or the representation of extra-mental causes of content. While this does track much that is important in the history of Buddhist philosophy, (...) it is overly restrictive. Based on three examples, this essay reconstructs other concepts of vikalpa available before, during, and after Digṅāga’s epochal reformulation of Buddhist epistemology. The first example takes us away from the familiar context of content introduction in perceptual experience to consider Ratnakīrti’s way of treating cases where one exits from concept-involving modes of engaging content. The second takes up with Vasubandhu and Sthiramati the case of the contents of background awareness. The third and final case builds on the last concern, taking up a discussion of possible worlds in the Laṅkāvatārasūtra. This last was intended to address the relationship of thought to language. Moving beyond narrowly epistemological concerns allows a more expansive sense of vikalpa to come into view. Doing so, in turn, allows one to see that vikalpa need not indicate only occurrent representations, but also the structured systems of possible discriminations which some Buddhists took to serve as the background for all possible perception, thought, and action. The existence of such a background changes the salience and the value of distinctions drawn between conceptual and non-conceptual contents and experiences. (shrink)

This review seeks to evaluate and navigate the theoretical terrain in which author Nathalie Etoke engages new modes of reflection on old problems of anti-black violence and erasure. Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition is a fairly short and accessible text devoted to rethinking paradigms of subjectivity in ways that animate our individual and collective responsibility. She offers theoretical but practical interventions invigorated by the indisputable vitality of Black arts, particularly music and literature. She deftly combines rigorous (...) philosophical examinations of the self and the other with a praxis-oriented invitation to reconsider the pathological hierarchy of social relations since the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how we might best upend them. Etoke’s refreshing take is one of possibility and potential. (shrink)

To practice philosophy is to be part of a conversation, and this autobiography is a conversation about Mabogo Percy More’s experiences as a black African philosopher in South Africa. Not only is this a conversation about philosophy, but it is also a conversation with philosophy as a profession, its interlocutors, and the philosophical canon. Moreover, it is an account of the philosophers both living and dead who have informed More’s worldview, matched with his lived experience. More specifically, as he himself (...) says, this is “an autobiography of a black philosopher in apartheid and apartheid South Africa and its academic institutions”. (shrink)

I am a mixed blood woman raised in Canada with two ancestries, Ininiwak and French, that have competing worldviews from social-political and religious ideology to ancient philosophies. These mixed ancestries set me on numerous paths, ultimately leading me to philosophy. However, when did this path begin? No one in my immediate family entertained ideas of education, so I had no guidance or understanding of what university would mean. I came from an ancestry of hardworking men considered to be lower-class French (...) men and a time when women stayed home raising families. My other ancestry involved hunting, trapping, and fishing where there were no class distinctions and everyone worked together in order to survive. Women here were not restricted to the home but free to hunt, trap, and fish if that was their choice. One ancestry included transience, of employment and of values, and strict religious doctrine. My other ancestry held permanence, in land, employment, families, and in friendships, and faith was intrinsic to all life. The diversity within my worldviews, the hypocrisy witnessed, and the rejection of my matrilineal worldview/philosophy sent me along my philosophy journey and kept me there. I wanted to know who “this man was that owned my mother’s world.”. (shrink)

The article examines the theories of decolonization that have originated in the north of the Americas and Oceania and Latin America. It compares settler colonial theories developed by Australian historians Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini with the theory of the coloniality of power of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. The author argues that Wolfe’s and Veracini’s theory of settler colonialism creates a conceptual distancing from what they call exploitation colonialism that is not only theoretically unsound, but also historically inaccurate. The (...) land/labor binary that they build in their theory of settler colonialism holds up only if it excludes Latin America from the analysis. This becomes evident in their analyses of the state, race, and miscegenation. Both theories, however, largely ignore gender in the description of colonization, a gap that Latin American decolonial theorists and feminist indigenous theorists of the north must fill. The differences between the theories determines also the ways they imagine decolonization. (shrink)

This paper adds to the epistemological contributions of Latin American philosophy. In particular, I propose a “resistant epistemology” informed by contemporary indigenous Andean philosophies and cosmologies. Focusing on the work of María Lugones, Rodolfo Kusch, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, I explore ways in which communities are made and remade on the basis of knowledges from below, surviving political and ecological crises, including colonialism and modern development. These kinds of resistive knowledges draw from rituals, quotidian and cosmic rhythms, and affective withdrawals (...) from instrumental and objectifying dispositions. (shrink)

In her anchor-piece on historicizing the canon, Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee appeals to professional philosophers to develop several tools that can be implemented in historicizing the canon. Amy Donahue, David H. Kim, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Kris Sealey tessellate different aspects of this call. Donahue augments Rosenlee’s argument by braiding together Dharmakīrti’s “anyāpoha” theory and Charles Mills’ ruminations about “white ignorance”; Kim explores some of the nuances of Rosenlee’s account for a post-Eurocentric philosophy; Maldonado-Torres ruminates about the larger social context in which (...) thinking can be decolonized; and Sealey uses the work of Kristie Dotson to acknowledge the possibility of multiple canons. In putting on the table a number of questions, concepts, and approaches to canon-building, the symposium aims to contribute to what is by now a large array of similar reflections and engagements in different parts of the world. (shrink)

Colonization is still present in the lives of Indigenous people in North America, and the threats it underwrites—the possibility of losing federal recognition, the failure to investigate the cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, and the constant challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act —comprise the day-to-day demands in Indian Country. While allies in the fight against modern-day colonialism would be welcome, the previous failings and insincerities of putative allies and the existence of an ally industrial complex (...) make it difficult to be a contemporary ally to Indigneous people. In this paper, I address the difficulties associated with allyship and discuss why being an active bystander is not sufficient for the needs of Indigenous people in North America. Taking the lessons learned from the actions of Veterans Stand for Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter during #NODAPL, I present some features of a decolonial ally. A decolonial ally is willing to stand in a relationship with Indigenous people, will seek out this relation while recognizing their privilege and affirming the sovereignty of those they seek to serve, and above all, will learn about the people independently, without imposing a burden on marginalized communities. Given that Indigenous people worldwide face similar colonial threats, I conclude by offering some points for future research regarding global Indigenous allyship. (shrink)

This book persuasively shows that modern philosophical ways of knowing are not the only valid forms of knowledge that exist. Angela Roothaan argues for a critical reappraisal of indigenous ways of knowing and a need to overturn the politics of epistemology that sustain the modern system of knowledge with regard to its othering of indigenous outlooks of nature. According to Roothaan, this can be achieved by broadening our epistemological and moral vistas beyond the thin modern scientific view that circumscribes valid (...) knowledge merely to the empirical aspects of reality. Such broadening will make an intercultural environmental dialogue possible. (shrink)

This essay invites the reader to engage in a path towards understanding philosophy in terms of “world philosophies” rather than mapping out thought to the already operative westernizing conceptions of what “philosophy” is. The question of “world philosophies” is taken up through the way that Latin American thought is situated inbetween lineages and traditions. The essay focuses on the transformative encounter between Heidegger’s thought during the period of Being and Time and the Argentine thinker Rodolfo Kusch. In contrast to Heidegger, (...) Kusch finds a distinct path of thinking grounded in Latin American Indigenous thought, a thinking that remains to date in the pre-reflexive living of the popular classes in Latin America. Ultimately, the task of world philosophies arises from the concrete situation of the thought being developed, an attentiveness required that is found in aesthetic sensibilities rather than in reflexive rational thought alone or rationalist pragmatic subjectivism. (shrink)

By looking at a canonical article representing academic philosophy’s orthodox view against cultural relativism, James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” this paper argues that current mainstream western academic philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism is premised on a fear of the racial Other. The examples that Rachels marshals against cultural relativism default to the persistent, ubiquitous, and age-old stereotypes about the savage/barbarian Other that have dominated the history of western engagement with the non-western world. What academic philosophy fears about cultural (...) relativism, it is argued, is the barbarians of the western imagination and not fellow human beings. The same structure that informs fears of cultural relativism, whereby people with different customs are reduced to the barbarian/savage of the western imagination, can be seen in the genesis of international law which arose as a justification for the domination of the Amerindian. It is argued that implicit in arguments against cultural relativism is the preservation of the same right to dominate the Other. Finally, it is argued that the appeal of the fear of cultural relativism is that, in directing moral outrage at others, one can avoid reflecting on the failures of one’s own cultural tradition. (shrink)

In this anthology, works of ten Japanese thinkers, many of whom are no longer alive but who have been household names among the Japanese intellectual community, are selected and translated into English, accompanied by a brief introduction of each thinker. An additional three substantial essays by scholars of Japanese philosophy make this volume a compelling read for anyone interested in the Japanese philosophical endeavor since 1945. This anthology clearly goes beyond the familiar parameter of the Kyoto School of Philosophy.

Louise Sundararajan’s aim in Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture is to provide an explanatory framework for cross-cultural differences between Chinese and what she refers to as “Western” cultures from the methodological perspective of indigenous psychology, which aims to give voice to the knowledge that exists beyond the limits of mainstream “Western” psychology. Her book is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing from philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, physics, biology, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics. She also identifies some of the shared roots of Daoism, Confucianism, and (...) Buddhism, and other similarities between Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indian cultures, in order to further explicate the various concepts of Chinese emotions. As a result, Sundararajan also draws some more general conclusions regarding what she refers to as “Eastern” cultures. (shrink)