Through the form of a letter, I engage my mentor, Jorge J. E. Gracia, in his own biographical articulation of life. While the letter was not included in the volume for which it was originally written, it was read to Gracia before he passed, and I could not be more honored. In the end, that is all that really matters. In the words that follow I take a moment to reflect on Jorge’s life and work as I process his passing.

This essay recounts my intellectual development from undergraduate study until present. The first section discusses my early life and my introduction to philosophy at Glendon College. The second discusses my graduate career at UCLA and my gender transition midway through the program. The third concerns my philosophical development as a professor at Cal State LA until 2012. It details my shift from early modern philosophy to what would eventually be called “trans philosophy.” The final discusses my intellectual growth since then (...) as well as the emergence of trans philosophy as a subfield. (shrink)

This paper examines Nishida Kitarō’s late essay, “Life,” which develops the process of “world-expression” to situate human and nonhuman agency in ways drawing his thought closer to concerns of posthuman ideals of inter-species commensurability and biosemiotics today. Here he extends his philosophy of a site-specific matrix or basho so as to incorporate arguments from J. S. Haldane’s The Philosophical Basis of Biology, which poses questions concerning the coordination of organisms and environments. Nishida finds in Haldane support for his own situating (...) of selves, even engaging questions concerning how animals count as selves. (shrink)

Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects develops an account of willfulness as a site of simultaneous oppression and resistance: a diagnosis attributed to particular subjects and to modes of behavior that are thereby diminished, pathologized, and controlled, and a “diagnosis” that may be positively affirmed as a way of living and doing otherwise. This essay puts Ahmed’s work on willfulness in conversation with María Lugones’ decolonial feminism, particularly her theory of active subjectivity. With Lugones, we offer, one can better understand the resistant (...) potential of willfulness, not simply as the willful subject possessing an oppositional “will of her own”, but rather, as exercising a different kind of subjectivity altogether—one that relies on multiplicity and arises through relationships across non-dominant difference. Extending the connections that Ahmed herself draws between willfulness and “madness,” we further explore the willful elements in experiences relating to mental illness and cognitive disability, categories of experience that we understand to be important aspects of what Aníbal Quijano has termed “the coloniality of power.”. (shrink)

Sarah A. Mattice’s Exploring the Heart Sutra is an ambitiously creative, well researched, clearly explained, and richly transdisciplinary work. Mattice’s use of music sampling is inspired, and her survey of translation theories and contextualization of the philosophical traditions in Chinese cultures lay out the reasons for her own translation and line commentary on the Heart Sūtra that privileges its Chinese cultural heritage. It would be a fine book even if without the two long chapters in the middle, whose connections with (...) the Heart Sūtra are tenuous. (shrink)

This article thinks through the work of Kanaka philosopher Davida Malo and puts it in dialogue with the work of Richard Armstrong. It argues that Malo offers an account of being human that entails the proper management of impulses and intentions in ways that lead to flourishing in complex communities overseen by leaders that are informed by the examples of leaders from the past. Standards for proper living, in this setting, are constructed by the community, the members of which are (...) informed by their own experiences and the experiences of their ancestors as the latter sought to ease the burdens they confronted in daily life. Armstrong offers a similar picture of human beings as creatures that must learn to observe their intentions and to cultivate intentions that foster proper communal living—a community that Armstrong conceptualizes as a single family. Unlike Malo’s description, however, the standards of this family construct are based on universal laws of right and wrong that only pertain to humans and their standing before a divine figure understood as the Biblical God. The significance of this piece is not only to show how Malo and Armstrong may have conversed over the question of how to live well, but also to begin a conversation in the field of world philosophies about the viability of Kanaka ways of life. (shrink)

This tribute to the late bell hooks examines her work as a Black feminist and Black Buddhist. After a brief introduction to her life, I examine her contributions to feminist thought, particularly her understanding of the need to dismantle “imperial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” As a Black feminist and woman, hooks comes to this work, first, with rage, but in her turn to Buddhist thought, she develops a love ethic, one that she wrote extensively about until her death in 2021 (...) of renal failure. (shrink)

Carl Mika claims in the symposium’s lead essay that we need more myth today. In fact, an “unscientific” attitude can potentially reorient the alienation from the world. For Mika, a philosophical mātauranga Māori incorporates such a way of being in the world. Through it, an unmediated and co-existent relationship with the world can be built up. Some of Mika’s co-symposiasts invite Mika to substantiate aspects about this bold claim. Carwyn Jones nudges Mika to discuss the parallels between tikanga Māori—a system (...) that seeks to incorporate Māori law—and the common-law tradition that is adopted in New Zealand today. W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz agrees with Mika that to understand the world through an indifferent “scientific” investigation is to understand the world only partially, while the Māori scientist Ocean Ripeka Mercier illustrates how she seeks to develop a third space in her work that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the propensity to control the world through knowing. Helen Verran invites Mika to think about whether, and how, his understanding of a philosophical mātauranga Māori can help to facilitate the cultivation of a naturalism that is able to generate a cosmopolitics in New Zealand. (shrink)

Agada’s new book has arrived at a time when contemporary African philosophers are gradually engaging one another’s work and participating actively in system-building. It is based on this “new wave” in contemporary African philosophy scholarship that I provide some critical comments over Agada’s book Consolationism and Comparative Philosophy: Beyond Universalism and Particularism. Whereas the originality and depth of Agada is not in doubt regarding his idea of Mood, the ultimate category of his ontology, I level four objections against the metaphysical (...) system. These shortcomings, I argue, set limits on the ontological framework that can mediate thought, theory, and practice both in Africa and beyond. (shrink)

At various junctures in its history, Buddhist thought has adapted in inventive ways to accommodate important ideological features of the new cultural spheres with which it came into contact. The concept of “skill-in-means” played an important role in most of these syncretistic developments by facilitating critical reflexivity, doctrinal flexibility, and expositional creativity. It is surprising that a principle that has favored crosscultural dialogue, co-integration, and hybridization throughout Buddhism’s history should elicit little interest amongst contemporary philosophers wishing to syncretize Anglo-American philosophy (...) with precisely those Indian Buddhist philosophical traditions in which skill-in-means qua meta-doctrine features most prominently, that is, the various traditions falling under the broad banner of Madhyamaka. In this paper, I argue that failure to give due consideration to skill-in-means in “fusion philosophy” methodology and hermeneutics is expressive of lingering metaphilosophical parochialism in what ought to be--and may yet become--a more reflective and cosmopolitan field of research. I further argue that paying heed to skill-in-means makes it clear that, if “fusion” with Madhyamaka philosophical traditions really is the goal, then philosophers engaged in this project will have to expand their metaphilosophical horizons such as to respect and accommodate these traditions’ irreducibly therapeutic orientation. (shrink)

Kuzminski’s book Pyrrhonian Buddhism: A Philosophical Reconstruction presents a comparative study of Buddhism and Pyrrhonism. Pyrrhonian Buddhism, Kuzminski’s novelty, designates a synthesis of Greek and Indian influences on Pyrrho’s thought—namely Democritean atomism and Buddhist phenomenalism. It is a philosophical construct that reveals the similarities between the Buddhist and Pyrrhonian models of enlightenment. The book examines striking similarities between both Pyrrhonism and Buddhism, suggesting their virtual identity. In Kuzminski’s opinion, it is essentially the Buddhist practice and the description of the Buddhist (...) experience adopted by Pyrrho of Elis that resulted in the original synthesis he calls Pyrrhonian Buddhism. Putting Pyrrhonism in the setting of Buddhism and its practice brings a new understanding of Pyrrhonism as the ancient Greek school influencedby the east. (shrink)

This paper will pose the question of the future minoritization of the white, gentile, Christian European and EuroAmerican identity, which has dominated world history from colonization through the post-Cold War historical present. The question is not how this is coming to an end in the near future as empirical fact and in what manner, but an attempt to imagine another future, another identity than what has been proscribed in the past. In order to move into this alterity, we will engage (...) in a critical reading of Derrida’s essay “Abraham, The Other,” in the volume titled Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. By examining the philosophical complexity of Derrida’s quasi-autobiographical reflection on his Jewish identity, we can prepare the conditions for how the future gentile white European identity could look when not grounded in its self-edifying monotheism of a white, Christiandominated political and cultural state. The relation between the future diversification of European identity is not just a matter of postcolonial immigration and multiculturalism. It has to do with the ontological problem of how to understand the origin and telos of gentile white European identity in its Christian heritage and metaphysics when simple notions of origin and end are erased. This brings in the philosophical problem of historical time, movement, and epochal shifts between today’s Europe and another Europe, today’s future and what is other to that. Derrida’s text provides a guide into what is other to monotheism, unicity, oneness, and—by extension, we will argue—gentile whiteness, Christianness too, which is not simply the opposite of polytheism and today’s racial diversity, i.e., non-white and non-western Christian minorities in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the “west” in general. Having said that, this does have obvious implications regarding justice and equality as European and “western” societies in general diversify. Linking the most archaic, or the farthest in distance beyond the mythic origin of Abraham and therefore of Jewish biblical-historical identity, raises the prospects of “another” Abraham. This Other is not rooted in historical memory. This paper argues that Derrida’s reflections will help us understand an alternative future whose metaphysics is yet to be written, one that is not simply a repetition of the contents of the history of religion and philosophy in Europe and its linear, successive, chronological historical time-frame, i.e., the Gregorian calendar. (shrink)

This article seeks to demonstrate how a dialogue between literary theorist and psychoanalyst François Flahault and Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō can be mutually beneficial in the service of building an account of good and evil that contributes to discourses in ethics. Although Flahault and Nishida share a similar commitment to disrupt the dichotomy between good and evil in the effort to liberate subjectivity, they diverge in terms of how their accounts relate subjectivity to the processes of social history. As (...) this article will discuss, the significance of their divergence, however, elucidates the strengths and limits of their approaches to the victim-victimizer duality that is implied within the problem of good and evil. Such a divergence also points to a potential space of synthesis and mutual enrichment as well: namely, on the side of championing Nishida’s contradictory logic and Flahault’s emphasis on the contextual demands and problems of social history. That is to say, within the dialogical encounter between Flahault and Nishida, as the present article suggests, is the potentiality to develop a universal conception of the common good that is contradictorily linked to the subjective interior where such provides a critical resource for a deeper engagement with the victim-victimizer duality. (shrink)

Enduring Critical Poses focuses on Anishinaabe language and literature to explore the writers, texts, and genres that have influenced the field’s formation. Organized from multiple perspectives across Anishinaabe intertribal communities, the collection achieves a transnational and transhistorical convergence in showing how Anishinaabe ethics and values intersect, how Anishinaabe criticism models tribal-scholarly engagement, and how Anishinaabe critical practice expresses philosophy and aesthetics.

This article gives a brief and condensed account of the main trajectory of my philosophical career. This started with the philosophy of mathematics and the history of science. A major turning point was the encounter with Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of science, with other French philosophers, and with the history of Chinese mathematics.