In This Issue 14.3

Abstract

Our final issue in the fourteenth volume is a treasure trove of thought, including two essays on Nāgārjuna, two essays on Heidegger, a major statement by the renowned Italian philosopher Paolo Diego Bubbio, an interface between Zhuangzi and Simone Weil, the premiere of our new Author Meets Readers feature, and some reviews of important new works. This issue kicks off with a special feature where the celebrated Italian philosopher Paolo Diego Bubbio responds to the article that we published earlier this year (14.1) by Daniele Fulvi on Bubbio’s conception of kenōsis. Bubbio’s defends himself against Fulvi’s charge of ontological anthropocentrism, which he contends is inevitable but not crippling. Bubbio’s defense is executed through an honest engagement with Fulvi’s remarks and takes care in laying out a detailed roadmap of his and Gianni Vattimo’s concept of kenōsis and its ethical implications. The article impressively concludes with an original discussion of the relationship between truth and nature. In the next piece, “Becoming and Negation, Protagoras and Nāgārjuna,” Robin Reames examines the “historical pairing of becoming and negation” as articulated by Protagoras and Nāgārjuna. The author argues that Protagoras’s account is speculative while Nāgārjuna’s is more comprehensive, given its deep analysis of the logic of becoming and negation. An examination of the resonances between these two thinkers illuminates their capacity to engage the problem of sophistry. Reames’s study is as enriching as it is informative as she engages with the intellectual history of both traditions without overshadowing the philosophical insights. Regarding comparing Buddhist and Western thought, especially regarding Nāgārjuna, we turn to Rafal Stepien’s “Tetralemma and Trinity: An Essay on Buddhist and Christian Ontologies.” The author brings Nāgārjuna’s fourfold tetralemma in relation to Hegel’s threefold dialectic in a rearticulation of the self and other. Stepien clarifies that his approach is not to read one thinker through the perspective of the other (which he warns can distort these two thinkers), but rather to “adapt”—not adopt—their ideas into Stepien’s own ontological philosophy. What such a project would look like we leave to readers to explore on their own. Given that our journal tries to engage more generously the world’s wisdom heritage, Ian Tan’s “Ereignis and the Grounding of Interpretation: Towards a Heideggerian Reading of Translation and Translatability as Appropriative Event” is of special interest. He turns to what has become one of Heidegger’s most provocative and contentious claims. In his lectures on Hölderlin’s “The Ister,” Heidegger pronounced that “Translation is never merely a technical issue but concerns the relation of human beings to the essence of the word and to the worthiness of language. Tell me what you think of translation, and I will tell you who you are.” Tan contextualizes this claim within Heidegger’s ontological project, thereby illuminating that translation is not a merely technical problem, but rather revelatory of one’s implicit or explicit ontological assumptions. If translation was an explosive issue for the reception of Heideggerian thinking, it is nothing compared to the problem of ethics. It has become fashionable to hold that Heidegger