Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry最新文献

{"title":"Deleuze: Concepts as Continuous Variation","authors":"Daniel W. Smith","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105116","url":null,"abstract":"(Justin S. Litaker interviewed Daniel W. Smith. Mr. Litaker focused his questions on continuous variation of concepts in Deleuze). JSL: How did you come to be interested in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and what sustains your interest? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] DWS: I first became interested in Deleuze when I was in graduate school. I was reading Nietzsche when the English translation of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy came out. So I read the book and was amazed at the way Deleuze had systematized Nietzsche's thought. At the time, there weren't many translations of Deleuze's works available, so I went to the library at the University of Chicago and discovered Difference and Repetition on the shelves. I thought it must contain the secret of Deleuze's work, which was only hinted at in Nietzsche and Philosophy. So right at the start, Nietzsche and Philosophy instilled in me a kind of conviction that Deleuze was worth reading, and that there was much more in his work that I needed to find out about. I had also been reading Vincent Descombes' book Modern French Philosophy, and he had isolated Derrida and Deleuze as the focal points of contemporary French philosophy. So I knew that Deleuze was more than a historian of philosophy, and that he had a project of his own, which was, at the very least, oriented around the concept of difference. There and then, I decided that I needed to learn French in order to read Difference and Repetition. You asked what has sustained my interest in Deleuze through the years. For one, I've never tired of reading Deleuze. Even now, I don't think I have a complete sense of what Deleuze is up to. I think this is partly because of his manner of writing, which has been described as \"free indirect discourse.\" Deleuze has written numerous monographs in the history of philosophy-on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Leibniz, Bergson, and so on-but in each book he is also reading and using these thinkers toward his own philosophical ends, so that in Nietzsche and Philosophy, for instance, there is a becoming-Nietzsche of Deleuze as well as a becoming-Deleuze of Nietzsche. Readers are thus caught up in what Deleuze would call a becoming, or a zone of indiscernibility. Reading Deleuze is more like following a trajectory or a continuous movement that you never have done with, rather than arriving at a set of doctrines or positions that would lie at the heart of Deleuze's thought. JSL: Has this process of becoming or continuous movement affected your own reading of Deleuze? DWS: Absolutely. Right now I'm trying to write a book on Deleuze. At one point, Deleuze says that he still believes in philosophy as a system, and I initially thought, well great, I'll try to elucidate Deleuze's system of philosophy. I thought I'd approach Deleuze's system using Kant as a model, since Kant has a very architectonic idea of what philosophy is. So I borrowed five rubrics from Kant's system: aesthetics (the theory of space and time, the theory of art, the theory of ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125292061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Importance of Sound in Poetry","authors":"Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105117","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130308037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Active/reactive Body in Deleuze and Foucault","authors":"Sergey Toymentsev","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL201051110","url":null,"abstract":"Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy may be considered as one of the earliest studies that presents Nietzsche as a philosopher rather than a poetic thinker by foregrounding the systematic element of his legacy. As a result, Deleuze's Nietzsche turns out to be impersonally objective and rigorously scientific/mathematical: his science is the concrete physics of forces that studies the formation of bodies as the effects of the dynamic relations of forces. As I'll attempt to show, it is Nietzsche's physics of forces that lays the foundation for the divergent yet complimentary methodologies of Deleuze and Foulcault. 1. Deleuze's Reading of Nietzsche's Theory of Active and Reactive Forces Active and reactive forces are the basic functions of Nietzsche's calculus where one force is necessarily viewed in relation to its opposite. According to Nietzsche's hierarchy of forces, active forces are those of domination and form-giving; while reactive ones are those of obedience and form-receiving. In reality, however, the interpretation of what kinds of forces are involved in the formation of the body is complicated by the fact that reactive forces prevail over active ones and thereby shape a reactive body. In history, the original hierarchy of forces is therefore inverted: reactive forces are dominant, while active ones are dominated. To illuminate the dynamic of force struggles, Deleuze-Nietzsche introduces the concept of the will to power, an inner motive force whose more primordial qualities of affirmation and negation determine the qualities of forces in a given relation. The affirming will to power expresses itself through active forces (by affirming itself); while the negating will to power, or the will to nothingness, through reactive forces (by negating the other). Furthermore, \"affirmation and negation extend beyond action and reaction because they are the immediate qualities of becoming itself. Affirmation is ... the power of becoming active ... Negation is ... a becoming reactive.\" (1) Therefore, depending on what quality constitutes the nature of the will to power (which, in turn, determines the qualities of forces), the becoming of forces can be either reactive or active: through the will to nothingness, all forces become reactive; through the affirmative will to power, all forces become active. However, the becoming-reactive of all forces is, according to Deleuze-Nietzsche, the only becoming of forces we know; and it is this becoming that constitutes the essence of man and universal history. How do reactive forces triumph over active ones? As Deleuze emphasizes, reactive forces do not triumph by forming a superior force; they always remain inferior in quantity and reactive in quality. The root of their triumph lies in the inversion of the differential genetic element, from which both active and reactive forces emerge. The differential origin of forces is seen differently from both sides of active and reactive forces: for active forces, the differen","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133068702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Speed: Its Lure, Its Limits and the Question, Whether Or Not Time Has Come to Slow Things Down","authors":"K. V. Dijk","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105119","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131476547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Approach to Difference and Repetition","authors":"John Protevi","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20105115","url":null,"abstract":"Truer words were never spoken than when Deleuze said of Difference and Repetition in his 1973 \"Letter to a Harsh Critic,\" \"it's still full of academic elements, it's heavy going.\" (1) I'll say! (Part of that academicism comes from Deleuze having submitted Difference and Repetition to his jury as the primary thesis for the doctorat d'Etat; the secondary thesis was the big Spinoza book). The context of these remarks is useful: Deleuze has just been noting that \"the history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex.\" (2) Deleuze continues that he tried to subvert this repressive force by various means: (3) (1) by writing on authors such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche who contested the rationalist tradition by the \"critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power [pouvoir]\"; (2) by enculage / immaculate conception: making the author say something in their own words that would be monstrous. These are famous lines, and the last is certainly fun in an epater les bourgeois sort of way. But what is really important in my view comes next, when Deleuze explains what it means to finally write \"in your own name,\" as he claims he first did in Difference and Repetition: Individuals find a real name for themselves ... only through the harshest exercises in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere w/in them, to the intensities running through them. [This is] a depersonalization through love rather than through subjection. (4) So that's our challenge in introducing Difference and Repetition: can we help our students avoid subjecting themselves to it as a monument in the history of philosophy, as is the case with an Oedipal relation to the history of philosophy in which you give yourself up to be a mere repetiteur: an old occupational title in the French academic system? Rather, can we help them turn their reading of it into a \"harsh exercise in depersonalization,\" that is, an opening up of themselves to the multiplicities and intensities within them, indeed, within all of us, student and teacher alike? Can our encounter with it be a depersonalization through love? Can we learn from it, rather than gain knowledge from it? Luckily, Difference and Repetition contains a discussion of learning; it thematizes the challenge it poses to us. The discussion of learning occurs at a key point in Difference and Repetition, at the turning point of the book, the end of the middle chapter, \"The Image of Thought.\" Let's look at the architecture of the book, which after the Preface, has a pleasing and significant asymmetry: Introduction: Repetition and Difference Chapter One: Difference in Itself Chapter Two: Repetition for Itself Chapter Three: The Image of Thought Chapter Four: Ideal Synthesis of Difference Chapter Five: Asymmetrical Synthesis of Sensibility Conclusion: ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"63 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113958444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Representations of Time and Memory in Holocaust Literature: A Comparison of Charlotte Delbo’s Days and Memory and Ida Fink’s Selected Stories","authors":"A. Pokhrel","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009484","url":null,"abstract":"The recent Holocaust testimonies are often disruptive narration of personal histories. In the form of memory, these testimonies capture survivors' experience of the Nazi Holocaust. As the survivor recalls his or her past experience in the present, \"'[c]otemporality' becomes the controlling principle of these testimonies, as witnesses struggle with the impossible task of making their recollections of the camp experience coalesce with the rest of their lives.\" (1) The sense of time is deeply embedded in the survivor's consciousness. Caught between the transitions of past and present, the survivor becomes traumatized by his or her own anguish and the anguish of others. Hence, in these testimonies, the psychological association of events becomes more important than the chronological order of events. Original in its narrative technique and use of memory and time, Charlotte Delbo's posthumous memoir La memoire et les jours (translated as Days and Memory, 1985), is a complex reflection of the atrocious past. Auschwitz is fresh in Delbo's memory, and its horrifying images permeate her being in the present. So the present moment is not a simple point, but it has a certain extension and inner structure of its own. German philosopher Martin Heidegger has said that the reality of time is constructed not as something which we encounter only when we attempt to reckon it but as something which becomes operational within human existence. Similarly, Ida Fink, in her short stories \"A Scrap of Time,\" \"A Second Scrap of Time,\" and \"Traces\" (published in her anthologies Traces and A Scrap of Time and Other Stories), excavates the \"ruins of memory\" that invoke the devastating experiences of the Nazi Holocaust, which cannot be \"measured in months and years\" but can only be measured psychologically. (2) Interestingly enough, both Delbo and Fink focus on the intricate relations of past and present. In this respect, the principal question pertaining to this study would be: How are memory and time used in Delbo's memoir and Fink's stories in representing the Holocaust? Although Delbo and Fink both make use of memory and time in narrating the inhuman conditions of ghettoization, deportation, forced labor, roundups, and mass execution, their ways of representation vary significantly. Memory and time are used in Delbo to show the timelessness in complex layers of memory and to recreate a reality through inventive narrative style while in Fink they are used to delineate the scraps of time in the ruins of memory and to create a tragic domestic reality through conventional narrativity. Charlotte Delbo and Ida Fink both write in the present looking back at the past moments. Delbo writes from the cafe in France after many years of camp life, whereas Fink writes from Israel after many years of ghetto life. Both find their present self inextricably linked to the past self. Despite their recognition of the importance of remembering, Delbo and Fink both encounter a problem in conveyin","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115676207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deleuze’s Concept of the Virtual and the Critique of the Possible","authors":"Daniel W. Smith","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094913","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I would simply like to sketch out what I take to be the component elements of Deleuze's concept of the virtual. (1) My thesis is this: Deleuze's philosophy can accurately be described as a transcendental philosophy--a transcendental empiricism, as he himself puts it--although Deleuze defines the transcendental field in a completely different manner than does Kant, who invented the term. Kant's genius, according to Deleuze, was to have conceived of a purely immanent critique of reason, a critique that did not seek, within reason, \"errors\" produced by external causes, but rather \"illusions\" that arise internally and inevitably from within reason itself by the illegitimate (that is, transcendent) uses of the syntheses. (2) Insofar as Deleuze conceives of philosophy as the construction of a plane of immanence, he aligns himself squarely with Kant's critical philosophy. (3) But he also criticizes Kant for having failed to fulfill the immanent ambitions of his critique, for reasons that we shall see in a moment. The difference does not lie simply in the fact that Deleuze purges the transcendental of any reference to consciousness or to a transcendental subject. The more important difference lies precisely in the distinction he makes between the possible and the virtual. For Deleuze, the transcendental does not serve to define the \"conditions of possible experience\" for a subject; on the contrary, it is a virtual field that serves as the genetic or productive condition of real experience, and that exists prior to the constitution of the subject. In what follows, I would like to draw out this difference between the possible and the virtual (as two conceptions of the transcendental) from the point of view of the history of philosophy: first, by examining two figures who seem to have influenced Deleuze most in this regard--Henri Bergson and Salomon Maimon; second, by examining the reading of Kant that Deleuze provides in Difference and Repetition; and finally, by briefly examining, as examples, Deleuze's analysis of three virtual structures, namely those of language, society, and the body. 1. Bergson's Problematization of the Possible. I turn first to Bergson. Deleuze derives the concept of the virtual directly from Bergson, and in a number of early articles (1956) he argues that Bergson forged the concept of the virtual by problematizing the notion of the possible. More precisely, the virtual is by nature problematizing; it expresses a problematic. What does he mean by this? The activity of thought is frequently conceived of as the search for solutions to problems, a prejudice whose roots, Deleuze suggests, are both social and pedagogical. In the classroom, it is the school teacher who poses ready-made problems, the pupil's task being to discover the correct solution, and what the notions of \"true\" and \"false\" serve to qualify are precisely these responses or solutions. Yet everyone recognizes that problems are never given ready-made but mu","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121774845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"African Philosophy as the Practice of Resistance","authors":"T. Serequeberhan","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094914","url":null,"abstract":"In what follows I will present my views regarding the questions, and areas of concern, that are of fundamental importance to the contemporary discourse/practice of African philosophy. I will present a programmatic statement of what I take to be a form of resistance in the realm of theory. And so, in keeping with the above, I will explore and concretely engage three interconnected and nodal points: 1. the indigenous re-orientation of philosophic work 2. the critique of Eurocentrism 3. and the question of our \"generic human identity\" The concerns expressed in the above three points are, in my view, crucial issues that warrant on-going discussion and debate. In examining them my hope is to further develop their articulation in view of making their importance more palpable and pressing. (2) For, it is out of such efforts that we can better grasp, and possibly participate in changing, our dismal contemporary neo-colonial situation located in-between (3) our former status of colonial subjects and our present wretched condition of being dependent formerly colonized peoples. It is this dismal and barren in-between, which constitutes our lived present. Our postcolonial situation, to properly be such, has to put in question this colonial residue-the in-between-ness of our present. 1. We are today, at the end first decade of the 21st century, at a point in time when the concrete dominance of the universe of Euro-American singularity is being encompassed, or engulfed, by the multi-verse of our shared humanity. In this context, the central concern for the practice of philosophy focused on the formerly colonized world should be directed at helping to create a situation in which the enduring residue of the colonial past is systematically put in question. For, even if, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we are beyond the \"Age of Europe\" (4) yet, every aspect of our existence in the formerly colonized world is still-in essential and fundamental ways-determined and controlled by our former colonizers. I say this not in order to shift blame but to locate specifically the source of our present predicament, not only as regards our economic and political dependence on the West, but also as regards the basic dependent orientation of our theoretic efforts. Indeed, as Paulin J. Hountondji has correctly noted: \"Historically, science and technology, in their present form on the African continent, can be traced back to the colonial period.\" (5) In today's Africa, the practice of science, technology, and theoretic work in general--as conducted in African universities and research centers, such as they are--continues, in the same vein, as during colonial times. How this practice might be changed, in view of present needs, is a question that is seldom, if ever, asked! As Hountondji points out, this deplorable situation is taken \"for granted\" (6) and as \"normal\" by those engaged in scientific work. Now, this \"subjective\" acceptance and internalization of coloni","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131741723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mimesis in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory","authors":"Bed P. Paudyal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL2009481","url":null,"abstract":"Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on literature and the arts are spread over several of his works, but his \"systematic\" and comprehensive theorization of art (including literature) was to wait until Aesthetic Theory, which Adorno did not live to complete. However, as the editors of the original German edition, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman, quote Adorno (from a letter he wrote \"several days before his death\"), \"the final version 'still needed a desperate effort' but ... 'basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of the substance of the book'\"; (1) it is not inappropriate to rely on Aesthetic Theory as repository of Adorno's thought on the subject of art and literature. Supplementing its \"reading\" with relevant chapters from Adorno's other works -Dialectic of Enlightenment (which he coauthored with Max Horkheimer), Prisms, and Notes to Literature)-this essay concentrates on the concept of mimesis in Adorno's theory of arts and literature in order to examine the various meanings Adorno assigns to that concept as well as the \"constellations\" in which this concept articulates with other concepts. Since Adorno's aesthetic theory forms a coherent part of his overall philosophical enterprise, the strategy used here is to discuss briefly some key concepts constitutive of Adorno's critique of philosophy and of Capitalist society, and then zero in on the concept of mimesis. Adorno was a leading member of the Frankfurt School-an institute that championed \"critical theory,\" which attempted to \"grasp contemporary society and culture as a totality,\" espoused \"unity of theory and praxis,\" and critiqued instrumental rationality. (2) Key to Adorno's thinking, as to the Frankfurt School's, were Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and Georg Lukacs's concept of reification. Commodity fetishism names the enigma in Capitalist society, where the value of the commodity as the product of social labor appears as the value of the commodity itself just as the relation between human beings essential to the production and exchange of commodities appears as the relation between commodities themselves. In other words, commodities become fetishes because they seem to acquire a life of their own. (3) Lukacs's theory of reification extends Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, via Max Weber's theory of rationalization, to argue that not only the economic sphere (in Marxist base-superstructure model, the socio-economic base comprising of the forces and relations of production) but \"social institutions such as law, administration, and journalism\" and \"academic disciplines such as economics, jurisprudence, and philosophy\" also become permeated by the commodity form or the logic of exchange. Indeed, according to Lukacs, commodity fetishism governs not only the objects in the world but equally the subjects, who are reduced to exchangeable commodities, \"like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace.\" (4) Adorno's favorite word for the total reific","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130600921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"XXII World Congress of Philosophy and Nepali Representation","authors":"Yubraj Aryal","doi":"10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/JPHILNEPAL20094833","url":null,"abstract":"This year's XXII World Congress of Philosophy met on July 30-August 05 in Korea under the Congress's theme \" Rethinking Philosophy Today.\" This is a congress which meets every five years. Last time it met in 2003 in Turkey and the next time will be in Greece, the homeland of philosophy indeed, in 2013. Philosophers and philosophy teachers from more than eighty-two countries participated in this quintessential philosophy congress. Most of them including myself presented papers at a series of different sessions. Almost all of the rest of the countries except my own country had more than one delegate. I was the single delegate from Nepal. This speaks much about ourselves besides the fact of our economic hardship, because participation from 'poor' countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nigeria included more than a single delegate. Despite some bitter feelings about our backwardness, I represented my country with a high feeling. The XXII Congress was important for us Asians, because it is the first ever of these congresses to have met on Asian soil in the long history of its one hundred and eight years. It was an opportunity to display the beauty and strength of our philosophical systems and traditions to the global communities. The heavy presence of philosophers from China, India, Japan and Korea definitively asserted what was Asian in the congress. Nepali representation at such a historic congress was very crucial for the promotion of the Nepali image in the global intellectual community, and I was very conscious of this fact. Who we are matters in how far we engage in dialogue with the global community. Our long isolationism can no longer help us to define who we are. For the first time in the history of the Nepali philosophical tradition, I stood high in front of a colorful gathering of very distinguished philosophers and spoke in a Nepali voice about our interest in the establishment of a cooperative society for philosophy and humanistic studies in South Asia. I was quite aware that we alone could do nothing unless intellectual colleagues of our neighboring countries extended their helping hands. But I was proud when Professor Bhuvan Chandel, current Secretary of the Centre for Studies in Civilizations in New Delhi, embraced me saying \"Nepal is our identity!\" after the gathering. At least we could make our presence and influences known and felt to our own Indian counterparts. Finally, I realized that the global community (although we can question the validity of such a community) is welcoming us to come up with our own voice. They are sympathetic to listening to our voice. How much we want to come out of our 'exotic' hibernation depends on us. Whether we want to maintain same past isolationism in a kind of illusory prelapsarian bliss, or whether we want to come up to the global front is up to us. Keeping the local sovereignty intact and letting it interact with the global is a need of every society today. To initiate a dialogue with the global does ","PeriodicalId":288505,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127331289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}