Journal of Japanese Philosophy最新文献

{"title":"Dōgen’s “Do No Evil” as “Nonproduction of Evil”: An Achievement and Its Micro-Macrocosmic Correlativity","authors":"S. Nagatomo","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2015.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2015.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Dōgen’s treatment of evil starts with a reflection on four statements found in the Pali Buddhist Cannon, namely, “Do no evil, Do good, and Purify the mind. This is the teaching of the Buddhas.” In order to grasp his philosophical reflection on evil, we must cast our inquiry within the wider issues that conceptually frame these four statements; namely, the idea of karmic retribution and an agent trapped in it. This requires us to clarify why “do no evil” precedes “do good,” and why there is a demand to “purify the mind.” The first two injunctions deal with an issue of human nature, and the third with the practice of Zen meditation, which is Dōgen’s method for “purify[ing] the mind.” His reflection on meditation experiences enabled him to discover how “do no evil” changes into “nonproduction of evil.” Dōgen’s contention then is that “do no evil” as an ethical imperative transforms into “nonproduction of evil.” Therefore, an ethical imperative as understood by an ordinary person is not the true intent of the above injunction for a practicing Buddhist. This is because the practice of meditation renders a practicing Buddhist incapable of producing evil. “Nonproduction of evil” describes an achieved state of personhood. It is for Dōgen a term of achievement, that is, a transformative process reached from a prescriptive imperative to a state descriptive of embodied, meditational experience. With this transformation, one comes to understand “the teaching of the Buddhas.”","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"3 1","pages":"31 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2015.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434174","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":"Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen, and the Psychedelic Eschaton by Cunningham, Eric (review)","authors":"S. Odin","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2015.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2015.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"3 1","pages":"117 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2015.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434290","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":"Kūkai and Dōgen as Exemplars of Ecological Engagement","authors":"G. Parkes","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2013.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2013.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Although the planet is currently facing an unprecedented array of environmental crises, those who are in a position to do something about them seem to be paralyzed and the general public apathetic. This pathological situation derives in part from a particular conception of the human relationship to nature which is central to anthropocentric traditions of thought in the West, and which understands the human being as separate from, and superior to, all other beings in the natural world. Traditional East Asian understandings of this relationship are quite different and remarkably un-anthropocentric, especially as exemplified in the ideas of Chinese Daoism and Japanese Buddhism—even though Western conceptions now predominate in both China and Japan. Nevertheless, these ideas and understandings are experientially accessible to any contemporary person who has full contact with the natural world, regardless of which tradition that person stands in.This essay examines the understanding of the human-nature relation that we find in the philosophies of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi, 774–835) and Dōgen (1200–1253), from whom we can learn much that is beneficial in the context of our current environmental predicament. The ideas of both thinkers are firmly rooted in practice, and especially bodily or somatic practice, designed to bring about a transformation of experience. The argument is not that we should appropriate their conceptions of nature in order to solve our environmental problems; rather, since they both practice “philosophy as a way of life,” the suggestion is that we can learn from the practices they advocate in the light of what they say about natural phenomena and would benefit from emulating their ways of engaging the world ecologically.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"110 - 85"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2013.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434274","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":"Japanese Postmodern Philosophy’s Turn to Historicity","authors":"Shaoyang Lin","doi":"10.1353/jjp.2013.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/jjp.2013.0006","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I will outline and categorize the history of postmodernism in the Japanese context. I will also critically analyze its changes from the perspective of postwar Japanese intellectual history as well as the postwar history of Japanese political philosophy. I will position this new intellectual and philosophical tendency, which has been around for nearly forty years since the late 1970s, in a global context, and I will especially position it within an East Asian perspective, which from my point of view, has been neglected. It also means that I will not only see Japanese postmodernism as the outcome of imported theory, rather, I will attempt to see it in its own historical context. And by outlining the shift of Japanese postmodernism over these forty years, I will also attempt to see the differences and continuities between Japanese modernism and postmodernism, thus attempting to overcome the opposing dichotomy of “modernism versus postmodernism” in the postwar Japanese intellectual context. As my conclusion, I regard the shifts in the history of postmodern philosophy over the past forty years, as a process of its turn to achieve historicity, and I also see it as a kind of localization of new Western thoughts in a modern Japanese context.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"111 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/jjp.2013.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66433937","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":"Opening Up the West: Toward Dialogue with Japanese Philosophy","authors":"Bret W. Davis","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2013.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2013.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This essay aims to help prepare the way for those trained in Western philosophy to enter into dialogue with non-Western traditions of philosophy such as that of Japan. This will be done mainly by means of critical examination of some key instances of the ambivalence—the tension between the openings and closures—toward dialogue with non-Western traditions found throughout the history of Western philosophy. After tracing this ambivalence back to the Greeks, and to the figure of Socrates in particular, the essay focuses in particular on a selection of modern continental philosophers: Hegel, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Derrida. While ambivalences can be found in all four, the order in which they are presented corresponds roughly to the degrees to which they contribute to opening up the West to cross-cultural philosophical dialogue. The positive lesson we glean from an examination of their thought is that hermeneutical and deconstructive reflection on one’s own tradition should accompany any venture into discourse with other ways of thinking and being. The critical point to be made, however, is that the latter venture into dialogue with others should at the same time accompany the former self-reflection. Even Heidegger and Derrida, after all, declined to fully engage in the kind of radical cross-cultural dialogue toward which they occasionally gestured. To begin with, in the opening section of this essay, a contrast will be drawn between the lingering Ameri-Eurocentrism of Western philosophy and the inherently cross-cultural nature of Japanese philosophy. The philosophers associated with the Kyoto School in particular have endeavored to open up philosophical discourse between Eastern and Western traditions. In the second section of this essay, a critical reflection on Karl Löwith’s critique of modern Japanese intellectuals will serve as a pivot, turning our attention back on the ambivalence toward cross-cultural dialogue found in the history of Western philosophy. As will be discussed in the third section, this ambivalence can also be discerned in the recent “hermeneutical turn.” Together with the examinations of Hegel, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Derrida undertaken in the remaining sections of the essay, the purpose of these reflections is to assist in ushering those trained in Western philosophy toward an engagement in cross-cultural philosophical dialogue with traditions such as that of Japan.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"57 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2013.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434321","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":"Japanese Philosophy as a Lens on Greco-European Thought","authors":"John C. Maraldo","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2013.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2013.0002","url":null,"abstract":"To answer the question of whether there is such a thing as Japanese philosophy, and what its characteristics might be, scholars have typically used Western philosophy as a measure to examine Japanese texts. This article turns the tables and asks what Western thought looks like from the perspective of Japanese philosophy. It uses Japanese philosophical sources as a lens to bring into sharper focus the qualities and biases of Greek-derived Western philosophy. It first examines questions related to the reputed sole origin and the nature of philosophy in ancient Greece. Using the analyses of Robert Bernasconi, it concludes that this reputation is a bias instilled by philosophers such as Hegel in the modern era. It then uses the scholarship of Pierre Hadot to show that Greek philosophy was not argumentative discourse for its own sake, but a way of life where reason was in the service of spiritual progress. This suggests a definition broad enough to accommodate Asian and other non-Western philosophies. Under the lens of Japanese philosophy, however, Greek-based Western philosophy often displays a double detachment, from everyday life and from embodied existence. In contrast, Japanese Buddhist and Confucian philosophies evince an appreciation of embodied existence in the ordinary world. The article raises several questions for further investigation in the prospect that the lens of Japanese philosophy can refocus the task of philosophizing today.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"26 1","pages":"21 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2013.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434337","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":"Parsing the Topos and Dusting the Mirror: A Radical Internalization of “Basho-Topos”","authors":"Yusa Michiko","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In order to clarify Nishida’s notion of topos (basho), I trace its formation, starting with the notion of “pure experience,” of which he says: “To experience is to know the thing as it is.” By taking the act of “to know” as the thread that connects the ideas of pure experience and topos, I examine his early writings leading up to 1929, going beyond 1926, when Nishida’s essay “Basho” was published. Over against the commonly held “objectified” view of the topos as a “location” or “field” in which the individual exists, a radically ontological reading of this notion emerges, requiring us to shift the vantage point from which we approach it. I conclude that Nishida introduced into his philosophical system a locative dimension as an ontological feature, and we, conscious beings, exist in this world “topologically” (bashoteki). The topos refers to the very logico-ontological mode of our being.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"2 1","pages":"32 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66433981","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":"Arakawa and Gins’s Nonplace: An Approach from an Apophatic Aesthetics","authors":"Raquel Bouso García","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0005","url":null,"abstract":"With the expression “apophatic aesthetics,” Amador Vega names different cases of twentieth-century hermeneutics of negativity that show a spiritual debt to negative theology and in particular to the major mystical trends of Medieval Europe. Our aim here is to explore how this category applies to the artistic work created by the contemporary artists Arakawa and Gins. However, our focus is not on the debt of these artists to apophatism in the Christian tradition but in Buddhism, especially in Zen. Through an analysis of various artworks, the article intends to determine the reminiscences of the evocation of emptiness in Zen-related arts. By so doing, despite the lack of continuity with tradition, it seems possible to uncover certain links with Japanese classic aesthetics. At the same time, since emptiness is a notion revisited in modern Japanese thought, the paper raises the question of its role as an ascetic way of thought, capable of avoiding conceptual limitations and thus opening new paths to philosophy. In this sense, insofar as thinkers well known as critics of modernity, such as Lyotard, Danto, or Taylor, have dialogued with Arakawa and Gins’s artistic proposal, a connection between certain aspects of Japanese philosophy and so-called postmodern thought is suggested.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"27 1","pages":"103 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434041","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":"Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School ed. by Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, Jason M. Wirth (review)","authors":"B. Park","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0000","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction of this volume, “Conversations on an Ox Path,” opens with a straightforward statement of the book’s purpose: “to promote dialogue between Western and Japanese philosophy, and more specifically between Continental philosophy and the Kyoto School.” In view of the fact that the Kyoto School is defined by its engagement with Western thought, and Continental philosophy in particular, one can’t help but detect a hint of graciousness, of Kyoto indirectness, of the bow in this opening gesture. This collection may be best understood as an enticement to Continental thinkers, and as an invitation to redeem this dialogical asymmetry. And since this title appears as part of the “Studies in Continental Thought” series, which is edited by John Sallis, the target audience is quite clear. Its concrete challenge, then, is that it must offer itself as an exemplar of what it means to take up this invitation to dialogue, while its capacity to entice the thinking of Continental philosophers constitutes the implicit criterion of exemplarity. To frame the point in more general terms, and in a way that the thinkers of the Kyoto School would likely appreciate: dialogue discovers its authenticity in its power to provoke thinking. The essays comprising this volume are for the most part careful, penetrating, and thoughtful encounters that meet the burden of this task. In my judgment, this volume constitutes a provocative confrontation with Continental thought and I certainly expect that it will be well received by the audience it solicits.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"2 1","pages":"135 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66433955","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":"The Self-Contradictory Identity of the Personal Self: Nishida’s Argument against Kantian Pure Practical Reason","authors":"L. Sullivan","doi":"10.1353/JJP.2014.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/JJP.2014.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout his entire career, Nishida Kitarō was, arguably, interested in challenging Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the moral will. In his first work, An Inquiry into the Good, he criticizes Kant’s pure practical reason as idealistic, arguing that the good should be understood not in terms of an abstract, formal relation of reason with itself, but in terms of personality as a single, unique, unifying power that is the true reality of the self. He echoes this language in his last work, “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,” proposing that the personal self exists as a self-determining individual through creative expression. This article will investigate how Nishida’s development of this concept of the personal self grounds his proposal that the goal of the moral will is realization of the good as a personal, rather than abstract, ideal, through the intentional action of active intuition.","PeriodicalId":29679,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Japanese Philosophy","volume":"2 1","pages":"33 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/JJP.2014.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66434019","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}