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Author: Graham Mayeda
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149857209X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
In every part of the world and in every era, philosophers have reflected on the meaning of culture and its philosophical significance. Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture:Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō explores how three of Japan's preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century—Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō—defined culture and analyzed what it tells us about social relations. Graham Mayeda also explores little-known aspects of the work of each philosopher, including a philosophical analysis of Watsuji's travel diary, Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara, the place of intuition in Kuki's ethics of otherness, and the role of culture in realizing Nishida's concept of reality as the historical world. Each of these three philosophers adapted philosophical methodologies such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical logic to studying the traditional sources of Japanese culture: Confucianism, Buddhism, Bushidō and Shintō. This book focuses on the way that Nishida, Watsuji and Kuki critiqued the methodologies that they adopted from European philosophy and modified them to reflect the values that form the basis of their own cultural tradition. Finally, Mayeda engages with the problem of cultural essentialism by identifying the progressive and conservative elements of each philosopher's characterization of Japanese culture.
Author: Graham Mayeda
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149857209X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Get Book Here
Book Description
In every part of the world and in every era, philosophers have reflected on the meaning of culture and its philosophical significance. Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture:Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō explores how three of Japan's preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century—Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō—defined culture and analyzed what it tells us about social relations. Graham Mayeda also explores little-known aspects of the work of each philosopher, including a philosophical analysis of Watsuji's travel diary, Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara, the place of intuition in Kuki's ethics of otherness, and the role of culture in realizing Nishida's concept of reality as the historical world. Each of these three philosophers adapted philosophical methodologies such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical logic to studying the traditional sources of Japanese culture: Confucianism, Buddhism, Bushidō and Shintō. This book focuses on the way that Nishida, Watsuji and Kuki critiqued the methodologies that they adopted from European philosophy and modified them to reflect the values that form the basis of their own cultural tradition. Finally, Mayeda engages with the problem of cultural essentialism by identifying the progressive and conservative elements of each philosopher's characterization of Japanese culture.
Author: James W. Heisig
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082483707X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 1362
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Book Description
With Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, readers of English can now access in a single volume the richness and diversity of Japanese philosophy as it has developed throughout history. Leading scholars in the field have translated selections from the writings of more than a hundred philosophical thinkers from all eras and schools of thought, many of them available in English for the first time. The Sourcebook editors have set out to represent the entire Japanese philosophical tradition—not only the broad spectrum of academic philosophy dating from the introduction of Western philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but also the philosophical ideas of major Japanese traditions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. The philosophical significance of each tradition is laid out in an extensive overview, and each selection is accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of its author and helpful information on placing the work in its proper context. The bulk of the supporting material, which comprises nearly a quarter of the volume, is given to original interpretive essays on topics not explicitly covered in other chapters: cultural identity, samurai thought, women philosophers, aesthetics, bioethics. An introductory chapter provides a historical overview of Japanese philosophy and a discussion of the Japanese debate over defining the idea of philosophy, both of which help explain the rationale behind the design of the Sourcebook. An exhaustive glossary of technical terminology, a chronology of authors, and a thematic index are appended. Specialists will find information related to original sources and sinographs for Japanese names and terms in a comprehensive bibliography and general index. Handsomely presented and clearly organized for ease of use, Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook will be a cornerstone in Japanese studies for decades to come. It will be an essential reference for anyone interested in traditional or contemporary Japanese culture and the way it has shaped and been shaped by its great thinkers over the centuries.
Author: Thomas P. Kasulis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824873831
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 785
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Book Description
Philosophy challenges our assumptions—especially when it comes to us from another culture. In exploring Japanese philosophy, a dependable guide is essential. The present volume, written by a renowned authority on the subject, offers readers a historical survey of Japanese thought that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Adhering to the Japanese philosophical tradition of highlighting engagement over detachment, Thomas Kasulis invites us to think with, as well as about, the Japanese masters by offering ample examples, innovative analogies, thought experiments, and jargon-free explanations. He assumes little previous knowledge and addresses themes—aesthetics, ethics, the samurai code, politics, among others—not in a vacuum but within the conditions of Japan’s cultural and intellectual history. For readers new to Japanese studies, he provides a simplified guide to pronouncing Japanese and a separate discussion of the language and how its syntax, orthography, and linguistic layers can serve the philosophical purposes of a skilled writer and subtle thinker. For those familiar with the Japanese cultural tradition but less so with philosophy, Kasulis clarifies philosophical expressions and problems, Western as well as Japanese, as they arise. Half of the book’s chapters are devoted to seven major thinkers who collectively represent the full range of Japan’s historical epochs and philosophical traditions: Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. Nuanced details and analyses enable an engaged understanding of Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintō, and modern academic philosophy. Other chapters supply social and cultural background, including brief discussions of nearly a hundred other philosophical writers. (For additional information, cross references to material in the companion volume Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook are included.) In his closing chapter Kasulis reflects on lessons from Japanese philosophy that enhance our understanding of philosophy itself. He reminds us that philosophy in its original sense means loving wisdom, not studying ideas. In that regard, a renewed appreciation of engaged knowing can play a critical role in the revitalization of philosophy in the West as well as the East.
Author: Adam Bronson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824855361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
After the devastation of World War II, journalists, scholars, and citizens came together to foster a new culture of democracy in Japan. Adam Bronson explores this effort in a path-breaking study of the Institute for the Science of Thought, one of the most influential associations to emerge in the early postwar years. The institute's founders believed that the estrangement of intellectuals from the general public had contributed to the rise of fascism. To address this, they sought to develop a "science of thought" that would reconnect the world of ideas with everyday experience and thus reimagine Japan as a democratic nation, home to one hundred million philosophers. To tell the story of Science of Thought and postwar democracy, Bronson weaves together several strands of Japan's modern history that are often treated separately: the revival of interest in the social sciences and Marxism after the war, the appearance of new social movements that challenged traditional class and gender hierarchies, and the ascendance of a mass middle-class culture. This story is transnational in both connective and comparative senses. Most of the Science of Thought founders were educated in America, and they drew upon a network of American thinkers and institutions for support. They also derived inspiration from other efforts to promote a culture of democracy, ranging from thought reform campaigns in the People's Republic of China to the Mass Observation study of the British working classes. By tracing these sources of inspiration around the world, Bronson reveals the contours of a transnational intellectual milieu. Science of Thought embodied a vision of democratic experimentation that had to be re-articulated repeatedly in response to challenges that arose in connection with geopolitical events and social change, prompting the group's evolution from a small research circle in the 1940s into the standard-bearer for citizen activism in the 1960s. Through this history, Bronson argues that the significance of Science of Thought lay in the way it exemplified democracy in practice. The practical experience of the intellectuals and citizens associated with the group remains relevant to those who continue to grapple with the dilemmas of democracy today.
Author: Charles A. Moore
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824800772
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
A collection of essays that provide insight into Japanese culture. This book is a great buy for anyone interested in Japan.
Author: Paul Chilton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190636661
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
What is religion? How does it work? Many natural abilities of the human mind are involved, and crucial among them is the ability to use language. This volume brings together research from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, to understand the phenomena of religion as a distinctly human enterprise. The book is divided into three parts, each part preceded by a full introductory chapter by the editors that discusses modern scientific approaches to religion and the application of modern linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Beginning with descriptive approaches to religious language and the problem of describing religious concepts across languages, chapters introduce the turn to cognition in linguistics and also in theology, and explore the brain's contrasting capacities, in particular its capacity for language and metaphor. Part II continues the discussion of metaphor - the natural ability by which humans draw on basic knowledge of the world in order to explore abstractions and intangibles. Specialists in particular religions apply conceptual metaphor theory in various ways, covering several major religious traditions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism. Part III seeks to open up new horizons for cognitive-linguistic research on religion, looking beyond written texts to the ways in which language is integrated with other modalities, including ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media. Chapters in Part III introduce readers to a range of technical instruments that have been developed within cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis in recent years. What unfolds ultimately is the idea that the embodied cognition of humans is the basis not only of their languages, but also of their religions.
Author: H. Gene Blocker
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791490386
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Japanese Philosophy is the first book to assert the existence of a Japanese philosophy prior to Nishida Kitaro in the early twentieth century. Because of Western military and economic dominance since the seventeenth century, the cross-cultural comparison of non-Western philosophy has generally gone in one direction—comparing Chinese, Indian, and other thought systems with Western philosophy. For various reasons, Japanese scholars did not follow the Chinese lead after 1920 in acknowledging that some of their own literary tradition should be classified as "philosophy." In spite of this, the authors argue that it is useful to compare cultures, and that one way of comparing cultures is to compare their philosophies—and therefore that it is worth treating certain parts of Japanese literature as philosophy, especially those parts that are similar to what has long been classified and treated as philosophy in India and China. By doing so, and by providing an overview of Japanese philosophy from the seventh century to the present, the authors contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding between East and West.
Author: James W. Heisig
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824824815
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.
Author: Bret W. Davis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222540
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
Recognizing the importance of the Kyoto School & its influence on philosophy, politics, religion & Asian studies, this text seeks to initiate a conversation between Japanese & Western philosophers.
Author: Robert E. Carter
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438445423
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
An accessible discussion of the thought of key figures of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. This book provides a much-needed introduction to the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. Robert E. Carter focuses on four influential Japanese philosophers: the three most important members of the Kyoto School (Nishida Kitar?, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji), and a fourth (Watsuji Tetsur?), who was, at most, an associate member of the school. Each of these thinkers wrestled systematically with the Eastern idea of nothingness, albeit from very different perspectives. Many Western scholars, students, and serious general readers are intrigued by this school of thought, which reflects Japans engagement with the West. A number of works by various thinkers associated with the Kyoto School are now available in English, but these works are often difficult to grasp for those not already well-versed in the philosophical and historical context. Carters book provides an accessible yet substantive introduction to the school andoffers an East-West dialogue that enriches our understanding of Japanese thought while also shedding light on our own assumptions, habits of thought, and prejudices.
