Comparative Philosophy Today and Tomorrow

Comparative Philosophy Today and Tomorrow

Author: Geoff Ashton

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1443808806

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Whether it be the China of Confucius or the Germany of Jurgen Moltmann, premodern India or the World Trade Organization, philosophy has brought us face-to-face with the pressing issues of our times. More often than not, these inquiries have stimulated creative responses to the opportunities and problems that shape our experiences. But the responsiveness of inquiry to its respective concerns can only grow according to the dimensions of the conversation underwriting the inquiry itself. With its comparative and interdisciplinary approach, Comparative Philosophy Today and Tomorrow: Proceedings from the 2007 Uehiro CrossCurrents Philosophy Conference creates a space for juxtaposing philosophical views on shared themes, thereby stimulating fresh insight into issues of contemporary significance. From self-cultivation to global justice, from environmental ethics to the interrelation of religion and science, this collection of essays highlights the central role of philosophy, and comparative philosophy in particular, for understanding and appreciating the connections and discontinuities of East and West, if you will, of past, present and future.


Comparative Philosophy without Borders

Comparative Philosophy without Borders

Author: Arindam Chakrabarti

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1472576268

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Comparative Philosophy without Borders presents original scholarship by leading contemporary comparative philosophers, each addressing a philosophical issue that transcends the concerns of any one cultural tradition. By critically discussing and weaving together these contributions in terms of their philosophical presuppositions, this cutting-edge volume initiates a more sophisticated, albeit diverse, understanding of doing comparative philosophy. Within a broad conception of the alternative shapes that work in philosophy may take, this volume breaks three kinds of boundaries: between cultures, historical periods and sub-disciplines of philosophy such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. As well as distinguishing three phases of the development of comparative philosophy up to the present day, the editors argue why the discipline now needs to enter a new phase. Putting to use philosophical thought and textual sources from Eurasia and Africa, contributors discuss modern psychological and cognitive science approaches to the nature of mind and topics as different as perception, poetry, justice, authority, and the very possibility of understanding other people. Comparative Philosophy without Borders demonstrates how drawing on philosophical resources from across cultural traditions can produce sound state-of-the-art progressive philosophy. Fusing the horizons of traditions opens up a space for creative conceptual thinking outside all sorts of boxes.


Introduction to Comparative Philosophy

Introduction to Comparative Philosophy

Author: P. T. Raju

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 8120809858

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This classic comparative study of the world's three great philosophies-Western (including Jewish), Indian, and Chinese-surveys the three philosophical traditions from their beginnings to the present time. However, in examining the traditions, Professor Raju has been less occupied with separate doctrines and individual thinkers than with essential characteristics and general trends. He has analyzed and compared these features within the traditions and explored the parallels and divergences among them. For the general interested reader, the interchange among the philosophies will be especially valuable. For the students of religion and of philosophy, the work is a standard guide and reference work.


The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking

The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking

Author: Steven Burik

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2010-07-02

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1438427425

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How do differences in language influence comparative philosophy? Although the Orientalism famously described by Edward Said is rare today, Steven Burik maintains that comparative philosophy often subtly privileges one tradition over another since certain conceptual schemes are so embedded in Western languages that it is difficult not to revert to them. Arguing for a new approach that acknowledges how theory and practice cannot be separated in comparative philosophical endeavors, Burik provides nonmetaphysical, deconstructionist readings of Heidegger and Derrida and uses these to give a new reading of classical Daoism. The ideas of language advanced therein can aid the project of comparative philosophy specifically, and philosophies generally, in trying to overcome ways of thinking that have dominated Western philosophy for twenty-five hundred years and still frustrate intercultural encounters.


Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship

Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship

Author: Andrew P. Tuck

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13:

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This study in cross-cultural hermeneutics examines the role that modern, Western philosophy has played in the interpretation of Nagarjuna's Madhyamikakarika, a second-century Indian-Buddhist text. Tuck locates a structure of distinct phases or "styles" in modern, philosophical history. These phases, Tuck shows, exhibit discontinuous interpretive biases, as well as continuity of hermeneutic intention. Discovering in each philosophical era a chaacteristic attitude towards the text--whether privilege, objectivity, or neutrality--Tuck argues that the continual reinterpretation of earlier scholarly readings is in fact at the core of fruitful hermeneutic pursuit.


Locating and Losing the Self in the World

Locating and Losing the Self in the World

Author: Masato Ishida

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1443869503

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Comparative philosophy brings into focus relationships found across philosophies of disparate cultures. In the contemporary globalizing world, this perspective is vital – it ensures that diverse voices have the opportunity to be heard and refines the understanding of the many varieties of philosophical thought. Philosophy departments around the world are beginning to see the import of this broader perspective. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in the areas of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, African, Latin American, and indigenous philosophies. Every year, graduate students from around the world gather at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the defining center of this comparative movement, in order to attend the Uehiro Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. These students bring a range of philosophical interests that converge to a definite theme over the course of the conference. At the 2012 meeting, this theme revolved around human beings’ recognition of themselves as selves, the discovery of the nature of these selves, and their relation to the world at large. These issues are comparative in the best sense of the word, drawing on the interests of canonical Western philosophy, as well as reflecting the fundamental concerns of non-Western philosophies. The three sections of this volume capture the stages of thought moving from self-awareness to self-transcendence, and leading to the general theme of the volume: locating and losing the self in the world. The papers in this volume represent diverse philosophical viewpoints, from canonical Western figures such as Immanuel Kant and Simone de Beauvoir, to those of non-Western philosophers who have been gaining interest in the English-speaking world, such as Nāgārjuna and Nishida Kitarō. By gaining familiarity with these figures’ perspectives, readers will become better able to distinguish and think through issues including linguistic and phenomenological understanding of the self, the self’s full engagement with the world, and the world’s reciprocal determination of the self.


Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality

Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality

Author: Ayon Maharaj

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-10-08

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0190868252

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Sri Ramakrishna is widely known as a nineteenth-century Indian mystic who affirmed the harmony of all religions on the basis of his richly varied spiritual experiences and eclectic religious practices, both Hindu and non-Hindu. In Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality, Ayon Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna was also a sophisticated philosopher of great contemporary relevance. Through a careful study of Sri Ramakrishna's recorded oral teachings in the original Bengali, Maharaj reconstructs his philosophical positions and analyzes them from a cross-cultural perspective. Sri Ramakrishna's spiritual journey culminated in the exalted state of "vijñana," his term for the "intimate knowledge" of God as the Infinite Reality that is both personal and impersonal, with and without form, immanent in the universe and beyond it. This expansive spiritual standpoint of vijñana, Maharaj contends, opens up a new paradigm for addressing central issues in cross-cultural philosophy of religion, including divine infinitude, religious pluralism, mystical experience, and the problem of evil. Sri Ramakrishna's vijñana-based religious pluralism--when grasped in all its subtlety--proves to have major philosophical advantages over dominant Western models. Moreover, his mystical testimony and teachings not only cut across long-standing debates about the nature of mystical experience but also bolster recent defenses of its epistemic value. Maharaj further demonstrates that Sri Ramakrishna's unique response to the problem of evil resonates strongly with Western "soul-making" theodicies and contemporary theories of skeptical theism. A pioneering interdisciplinary study of one of India's most important philosopher-mystics, Maharaj's book is essential reading for scholars and students in philosophy of religion, theology, religious studies, and Hindu studies.


A World in Discourse

A World in Discourse

Author: Matthew Izor

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-10-28

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443885711

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Comparative philosophy refines the inter-cultural and inter-regional development of philosophical thought that is imperative for a globalizing world. The influence of comparative philosophy can be seen in the growing number of departments that include one or more comparative specialists in their ranks, and this is no longer only a trend in philosophy. Playing no small part in this growth is the fact that training in comparative thought provides one with a methodological backdrop against which rapidly diversifying sets of topics are being addressed from a broad range of perspectives. This volume illustrates precisely that trend by gathering together original work first presented at the Uehiro Graduate Philosophy Conference, an annual conference held in the spring at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. The campus that has been the epicenter of comparative philosophy has, through this conference, become a meeting place for new philosophical talent. Organized by the graduate students of UH Mānoa, the conference routinely attracts presenters from Asia, Europe and North America, and has featured keynote speakers hailing from universities in Japan, China, and the US. This volume publishes for the first time the standout papers from the 2013 meeting of the conference, the theme of which was “Convergence and Alterity”. Presenters were asked to submit their finest work that demonstrated the far-reaching nature of comparative thought. The result is a collection of novel voices emerging within the field. As can be seen in the uniqueness and vigor with which they approach the discipline, these writers demonstrate the ever-enlarging boundaries of comparative analysis. The volume includes papers covering figures such as Kant, Plato, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty in the Western tradition, and Miki Kiyoshi, Zhuangzi, and Confucius in the Eastern traditions. From boredom and cynicism to imagination and feminism, the topics treated are also of much interest to contemporary research. Throughout its pages, the reader will find not only a resurgence of the comparative methodology, but also a detailed analysis of both fresh ideas and classical texts.


Comparative Philosophy and Method

Comparative Philosophy and Method

Author: Steven Burik

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1350155047

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Addressing arguments that comparative philosophy is itself impossible, or that it is indistinguishable from philosophy more generally, this collection challenges myopic understandings of comparative method and encourages a more informed consideration. Bringing together a wide variety of methodological options, it features scholars spread across the globe representing multiple philosophical traditions. From the beginnings of comparative philosophy in the 19th century to present-day proposals for more global philosophy departments, every chapter serves as a viable methodological alternative for any would-be philosophical comparativist. With contributions from leading comparativists that are both distinctive in their method and explicit about its application, this valuable resource challenges and enriches the awareness and sensitivity of the beginning comparativist and seasoned veteran alike.


Cross Currents

Cross Currents

Author: Cindy Scheopner

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-07-24

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443864692

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Philosophy begins with a question. The same question is often asked in different languages. Comparative philosophy is a project that engages thinkers from all areas of the world and approaches common problems from different perspectives. The conversations look at not only interactions between cultures, but also the relationships among humans, animals, and nature. But the many languages and unfamiliar terms can seem intimidating even to those with formal philosophical training. This book provides an approachable survey of current topics from some of the newest comparative philosophers as they enter the field. Arising out of a graduate student philosophy conference at the University of Hawai‘i, these selected papers were revised to respond to the suggestions and challenges presented during the conference. For this volume, foreign terms are translated, and introductions and editors’ notes give context to the individual chapters. Ignoring the traditional divisions of academic philosophy, this anthology focuses rather on the common search for answers by bringing thinkers from what are labeled “eastern” and “western” philosophy into conversation with one another as members of the global community.