Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”



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JOHNSON, Joe (XXXXX)
Nakamoto Tominaga and the De-exoticizing of Cultural Comparisons”
The general thesis of this paper is that when philosophers and cultural theorists characterize foreign societies, they tend to focus on that which is ‘other’ than their own tradition, and in doing so they often leave out significant commonalities with the foreign tradition.  That is to say, there is a bias to highlight elements that are esoteric or different relative to their own tradition, and to ignore and downplay elements that resonate well.  This tendency may serve to generate more interesting theses, discussions, and books, but it is something regarding which everyone involved in cross-cultural philosophy or cultural theory must at least be aware, and possibly take corrective steps.

This thesis also has a counterpart—namely, that foreign traditions and cultures tend to characterize themselves in this same way.  That is to say that in their own self-awareness and critique, they tend to stress elements which are ‘other than the other.’


The present paper is a very modest step toward the above-stated general thesis, and proceeds by 1) reviewing the rational secularism of Tominaga NAKAMOTO  (1715–1746; Japan) in which he greatly precedes the varieties of Critical Buddhism that have arisen in both western and eastern scholarship since the 19th and 20th centuries (—not to mention NAKAMOTO’S critiques of Confucianism and Shinto), 2) contrasting that with esoteric fascination with eastern ideas by prominent western philosophers of the same period, and 3) examining the relatively slight treatment NAKAMOTO still receives in characterizations of the Japanese philosophical tradition


KABELEK, Kobi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
The Experience of Movement in Holocaust Testimonies”
Kobi Kabalek (History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) will discuss “The Experience of Movement in Holocaust Testimonies.” Scholars of the Holocaust assign only limited importance to phenomena that exceed clearly drawn boundaries of ghettos, camps, towns, and shtetls, thus testifying to the lingering focus on bounded locations in this field of study. However, the Holocaust did not only take place only within fixed containers of violence, but also beyond them and in the movement between them. The journeys to and from ghettos and camps introduced the Jews to new landscapes and populations, stirred different feelings among the deportees, and changed their understanding of what was taking place. These assessments and expectations, in turn, played a role in the ways in which subsequent occurrences were perceived and influenced the decision making process upon arrival to the sites of persecution. The paper will examine depictions of movement as constituting temporary, yet significant, spaces of meaning and point to the functions of these movements in structuring survivors’ postwar narrations of the Holocaust.
KALMANSON, Leah (Drake University)
"'Be the Change You Want to See in the World?' Qi-Cosmology and Structural Change"
Discourses on social justice rightly tend to focus on structural causes of oppression. Indeed, teaching social justice at the undergraduate level usually involves coaxing students away from the naive belief that personal self-development can effectively change society for the better. Although I do not mean to suggest a return to a naive focus on personal change, I do wish to reconsider the meaning of "structural change" with resources from qi-cosmology, and from that perspective consider the relation between people and the places they inhabit.
In neo-Confucian writings on the relation between li and qi, li is the principle that structures and expresses order in qi. Achieving optional order in the cosmos is often seen as an outgrowth of personal qi-cultivation practices. What is the relation between a well-structured heart-mind, a well-structured society, a well-structured world, and a well-structured cosmos? How might this qi-cosmology help us rethink how best to envision and enact a "better world"? This presentation is a preliminary exploration of these questions.
KANG, Kyung Hyun (Yonsei University, Korea)
Diagram of the Ethical Ideal: Centering on T'oegye Yi Hwang (退溪李滉, 1501~1570)'s Modification of the Existing the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate
Many Confucian scholars of the Joseon Dynasty(1392-1910) draw various diagrams that represent their ethical ideals. T'oegye Yi Hwang (退溪李滉, 1501-1570), the leading Confucian of the Joseon Dynasty in the 16th century, also creates several diagrams: the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate and The Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning. Actually, The Diagram of Heavenly Mandate is originally created by Chuman Jung Ji Un (秋巒鄭之雲, 1509-1561) and revised by T'oegye. I attempt to analyze T'oegye's ethical ideal through the examination of his modification of the existing the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate.

T'oegye made a few core modifications to the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate. Specifically, he expresses his view on the Heavenly Mandate through repositioning the circle of Heavenly Mandate (天命圈). The circle of Heavenly Mandate obtains the meaning of the Lord on High (上天·上帝)'s mandate by taking a higher position in the Diagram of Heavenly Mandate. T'oegye thinks that the circle of Heavenly Mandate on the top of the diagram represents the Lord on High's mandate which is a foundation of ethical practices and a ground for ethical duties. Therefore, T'oegye lays emphasis on Oe-gyeong (畏敬, awe and reverence) towards Heavenly Mandate. And Hak-mun (學問, learning) for T'oegye’s ethical pursuit is to clearly understand the life's duties given by Heavenly Mandate.

KARNA, Bishal (The Ohio State University)
A Place for Mindfulness and Awakening: Sōtō Zen Monasteries in the Rural U.S. Midwest”
Dainin Katagiri roshi (1928-90) was a Japanese Sōtō Zen master who came to the U.S. in 1963 to establish monastic communities on the model of Dōgen’s Eihei-ji. In planning his monastery he spoke of “molding an environment” so that “when you are right in the middle of a monastery, even though your life is like a snake, that snake is in a bamboo stick and very naturally you straighten out.” My presentation will explore how Japanese philosophical assumptions and cultural values were adapted to the American context in establishing the monastic centers in Etizen, Minnesota, and Dorchester, Iowa. In doing do, I will reference the ideas of Zen Master Dōgen (1200-53) and the cultural philosophy of place developed by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960)
KAWASAKI, Soichi (Miyagi University of Education, Japan)
“’Being-here’, ‘Being-with:’ On What Makes Students Form a Community”
In p4c activities, teachers, as facilitators, try to encourage children to form a “community of inquiry.” When teachers start p4c in classrooms, they have to explain the importance of “safety” to children many times. Does this mean that “safety” in a classroom is a kind of “minimum rule” of p4c which teachers must train students repeatedly to keep? However, in reality, teachers soon realize that children do not resist this “safety” and that, on the contrary, they even need it. So we can say that “children already know what they really need, even when they do not realize it”. In this sense, p4c activity can be regarded as a practice of Socratic maieutics.
KEATING, Malcolm (Yale-NUS College, Singapore)
Putting Words in their Place: Elliptical Completion through Postulation”

Classical Indian philosophers, although committed to the compositionality thesis, gave varying accounts of how interpretive practices allowed for ellipsis completion. The philosophers known as the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsā argued that an interpretive process, which they called arthāpatti or “postulation,” could yield certain knowledge of how to complete ellipses. For instance, since the Sanskrit language is highly inflected, someone who hears a speaker say “Door, door!” can rely on syntactically-encoded information to recover a complete sen- tence, “Close the door, close the door!” In the 16th century, Narayaṇabhaṭṭa discusses this process in the Mānameyodaya, arguing that postulation requires the positing of words in order for there to be anvaya or “connection” within the expression.


This argument is posed in response to opponents who argue that only the word meanings, and not the words themselves, must be posited. The term for “connection” in Sanskrit could be understood as syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic connection. I show that all three kinds of connection may be the subject of postulation, although the distinctions between them are only implicit in the Mānameyodaya. I then discuss connections between Narayaṇabhaṭṭa and contempo- rary Anglophone literature on the topic. In particular, I argue that due to the ambiguity in the notion of connection, Indian proposals may be consistent with multiple contemporary formal analyses. Ultimately, I conclude that the crucial implication to draw from their dialectic is the claim that ellipsis completion rises to the level of knowledge, and that it does so through a rational process grounded in the principle of compositionality.
KEENAN, Barry C. (Denison University)
Locality and Reverence”

Environmental ethics has challenged the anthropocentrism embedded in traditional western moral philosophy. Neo-Confucian philosophers in the Song period would have understood this argument. Cheng Yi and Chen Chun elaborated the vocabulary of classical Confucianism that assumed productive continuities between oneself and one’s world tianren heyi (天人合一). The prerequisite in the Cheng-Zhu school for understanding this continuity was cultivating a reverent attitude jing (敬). Philosophers and poets of that same reverence who are alive today define the attitude as a felt recognition of human limitations (Paul Woodruff), and define living according to reverence as adopting one’s own locality as a place to live while fully accepting the conjoined interdependence of oneself and one’s world (Wendell Berry).


KELBESSA, Workineh (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia)
The Place of Africa in the Current World Order”
This paper examines the place of Africa in the current world order, and shows the importance of developing more inclusive ethical and epistemological foundations that are required to reconceptualise and remap our current situation and contribute to the emergence of a more prosperous, just and peaceful world in the 21st century. Africa and other ‘developing’ countries have very little influence and voice in today’s global policy-making forums. This paper stresses that the voices of ‘developing’ countries have important contributions to local, national and international development and environmental agendas, and can help us to remap the world in a way that makes sense to ‘us’. Thus, what are needed are fundamental changes in the structures of global power such that the 'weaker' countries that represent the vast majority of humanity are no longer weak and the 'powerful' countries that represent a tiny minority of humanity are no longer powerful. The paper suggests that humanity as a whole must develop alternative attitudes towards the current world order. Thus, instead of searching for short-term profits or looking only for immediate gratification, TNCs and other powerful players in the current world order should respect the knowledge, need, aspiration and voice of ‘developing’ countries.
KENNEY, Rick (Georgia Regents University) and Kimiko AKITA (Aichi Prefectural University)
Yasukuni: A Place for Pacification or a Problem, Still?”
“Yasukuni” was established as a Shinto shrine in 1869 as Tokyo Shokonsha, shortly after the restoration of the Meiji Empire, to honor the spirits of people who had died fighting for the emperor. In prewar Japan, jurisdiction over Yasukuni belonged to the Ministry of the Military, whereas other shrines were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs. After the war, Yasukuni was given the status of a private corporation. Although Allied rulers during the Occupation insisted that the Japanese separate the sacred (Shinto) from the secular (government), effectively dismantling the bastard religion and many of its manifestations, Yasukuni Shrine has remained under the aegis of an individual religious corporation, independent of an association formed by more than 80,000 other shrines.

Recent visits to Yasukuni, which honors 2.5 million war dead, including 14 top war criminals from the War in the Pacific, by Japan’s prime ministers are viewed by Asian neighbors as a symbol of the country’s past militarism and as encouragement for its growing nationalism. Media coverage last month of lawmakers’ pilgrimmage to the autumn festival at the shrine noted that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stayed away—though members of his cabinet visited Yasukuni—in advance of a meeting among leaders from Japan, China, and South Korea planned for this month in Seoul. Abe has stayed away since his 2013 visit drew rebukes from China and Korea and, for the first time publicly, the United States.



The name Yasukuni itself means, ironically, “Pacifying the Nation.” This paper would use the lens of Japanese religious belief systems to examine the competing tensions represented by the Yasukuni Shrine and those leaders whose very publicly mass- mediated political attitudes and activities threaten not only peace in the nation, but throughout East Asia and all the way to Washington.
KOČNOVAITÉ, Liuda (University of Iceland)
Where Are You (From)?: Locating Persons in Moral Theories”
Person’s position entails significant ethical dimensions, thus inquiries ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What do you do?’ are common means for assigning a certain status to the new acquaintances in the moral framework. For example, Confucian role ethics asserts that we have to contextualize a person as a bearer of the unique set of roles, in order to interact with her in the most appropriate way. However, the acclaimed (Western) principles of individualism, universalism, and equality would seem to contradict such practices. So where is an autonomous individual situated and where do the equal individuals meet?
This paper presents a brief overview of the presumed location of human beings, according to the moral theories of Confucius, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. The process of creation of moral places between interactors is also outlined, following the aforementioned thinkers.
KOCZMAN, Joshua J. (Hillsdale College)
Where I Am Not: Heidegger’s Gelassenhiet, Dōgen’s Genjōkōan and the Discovery of Place”
Martin Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and Dōgen’s現成公按 [genjōkōan] do not name or categorize but rather describe, as though narratively, the discovery—the dis-covery—of place. They do not detail a discovering of place, but rather the presencing of place unconcealed. Gelassenheit, borrowed as it is from Meister Eckhart, and 現成公按 [genjōkōan]—in its originary spelling, 現成公案 [genjōkōan]—arrives from the Buddhist tradition of China.
What Heidegger offers to the tradition of Eckhart—the Christian tradition—and what Dōgen offers to the Buddhist tradition is a re-location of the starting point of understanding: I must begin where I am and progress from there to where I am not. What is most near to me of where I am not is what stands in my vicinity, what stands most near. For Heidegger, what stands most near are things. Things are what is most readily present. For Dōgen, what is most present, what is most near, is the interplay of delusion and enlightenment. For Heidegger, things, and for Dōgen, this interplay, are so readily near that they are often overlooked. Gelassenheit and現成公按 [genjōkōan] describe a turning away from over-looking towards under-standing.
Where I am not is where my own place becomes present to me, becomes even a possibility. My own place is always my own, because where I am not is only ever my own. Arriving at place is thus always personal, always my arrival at my place. On the other hand, however, that there is a my own is universal. What is my own place is part of where an other is not, and so there is something universal at play in the discovery of place.
The “releasement” of Gelassenheit and the “presencing” of 現成公按 [genjōkōan] are not affirmations of “a self” apart from what it is not. Rather, they affirm “a self” as a part of what it is not by first approaching there issue of “where.” I am always first amid where I am not, and from this, place becomes present, first in dichotomies of self and other—what Dōgen would call “delusion” and Heidegger would call “distancelessness”—and then as differences—the very possibility of enlightenment and identity. Such movement always happens first and most primarily as personal, as my own and my own where I am not are mine until place arrives and I and they are released and become present at where I am and not what I am. The discovery of place happens only where “a self” is no longer a “what” which covers it, but rather a “where” standing in relation to where it is not.
KIM, David (University of San Francisco) 
What is the Place of Radical Occidentalism in Contemporary Asian Philosophy? The Case of He-Yin Zhen and Feminist Confucianism.”
In the history of modern Asia (especially the 20th century), there are many examples of Asian thinkers who explicitly hybridized their native traditions with Western perspectives, and their work has been addressed as Asian or comparative philosophy. There are also many examples of Asian thinkers who explicitly displaced their native traditions and endorsed Western perspectives. Many of these latter thinkers, motivated by liberatory aims, opted for radical Western thought (like Marxism, anarchism, feminism, etc.), e.g. He-Yin Zhen, Lu Xun, M.N. Roy, etc. Arguably, many contemporary theorists in postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, and Asian Studies, especially Critical Asian Studies, can be positioned within this fairly long trajectory. Radical occidentalism raises questions about the place of such theories in contemporary Asian and comparative philosophy. It also raises questions about the role of place for a philosopher’s theorizing: Should Asian philosophers retain ties to the philosophies of their homeland? The former question will be addressed through consideration of the latter. To focus the discussion, the paper discusses the work of He-Yin Zhen, an early 20th century Chinese anarcho-feminist, and the normative issue of whether she should have pursued a more hybridist strategy to retain links to place and to avoid Eurocentrism. Specifically, the paper considers her concept of nannu in the context of recent efforts at formulating feminist Confucianism, and its ramifications for the role of place in philosophizing.
KIM, Hyeongseok (Gyeongsang National University, Korea)
“‘Sewer’ of World History: Ham Seok-heon’s Place in his Background of Eastern Thought and Christianity”
Ham Seok-heon (13 March 1901 – 4 February 1989) was a civil rights activist committed to human rights and non-violence during the period of Japanese colonial rule, Soviet military government, and Korean military dictatorship. His commitment to human rights, democracy, non-violence, and pacifism earned him the name, ‘the Gandhi of Korea,’ and the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker) nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and 1985.
Ham was also a Korean liberal thinker who tried to combine Christianity with various Eastern philosophical perspectives in order to find Korea’s spiritual identity and produce new values. He considered Japanese imperialism and Korean dictatorship as a product of modern totalitarianism, and he found and developed important ideas to overcome totalitarianism and keep pacifism among East Asian thoughts, especially in Daoism, although his ideological foundation was Christianity.
This paper mainly analyzes this point with its influence on later activists in Korea. For example, Ham produced a concept of Ssial (seed grains), which means ‘the people’ as the historical subject, who keep fundamental life in themselves like seed grains. At the same time, he matched it with some concepts of ‘weakness’ ‘humbleness’ ‘benevolence’ in Laozi. Ham believed only suffering people can sympathize with other people’s suffering, and that is why God gave the Korean people lots of adversities in their history. Therefore, ‘weak’ and ‘humble’ Korean people, groaned under despotism and totalitarianism, could carry their cross, ‘love’ other people, and so achieve world peace in the truest sense. Ham was also an inspiration to many various anti-authoritarianism or pro-democracy movements in Korea, in terms of suggesting various approaches including ecology, syncretism, liberation theology, and so on.
KIM, Jongmyung Kim (The Academy of Korean Studies, Korea)
Place and Culture: Royal Palaces and Buddhist Rituals in Medieval Korea”
The purpose of this paper is to examine how Buddhist rituals in medieval Korea (918-1392) were shaped by relationship with their ritual places, royal palaces, which has been heretofore largely and unduly ignored. Buddhist rituals flourished in medieval Korea. More Buddhist rituals were held at that time than at any other time in Korean history, a frequency also unsurpassed in China or Japan. In this paper special emphasis will be given to the Assembly of Eight Prohibitions (P’algwan hoe) and the Lantern Festival (Yŏndŭng hoe), the two most important Buddhist rituals, which were the Buddhist expression of medieval Korean beliefs such as ancestor worship and were performed in royal palaces. In particular, in his To Take Place, Jonathan Z. Smith stresses the importance of place to a proper understanding of the ways in which "empty" actions become rituals.
This paper will focus on identifying the nature of royal palaces as ritual places in relation to the major Buddhist rituals in medieval Korea, examining how the royal palaces contributed to shaping the Buddhist rituals as state rituals in relation to the idea of ancestor worship, an important part of the Confucian tradition, and understanding the ways in which the royal palaces are perceived, marked, and utilized religiously.
KIM, Jung-Yeup (Kent State University)

 

The Daxue 大學 and the Zhongyong 中庸: Texts about Transforming Ordinary Places into Extraordinary Ones”


In this paper, I show that there is a common theme of transforming ordinary places into extraordinary ones in the Daxue 大學 (Great Learning) and the Zhongyong 中庸 (Focusing the Familiar). First, based upon the commentaries on these classical Confucian texts from Chinese and Korean neo-Confucian philosophers of vital energy 氣 (qi), I argue that this theme can be understood in terms of vital synergy. That is, the ordinary place is where vital synergy amongst ourselves exists minimally, the extraordinary place is where vital synergy amongst ourselves is maximally realized, and a central motif underlying both texts is the emphasis on transforming the former into the latter.
Second, drawing upon insights from Confucian Role Ethics articulated by Roger T. Ames and Deweyian aesthetics, I show how this project of transforming place can be understood as an aesthetic one. Finally, I demonstrate how the Confucian insights investigated thus far can theoretically and practically contribute to how place is understood in contemporary discourse on everyday aesthetics.



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