TANKE, Joseph (University of Hawai’i)

Thirty spokes join at one hub,

But it is the non-being (the hole) that gives the use of the cart.

Lumps of clay are molded to form a vessel,

But it is the non-being (space within) that gives the use of the vessel.

Doors and windows are constructed to form a chamber,

But it is the non-being (space within) that gives the use of the room.

While the materials are the asset,

But it is the non-being (within) that gives the function.
THOMPSON, Paul B. (Michigan State University)
“The Allure of the Local in Food Ethics”
Philosophical inquiry into food security, the environmental impact of agriculture and fair treatment for small farmers and other food system workers has recently congealed into the field of “food ethics”. Taking up an alternative food movement’s interest in mounting resistance to large corporate actors and the global food system, advocacy for “locavore” eating practice is a topic in food ethics that links to the Conference theme of “place”. Emphasis on local food systems links several disparate normative rationales, however, and not always in ways that cohere. First, local food systems are said to place a lower burden on the environment than the global food system, providing an environmental ethics rationale. Second, local food systems allow money to circulate in local economies, providing a rationale based on local job creation within communities of place. Third, local food systems are said to promote sociality and convivial social relations, serving a political value of place-based solidarity. Finally, aesthetic qualities such as terroir are said to enrich the experience of eating foods from specific places. Do these notions of place converge or diverge? The answer is that while there are tensions, there is a surprising sense in which quotidian practices of local food culture have the capacity to invest place with distinct but mutually supporting conceptions of value. Food practice is thus a cornerstone for sense of place.
TIMM, Jeffrey (Wheaton College)
“A Place Beyond Place: The Divine Madman and the New Materialism”
The New Materialism rejects “transcendence” and “objectivity” within the study of embodied, emplaced and “embraided” cultural experience. Recently scholars like Vasquez (2011) and Harvey (2013) have argued for an approach to the study of religion as everyday life, celebrating difference and employing “otherness” as a methodology. From the otherness of the Vajrayana the gaze turns to the new materialism, wondering exactly what is new about it. Contrasting the natural embeddedness of traditional indigenous cultures with the alienation from place and self in the modern west sets the stage for a third possibility: Vajrayana.

Kyimed Lhakhang is a sacred temple in western Bhutan identified with the divine madman and, despite its emplacement or embraidedness in a particular and meaningful landscape, it forever points to a transcendence of place and “going beyond, beyond.” This Vajrayana cultural understanding of place is directly linked to an appreciation and cultivation of alternate states of consciousness. It is here that the divine madman and his ancient wisdom tradition, attuned through insights of biogenetic structuralism, quantum physics and fractal geometry, may have some helpful suggestions for the New Materialists.

“Towards the Growth of Agrarian Literacy”

One of the concerns that J. Baird Callicott shares through his works is the impoverishment of the value of agriculture. With the trend of increasing mechanization, farmers are enforced to pursue efficiency and profits by introducing whatever technological measures available. Agriculture is a business based on the relationship between farmers and consumers. Farmers’ choices are thus significantly influenced by the choices of consumers. Thus, Callicott writes, “Farmers are asked to make costly changes in their method of production for the sake of everyone else’s quality of life.”
In order to consider the value of agriculture that has been dismissed in recent agricultural business, Callicott cites Aldo Leopold’s land aesthetic. Aesthetics goes beyond instrumental evaluation. It is the appreciation of the existence of certain things per se. Leopold’s land aesthetic, according to Callicott, “recognizes the beauty of neglected natural environments.” It is not about the appreciation of scenic beauty of agricultural landscapes but the understanding of their history of evolutionary and ecological biology. Biological literacy is thus the foundation of Leopold’s aesthetics.

The connection between agriculture and biodiversity began to be emphasized in Japanese agricultural policies. Farmlands are now valued from various perspectives such as ecological habitat, scenic beauty, therapeutic function, disaster prevention, etc. Several agrarian villages have been selected as GIAHS sites by FAO and have been recognized as important bio-cultural heritages. In spite of these progresses, the future prospect is not bright. In this paper, I examine unique agrarian aesthetics in Japanese tradition and consider the difficulties and hopes concerning current agricultural conservation movement. One of the possible solutions is the cultivation of agrarian literacy.

“Place, Culture, and Nostalgia: a Phenomenological Perspective”

The reception of nostalgia in the 19^th and 20^th century is striking. At once an emblem of political conservatism, nostalgia is also an invariant aspect not only of individual existence but also of different cultures. From the Japanese concept “mono no aware” to the Portuguese term “Saudade,” nostalgia is a nuanced and culturally mediated concept. In this paper, I assume a phenomenological perspective on nostalgia, exploring the points of converge and divergence between Eastern and Western attitudes toward pastness, longing, and transience. My claim is that spatiality plays a central role in the formation of nostalgia, such that our experience of the past is tied up with the materiality of places, both in the presence and in their absence. I explore this claim through situating Freud’s short essay “On Transience” in dialogue with Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

TSAI, George (University of Hawai’i)
“Blame and the Blamed's Place in (or beyond) the Moral Community”
How does blame achieve its desired-effect of modifying the behavior of the blamed? More specifically, how does the blamed's place or position with respect to the moral community (whether the blamed is situated within or beyond the moral community) make a difference to how, and whether, blame is able to achieve its desired-effect? In exploring these questions, I argue that it is a rather complex matter how blame operates to change the blamed, and that this complexity matches the fact that the blamed (as a group) are a morally and psychologically diverse lot. 
TURNER, Paul M. Turner (DePaul University)
“The Estrangement of Presence in the Zhuangzi”
It is well-known that the Zhuangzi 莊子 portrays apparently irreconcilable opposites as, in fact, mutually dependent on one another. This is most clearly the case with two sets of terms in the text's second chapter, shi-fei 是非 ('that's it' and 'that's not') and shi-bi是彼 ('this' and 'that'). Each term plays a role in distinguishing between what is correct or incorrect, and especially with regard to determining just what is properly virtuous, good, beautiful, and so on. Much of the English language commentary to date portrays these pairs of contraries as being primarily linguistic. Their contrariety seems merely semantic, then, while the contraries in fact form a unity either insofar as their meanings require one another, or there is an underlying unity beyond language which the use of names somehow distorts.

In this paper, I will take up and radicalize Brook Ziporyn's suggestion about the status of perspective in the Zhuangzi, which is that a thing does not merely have but rather is such a perspective. This is to say that a thing's affirmation and negation structures its presence. What this means is that affirming and negating are not activities which beings undertake in an everyday sense, or 'within language', but are rather better understood as ontologically constitutive of a being which can act or speak. I will argue that a thing in the Zhuangzi is a clearing and lighting-up (ming 明) which essentially emerges from the dark and confused chaos of nonbeing (hundun 渾沌), where illumination has the sense of 'forming a meaningful world'.

Recent work at the intersection of justice studies, disability studies, phenomenology, and the metaphysics of space and place suggests that paying attention to how persons of disabilities experience and understand “space” and “place” is central to the very construction of space and place from the standpoint of equality and justice. In this talk we present the pioneering work of Dr. Victor Pineda, who is the key architect of the AWE movement (A World Enabled Movement).

We present his work against the background of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum who have also drawn attention to the experiences of persons with disabilities in their articulation of the capabilities approach to justice. However, we argue that Dr. Pineda’s work is pioneering and goes beyond those of Sen and Nussbaum in so far as he argues for the thesis that our current understanding of disability is confused, since we take a medical or biological approach to disability rather than a social and environmental approach to disability. We show how his careful argumentation suggests that everyone is disabled relative to some environment or place because disability is a functional notion tied to an individual in a space that is a constructed place through affordances it allows a person to optimize in freedom and being. We rehearse his empirical research on the United Arab Emirates in which he shows how laws concerning disability have shaped the production of the city life.

We conclude by suggesting that cross-cultural research on disability provides a pathway forward for researchers in a variety of fields. The grand unification we point is research space and place that combines disability studies and future studies with comparative philosophy and theories of justice in political theory and philosophy.

“The World is a Cage” or The Place of Freedom in Early Chinese Philosophy

Inspired by the long-standing Western philosophical debate on the (in)compatibility of determinism and free will, I analyze the way in which Early Chinese authors argued that behaving adaptively could lead to a kind of non-dualist, compatibilist freedom that I call “Adaptive Freedom.” I begin with a Song-times debate on the historical and philosophical reasons for feudalism (Su Shi 蘇軾􏰆vs Zhu Xi 朱熹), which helps illuminate similar positions with regard to fate and free action in Early China.