FUJIMOTO, Matthew (University of Hawai’i)

In this presentation, I will examine Nishida’s view of language as seen in “Expressive Activity” (Hyōgen sayō, 表現作用) and show that it plays a vital role in his larger philosophical project of constructing a truly universal philosophy. I will do this by; first, examining several passages from “Expressive Activity” in order to construct a basic understanding of Nishida’s view of language, and second, draw out the implications of such a view of language for his philosophy of place. I will conclude by showing that a relationship between language and Basho should be expected given our intuitions about contextualized experiences and persons. 

“Upaniṣadic Isomorphisms: Mapping the Universe Within the Body”

Isomorphic correspondences between the cosmic and individual spaces is a characteristic feature of Indian philosophies.  In the Upaniṣads we find a model that maps a particular cosmic Deity with a specific organ of the body and its function in such a way that the Sun is said to preside over vision; Goddess Earth over smell; the Lord of Water (Varuna) over taste, and so on.  What is the logic behind these correspondences?  What is the significance of those deities with respect to the faculties of perception and action?  Can the understanding of the intimate relation that the natural elements have with our own faculties of perception and action help us re-structure our relation with this world as a place of environmental harmony? 

'Space' and 'place' are mutually depending experiential categories, as proposed by Yi-Fu Tuan, where 'place' signifies location, stability, safety, pause within the movement, and 'space' indicates a sense of yearning, a drive to transcend the boundary, an overarching trajectory towards 'here and now', illuminated with the sense of being and becoming. Gaston Bacherald on the other hand postulates the reverberation of spatial imagination within the most commonly encountered architectural elements which are abound in our living localities, both indoor and outdoor. While 'place' has a mappable quality, bounded space may have a measurable quality. In Indic tradition the space has been conceived both as bounded and unbounded, a philosophical move to account for the 'apeiron' while confined in the affairs mostly related to the 'peiron'. Georg Cantor has shown that the 'apeiron', the infinite and the finite should not be treated as opposites, because the constant striving to sense the infinite can go on through the reasoning of transfinite numbers. While 'space' remains as a primary philosophical category, the conceptualization of 'place' has seen limited intellectual appeal so far. The further conceptualization of 'place' can initiate with the abstraction and extention of its mappable, locational, inhabitable and territorializable qualities.

“Does Cultural Incommensurability Measure Up? A Consideration of Nearness and Distance in Intercultural Philosophy”

There is the need for self-defense, not uncommon when presenting intercultural philosophy to a wider audience, as questions of cultural incommensurability inevitably arise. Is comparative philosophy legitimate? Is intercultural? Is any type of global philosophy possible? Are the cultural, terminological, and perspectival differences simply too great?

Indeed, intercultural philosophers and methods should indeed have to defend themselves, since critical inquiry demands no less. However, they should not find themselves initially and forever thereafter in that position of defense and haunted by the supposedly frightful specter of the culturally incommensurable, when that question is itself predicated on many less than defensible premises.

The vices of cultural incommensurability questions become apparent as something of a “sorites paradox” emerges when considering how contemporaneous cultures talk to each other or how contemporary idioms speak to the past. The sorites paradox, using the Greek term for “heap,” refers to the slippery slope question of quantification. A heap might have a certain large number of straws of hay in it, but taking them away one by one, at some point a threshold is reached whereby the heap ceases to be a heap.

What does this mean here? Well, the idea is that some point exists where things either become intracultural, occurring within a single proper domain, or intercultural, occurring between two separate cultures. This implies a threshold, a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal border at which this culture here ends and that culture there begins, and also a border where each becomes a proper entity, a heap unto itself, and not just subcultural detritus.

What then is to be done? There has to be a way of recognizing real differences without giving into the pernicious logic of presuming separation. How would it then make sense to talk of cultures having conversations if the fallacy of misplaced cultural concreteness is taken seriously? How can things be intercultural if there are no cultures as such? How is it possible to rescue basic talk of cultures more generally and avoid somehow implying that all talk about Chinese philosophy, French culture, or American literature is in some way essentialist, racist, and/or nationalist?

Answering such questions is no mean task. There needs to be a type of intercultural philosophy which does not lapse into pernicious abstractions of cultures, and which still retains the ability to speak of this culture or that as the case may be. There needs to be a way of talking about world philosophy as a unity while respecting philosophical worldviews as a dynamic manifold where the constituent elements are fluid, yet insistent particulars and not simply so much misplaced concreteness.

The approach here takes up Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomatic method, Franz Martin Wimmer’s polylog model, and Roger Ames’ observations on interpretation as negotiation to reconsider place, nearness, and distance in light of the questions that dog intercultural philosophy. Recognizing the sorites paradox, the response here shifts away from the incommensurability question’s underlying notions of objective purity that quantify self-sameness in seemingly monolithic “heaps” of time, place, and culture. Instead, this approach emphasizes self-consciousness of the necessary impurity of all perspectives in any multi-point, non-hierarchical conversation that would seek to appreciate the qualities, not of abstracted and quantified cultures, but of individual voices within dynamic and constitutively pluralistic philosophical cultures.
GIANETTI, Jason (Eisho-ji-Northwest Zen Center)
“Dialectical Method in Plato and Nagarjuna”

In the interest of brevity, this paper will attempt to concisely present Plato’s formulation and development of the so-called “Theory of Ideas” and the science of dialectic. I will attempt to show how the “Theory of Ideas” and the science of dialectic are necessarily connected; how Plato presents these concepts in various dialogues which, if taken in the order that I present them, can be understood to roughly correlate to the stages of developmental complexity presented in the “Divided Line” and “Allegory of the Cave” sections of the Republic; and how the mysterious and ambiguous things which are said about ideas and dialectic in the Republic can be deciphered by a careful reading of the Phaedo, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Sophist, and Philebus. Through an examination of those dialogues I shall argue that Socratic dialectic operates on two different levels, one of the eide and dianoia, which consist of discrete and self-consistent units, and one of the koinonein and episteme which involve a “blending” and “community” which necessarily violates the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Finally, I will compare the methods and conclusions found in the Platonic corpus to some rather evocative passages in the Hindu and Mahayana tradition of Buddhism.

“Moral Education as the Place of Person and Moral Development”

Furthermore, we will present ethics of social consequences (ESC) offering a possibility for moral and personal development through critical moral thinking. The ESC emphasizes basic values accepted by the moral of the society, i.e. humanity, human dignity, moral right for life, justice, responsibility, duty and tolerance. On the other hand, in the process of moral thinking it requires to regard future or past consequences emerging from our thinking, decision-making and acting. The aim is to create a model of moral and personal development through critical thinking on the basis of criteria, which form conditions for free decision-making and acting of person, his/her moral responsibility determined by the effort to achieve positive social consequences emerging from our behaviour and acting or at least to achieve predominance of the positive over negative social consequences.

“The Place of Yoga in Brazilian Culture”

In this paper, we will make a brief analysis of the place of Yoga (an ancient practical and philosophical system related to the Hindu religion) within the Brazilian cultural universe, a context wherein it starts to create new identities. Yoga tradition has gained its own features in Brazil, due to peculiarities of our cultural identity. Our proposal is to discuss, in an introductory way, the forms and discourses through which Yoga tradition is presented to our society both as a philosophical and as a practical-physical system by Brazilian Yoga masters who, since the 1960's, begin to publish their own books and to create explanations and their own terminology to suit our cultural context. We intend, therefore, to analyze the ways in which Yoga's place is being built in our culture, and, at the same time, the ways in which it is being adapted to our own socio-cultural characteristics.
Although some contemporary Brazilian teachers insist on the importance of valuing certain practices exactly because of their "purity", "originality" and "fidelity to the Indian philosophical tradition", we consider the reverse process as the most important from a historical point of view: the formation of a "Brazilian Yoga", which results from a particular reading of this Indian tradition in Brazil, due to our historical specificities. Such specificities – which, since the beginning of colonization, acted in the shaping of our bodies, our beliefs and the way we relate to the world, – will be analyzed in our speech. We believe that it is exactly through the lenses of these constitutive elements which came from the historical and social formation of the Brazilian identity that Yoga finds its place in Brazilian culture since the mid-twentieth century.
GRIFFITH-DICKSON, Gwen (Lokahi Foundation, UK)
“The Place of ‘Place’ in Communities: Symbol, Substrate, or Actor?”
Humanity moves place; and two of the most urgent and destabilising issues of the current moment have arisen from humans dramatically moving place: those fleeing from Islamic State (and allied movements e.g. Boko Haram) to save their lives and modes of existence, and those fleeing to Islamic State precisely to realise an imagined life and mode of existence. These mass movements then throw up chronic, unanswered questions of what it means to belong in/to a place; with sharp political divisions in the countries receiving refugees and ‘migrants’; but also those same countries alarmed by the rejection of their citizens who leave to join Da’esh. Meanwhile, those whose territory is taken feel alienated from the purported new nation-state in their own earthly place that rejects and indeed endangers their lives and ways of life.

Against this backdrop, I ask what it means to belong to a physical place and what place can uniquely contribute to human communities. By this point in human history, most of our human habitats are palimpsests: written on and scraped off to be written on anew by new occupants, cultures, civilisations. Most of us now live in a diverse human landscape: whether patchy, with pockets of demographic difference created in layers of migration and change; or whether hybridised; or both. So what gives a people a purported ‘right to be here?’ And is the physical (or better, earthly) place – the land, the waters – ever an entity or indeed an actor in communitarian living, or must it only be the passive substrate for human activity that creates a community and a sense belonging out of everything but this land?

The fantasy of creating a new state – be it Israel, a newly independent nation-state of Hawai‘i or indeed Da‘esh – where it will at last be possible to right historic injustices and lead a life in accordance with communitarian values and vision, is a very powerful one. How much easier and faster to sweep aside a messy or failed historical project and begin anew, as compared to the slow, ongoing work of scraping and rewriting on a palimpsest. In some cases (Israel, Hawai‘i) the land itself – this earthly place – is an ineradicable dimension of that vision. In others, whatever the historical significance or symbolism ascribed to particular spots, the vision is a universal one; and its current location or battlefield is merely political expedience, the first, most likely win of an imagined sequence of conquests to establish a limitless state of righteousness.

But even when the place itself is part of the compelling vision, is the power of a place in its own right undermined when other tests of belonging are applied – whether it be ideology, religion, race or ethnicity, or even the rule of a particular vision of law? And if so, is that not a betrayal of the ‘power of earthly place’?