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


MYERS, Michael (Washington State University)



Download 0.89 Mb.
Page17/23
Date11.05.2018
Size0.89 Mb.
#48577
1   ...   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   ...   23

MYERS, Michael (Washington State University)
“Place and Space in Israel/Palestine”
Palestinians maintain that Israeli Jews have mythologized the places mentioned in the Bible and have assumed those places as their own, to the exclusion of Palestinian aspirations and legal right to the land. Jews argue that Palestinians do not recognize that Israel constitutes the only space in the world that can provide a safe haven specifically for Jews, a haven necessary to protect the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust.
Proposed solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tend to involve concepts of space alone. Two-state solutions, for example, draw and redraw boundaries in an attempt to provide space for both peoples. Meanwhile, the places where Palestinians live become more dangerous, isolated, and squeezed smaller and smaller, while the places in which Israeli Jews live become increasingly militarized, unsafe, and threatened by attack from hostile neighboring countries.
This paper seeks a way out of the conflict through an examination of the concepts of place and space in the unique context of Israel/Palestine. While Israeli/Palestinian space is confined, contested and finite, it might be possible to construct a place that is plural, peaceful and conceptually without limit. The beginning of such a project would bring together Palestinian memory and conceptions of the land such as found in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Forays into A Vanishing Landscape with Israeli aspirations for a post-Holocaust world as found in Emil Fackenheim’s To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought.
NABOR, Maria (Aklan State University, Philipines)
“Kalibo Sto. Nino Atiatihan Festival and The Cultural Heritage of the Atis of Boracay”
The province of Aklan in the Philippines, (is packed with interesting places, from scenic beaches, captivating waterfalls, and vast caves), one of the top tourist destination of the Philipines. Boracay island is voted as the best beaches in the world. Aklan comprises 17 municipalities, one of which is known as “Kalibo”.
The month of January is devoted to the various festivals honoring the image of Santo Nino. The most popular celebration is the Kalibo Santo Nino Ati-atihan Festival that is replicated throughout the country since 13th century.
This cultural festival has become a social movement – an expressive behavior pattern where people collectively adapt to change and individuals find emotional release and an expression of their beliefs. It is a movement where people from all walks of life join and unite in traditional ways of celebrating. It is the blending of religious festivities of yesteryears with the present generation’s lifestyle and the manifestation of this in the individual as his way of life, his attitudes and his practices (such as the way he dresses entertains guests or shows friendship and hospitality) developed from childhood to adulthood.
The Ati-atihan is a gladsome confluence of hope and faith, philosophy, religion, enjoyment, prayer and merry-making, charity and generosity, thanksgiving and ritual, atonement and adventure, history and legend, hope and well-wishing, concord and creativity-all happily blended, in the merry sound of beating drums.
The festival will continue to stay among the Aklanons as a most valued tradition, a unique legacy that will be handed on and treasured from generation to generation.
During the 12th to 13th century, the Ati’s trusted the Malays for governance. The Malays, in return, valued their spirit of paternalism, friendship, camaraderie and brotherhood. This is the very reason why their cultural heritage survived for many centuries and has been reknowned worldwide.
NAGATOMO, Shigenori (Temple University)
“Holistic Non-Dualism: A Sketch for a Philosophy of Place”
This paper is an attempt to construct a philosophy of place so as to demand a perspectival shift from “either-or egological dualism” to “holistic non-dualism.” The latter phrase designates an epistemological conceptual framework that is contrasted with an epistemological paradigm that is based on “either-or egological dualism”—the stance which has been used as the predominant paradigm since the age of enlightenment in the Western philosophical tradition. “Either-or egological dualism” can be explained by breaking down into the following segments: “either-or” “egological” and dualism. Dualism is a conceptual stance that divides the whole in two opposing pairs such as mind and body, I and others, and the host of other pairs. It promotes an oppositional thinking and ontology. Either-or logic justifies this division, a consequence of which is a prioritization of one segment or part over the other segment or part. This promotes one-sidedness as standard and normal. An agent which performs this prioritization is an ego that is divorced from the body, i.e., ego as a thinking being wherein rationality is singled out as the essential defining feature of what it means to be human. This creates a split and conflict within the human psychē, and a distance between humans and the place e.g., nature. When the ego engages in thinking, it objectifies the things of its thinking. This objectification is made possible by accepting the human being as a “being-outside-of-nature.” This definition gives us an image that the human being stands outside of nature, i.e., a human being as a thinking being is situated outside of [and possibly above] nature as an observer. This creates a contradiction namely that while he/she stands outside of nature, his/her body is anchored in nature as a material being.
Unlike “either-or egological dualism,” “holistic non-dualism” does not promote an epistemological paradigm in which the whole is broken down into two opposites. Rather, the whole is understood as the whole, more specifically, a thinker doesn’t stand outside of the whole, because it understands the human being as “being-in-nature.” Instead of mind-body dualism, holistic non-dualism accepts the idea of mind-body correlativity, and to expand it to a larger dimension, it recognizes a micromacrocosmic correlativity between the human being and nature. Nor does it engage in oppositional thinking that creates distance between the human being and the whole (or nature). Moreover, it doesn’t create a split or conflict within the human being.
To advance the above idea, it explicates Nishida’s logic of “absolutely contradictory self-identity.” Nishida’s logic of “absolutely contradictory self-identity” states that the logical structure of the world is both “contradictory” and “self-identical” at the same time, where the adjective “absolutely” indicates that this structure cannot be resolved into a higher synthesis. This structure is used to account for how change occurs in the world, i.e., his “place dialectic” in terms of a dialectical change from “that which creates” to “that which is created” and from “that which is created” to “that which creates.” In this dialectical change, the paper also examines the human role in terms of Nishida’s theory of “acting-intuition.”

NAKAJIMA Takahiro (University of Tokyo, Japan)
“Seeking for Place of Earthly Universality in Modern Japan: Suzuki Daisetz, Chikazumi Jōkan, and Miyazawa Kenji”
When confronting European modernity, the universality represented in Chinese philosophy got lost its overwhelming power in East Asia. In contrast with the universality shown through modern science and philosophy in Europe, the traditional universality in China turned to be “Chinese universality.” In this turnover of values, how could Japanese intellectuals imagine the universality? It was not a simple prolongation of modern universality into East Asia, but a transformed one. We might call it “Earthly Universality.”
In my presentation, I will first talk about “Earthly Universality” in modern Japan, focusing on Buddhist Thinkers such as Suzuki Daisetz (1870-1966), Chikazumi Jōkan (1870-1941), and Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933).
Suzuki defended Pure Land Buddhism to find a possibility of “Earthly Spirituality.” By referring to local saints called as “Myōkōnin,” he elaborated the dimension of the mysterious in the midst of modernized Japan and regarded it as a place of resistance to the extreme nationalism. He said that “regardless of the East or the West, Political system should be mainly based on liberty which derives from spiritual liberty.” (1947) As for religion, he preferred religion existing in the earth. He said, “Though religion is said to come from heaven, its essence exists in the earth.” (1944) As a modern intellectual, Suzuki knew the power of Christianity that had a notion of heavenly “transcendence,” but he tried to find an earthly universality in Buddhism.
Pure Land Buddhism was drastically transformed in modern Japan. Chikazumi Jōkan, a contemporary with Suzuki, tried to reform it along with Kiyozawa Manshi (1863-1903). By paying attention to Christianity, he constituted modern Pure Land Buddhism based upon new belief “kyūdō.” Miyazawa Masajirō (1874-1957) and his family devoted in the direction Chikazumi proposed. However, Miyazawa Kenji, son of Masajirō, was dissatisfied with it.
Kenji left Pure Land Buddhism of Chikazumi, and converted into Kokuchūkai (国柱会 National Pillar Society) based upon Nichiren sect. He hoped to realize social welfare as Buddhist utopia in this world. However, he became suspicious of Kokuchūkai and tried to establish a new community for “Earthly Men.” It was called as “Rasu Earthly Men Association” (1926.8-1927.3) in which Miyazawa challenged to combine natural science and religion redefined in Genius Loci. By thinking that “religion gets tired and is substituted by science, and science is cold and dark” (1926), Miyazawa needed to build a bridge between the universality of natural science and the locality of religion.
Here we come to understand an encounter between Daisetz and Kenji over a detour. Both of them seriously thought of alternative social imaginary based upon “Earthly Universality” in modern Japan.
NEVILLE, Robert C. (Boston University)
“On the Confucian Virtue of Shallow Roots”
The conventional belief is that Confucianism fosters the cultivation of deep roots in a place with family orientations and deep history.  But Confucius himself, by legend, wandered all over China looking for a tenured position. His philosophy expanded to the very foreign soil, in a cultural sense, of Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia.  The most creative Confucian thinkers of the last century or so lived in self-conscious diaspora away from China.  Nowadays, people with no ethnic roots in China are advancing the participation of the Confucian traditions in global philosophical conversation outside even the diaspora of East Asian intellectuals.  So there must be something in Confucianism that allows it to disengage from its roots in one place and set down sufficient roots in another.  The Confucian virtues of humaneness and individuated ritual virtuosity, or role ethics, must be able to adapt themselves to multiple places, allowing Confucianism to be in dialectical critical relation to the culture at hand so as to push back against the instincts of ingroup self-defense that are so hurtful in a global situation.  The paper presents a theory of Confucian transportability.
NGUYEN, Ngoc Tho (University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City)
“Traditional Vietnamese Village Space and its Reaction to Confucianism”
Traditional Vietnam, an inland Southeast Asian nation getting engaged with East Asian Confucianism, has shown the conrete space culture that are naturally shaped and promoted by the villagers as means to survive in the local environmental and social contexts. Being threathened by annual flood and the external expansions, villages in North Vietnam has been tightly enclosed and internalized to construct the autonomous style of living units. Such a kind of rural village organizing has built up Vietnamese cosmology and concepts of human beings and society, regulated the foundation of Vietnamese identities, personality and communication. Under Vietnamese’s eyes, village is also considered as “house”, “home” and “state”, village unwritten rules as “family principles”, “community conventions” and “state law”. Village’s enclosure has also enclosed villagers’ destiny, eyesight and capacity.
One’s life is complicatedly interfered by and engaged with many village’s components and relations; therefore, dealing with village also means dealing with each individual. On the other hand, the enclosed village space has defined the way of dealing with external sources (cultural exchanges, cultural influences). Confucianism in the early periods as well as Western philosophies and concepts in the recent centuries all have been looked, absorbed and reconstructed through different village prisms. This paper is to discuss on the concept, the construction and the nature of traditional Vietnamese “village” as well as its impacts on villagers’ social life, cosmology and viewpoints from which the reaction over the arrival and absorption of Confucianism has been shaped.
NUSSEIBEH, Sari (Alquds University Jerusalem, Palestine)

HENDLER, Micah (Director, YMCA Jerusalem Youth Chorus)
“Noise and Sound: A Space to Call ‘Home’”
I will be developing this presentation with a colleague, Micah Hendel, who leads a 'mixed' youth chorus here at the YMCA, the main idea being that mental space -where or what one feels at home (occupying)- is significantly a space of sounds, the one often being exclusive of the other (turning what sounds like a harmonious melody for one into a jarring noise for the other). Sounds are of different sorts, and these include thoughts and prejudices.  Music as instrument and practice can help expand one's 'home space', allowing it to become inclusive. It offers a paradigm for how space/home can be shared.  
OH, Jea Sophia (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)

 

"In the Beginning was the Place…": An East-West Dialogue of Creatio ex Profundis"



 

This study will compare Neo-Confucian Zhang Zai (張載)'s taixu (太虛, the vast vacuity) and process ecotheologian Catherine Keller's tehom (the chaotic depth in Hebrew) as the ultimate spatio-temporal place of creation, using the Korean term teum (in-betweenness) to connect these two resonant ideas. Both Keller and Zhang developed a nondualistic cosmology as opposed to the Augustinian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (the creation out of nothingness). As Keller rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo which was inherited by Augustine where God is the unilateral agent of creation while the multitudes (萬物, wanwu) are subalternized, for Zhang, taixu is the ultimate place where cosmos and the multitude are born from the same fluid vital force (氣, qi) resonant with Keller's creatio ex profundis (creation out of the deep). The great vacuity is not nothingness but the fullness of vital force (氣, qi). The creation is the manifestation of the endless becoming(s) of taixu that becomes myriad things by convergence of qi while myriad things become taixu by diffusion of qi. Both Keller and Zhang Zai's harmonious cosmology is a new paradigm of creation that this planet is one organic body of the myriad thing events in which we are all interconnected of which nothing is left out.


OLBERDING, Amy (University of Oklahoma)
“Philosophical Exclusion and Conversational Practices”
In this essay, I seek to assess and analyze the ways in which informal modes of talk regarding “inclusivity” in philosophy can, even where well-disposed and –intentioned, act like philosophical gatekeeping, frustrating efforts to devise genuinely hybrid philosophical efforts that would fully enfold and incorporate philosophical traditions beyond the west. “Boundary policing” within philosophy is often most apparent where the discipline’s intellectual territories are explicitly mapped in ways that exclude traditions beyond the west. However, focusing on intellectually ambitious and explicit attempts to conceptually define philosophy obscures the ways philosophy is already functionally defined by our practices. For many philosophers, philosophy just is what they read in professional journals, what they teach and write, and what they discuss with colleagues – that is, philosophy is an object of experience, a phenomenon and lived activity. In this regard, boundaries are more often felt than explicitly announced or plainly posted, as informal modes of talk signal barriers and thereby functionally patrol the discipline’s outer edges. Such is to say that even where philosophers are generally well disposed toward inclusivity, they may nonetheless participate in intellectual and conversational practices that act like gatekeeping. Indeed, as I argue in this essay, the way the profession talks about whether or not to find greater place for Asian philosophy often already contains the negative answer. The dialogue, even where ostensibly open and interested, is itself shaped as a no.
Olberding, Garret (University of Oklahoma)
“Shadows in the Mirror: Reflective Representation of Physical Space in Early China”
The compositional norms with which early Chinese geographic maps were designed remain little understood.  Similar to other ancient maps, all are rough diagrams of uncertain geographic area and indefinite purpose.  In my paper, using comparisons with pre- and post-Renaissance European maps, as well as statements relating to the visual organization of space found in early texts, such as the later Mohist canons, the Huainanzi, and the Guanzi, I will analyze what early Chinese maps reveal about the standards of reflective signification and epistemic positioning involved in their creation; for instance, their employment of perspective and contrast. 
Juxtaposed against what one might call the Renaissance’s “geometry of sight,” I also wish to highlight the employment of certain related aesthetic sensibilities, such as the regular use of linear definition and empty space.   Through such analysis, I aim to demonstrate certain definitive aspects of their logic and organization, and offer some additional insight into early Chinese representations of cartographic space, and thus how visual perception shaped the understanding of em/placement.
OLSON, Carl (Allegheny College)
“Place and Play: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Rāmānuja and Zhuangzi”
The notion of play assumes an important place in the philosophical works of the Indian thinker Rāmānuja and the Chinese Daoist thinker Zhuangzi. After comparing their positions on play and looking at its features (e.g., its risky nature, its freedom, becoming lost in play, its effortlessness, and its self-representative nature), this essay examines the relationship between play and place in these two philosophers. Play necessarily occurs within some type of context or place that can assume God’s body or the Dao, according to the respective positions of Rāmānuja and Zhuangzi. Finally, this essay turns to consider the chosen thinkers conceptions of the relationship between play and place and the way that it compares to the thought of Yi-fu Tuan in order to suggest any changes that he might make to satisfy the Indian and Daoist thinkers.
OPPEGAARD, Brett (University of Hawai’i)
“How Media Lost its Place and Found It Again: Proximity Issues from the Penny Press to the Smartphone”

Our places can be conceptualized as our information interfaces, increasingly integrated with overlapping digital worlds through mobile technologies. These juxtapositions of digital media and physical environments can generate deep, complex, and personal meanings to us, and consumers suddenly can’t get enough of mobile news and geolocated content that enrich our places. Media organizations, though, generally have been befuddled and unable to align the potential of locative and contextual information much with their current business models.


Academics meanwhile have been struggling to find ways to empirically study the related emerging media forms, with their complex dynamics. Through medium theory and historical perspectives, this presentation will describe how journalistic media lost its connections to place during the time of the telegraph and railroad – when Marx and Heidegger warned of ramifications caused by the annihilation of time and space – and recently has been reconnecting to place again through experimental prototypes using geolocation technologies, such as smartphones and tablet computers. To illustrate the increasingly important intersection of technology and place, several field studies and case studies will be shown, focused upon the growing importance in media today of tailoring information by proximity and the emerging genres.
OZBEY, Sonya (University of Michigan)

 

“The Outside Generated from the Inside: Xunzi on the ‘Petty Person’”



 

Integral to the classical Ru imagery of the “civilized world” was the trope of the “barbarian,” which defined both the territorial and conceptual limits of it. Although the so-called barbarians were often referred to with territorial or directional word compounds, their perceived inferiority was due to their ritual deficiency—which means although the lands from where they come shaped the way they are, they were not destined to be that way. Being born human, they were considered to share similar dispositions with other humans, although their ritual deficiency took away from the obviousness of their humanity. The cultivated, exemplary people, by contrast, typically belonged to central plains, although no matter what kind of conditions in which they found themselves, they succeeded in following the tradition that is passed down from Xia to Zhou—which, in a way, amounts to living in the same “cultural universe” regardless of where they actually end up. As for the other dwellers of the central states, the masses, they too were thought to be at the mercy of the conditions in which they found themselves, which were, during the Zhanguo period, far from ideal. Thus, they, naturally, too fell short of the human ideal, which makes it harder to employ a neat inside/outside dichotomy to delineate the limits of the civilized human world (the borders of which were already unclear to begin with, due to the shifting political climate). This paper focuses on the descriptions of “petty people” in the Xunzi and examines them in relation to bestiality metaphors, descriptions of the commoners, as well as descriptions of the barbarian people. My goal is not to locate the exact place of them in the symbolic ladder of propriety and humanity, but to use various descriptions of petty people as vantage points to examine the unstable nature of the symbolic field within which different imageries of the ‘inhuman’ finds expression. 


PAOLILLO, Maurizio Paolillo (Università del Salento, Italy)
“The Quality of Space in Traditional Chinese Aesthetics: ‘Real Place’ and Affinities with the Western Tradition”
With the help of Chinese sources, most of which belonging to painting theory, and ranging from 5th to 11th century, this contribution aims to show the affinities between ancient China aesthetic principles and an important part of Western aesthetics, which from Plato arrives to Middle Age and beyond. During this long historical phase, a vision of “real place” (Chinese zhenjing 真景), based on the assumption that every landscape representation must not be limited to a quantitative reduction, takes place among the élite of the literati. The writer hopes to contribute to the dismantling of some visions, like the popular vulgata about the “peculiarity” and the relativism of traditional Chinese thought.

Download 0.89 Mb.

Share with your friends:
1   ...   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   ...   23



The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message
    Main page
same time
real world
main features
true nature
third part
european association
world congress
same order
most ancient
collective memory
central concept
theoretical part
female body
simple concept
differing roles
relationship between individuals