“Dwelling: Levinas beyond Heidegger”

“Dwelling: Levinas beyond Heidegger”

In his book Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas discusses the concept of dwelling directed polemically to Martin Heidegger. In this study I want to suggest that the source of Levinas's 'domesticity' may found in his Talmudic readings. His phenomenological research revealed 'dwelling' as an ethical thinking. The Levinasian thought sees Home that is not derived from the Freudian “angst” or from the Heideggerian “thrownness“ [geworfen]: "he does not find himself brutally cast forth and forsaken in the world”.

Levinas explains the ethical meaning of 'domesticity' by understanding the ethical aspect of the 'feminine': “in a world that offers it no inner refuge, in which it is disorientated, solitary and wondering… 'The house is woman' the Talmud tells us”. But the terms 'home' and 'domesticity' goes beyond the descriptive social usage of these terms, extending to the meaning of 'being in the world'. Levinas’s concept of feminine and dwelling runs deeper than that and indeed stands in contrast to Heidegger. Heidegger describes the situation of the Dasein’s being as 'thrown into the world', and the way of authenticity lies in accepting the facticity of it. And Levinas uses a difficult metaphor to describe this facticity, that of an actual projectile, as a 'stone one casts behind oneself'. Opposite the possibility of projectedness is “home-ness/dwelling”.

One possible perception of “home” would describe it as a person’s protected space, a deliberate turning away from the external and a gathering inward into one’s interior. And there is another possibility for understanding 'home', and he identifies it with 'the feminine'. The new meaning of dwelling is not as shelter but as ethical dwelling. Home that is domesticity intended to welcome, one that remains open in order to accept guests. Feminine offers an alternative in an alienated world, an alternative called 'home'. 'To feel at home' is not to feel protected but rather to feel that one is moving inward to a familiar place, a welcoming place. It is a motion of transition – not an outward one, though, but an inward one.

“Paradoxical Space and the Geopolitics of Race and Domestic Violence”

“Finding a Place for Transhumanist Immortality in Ancient Indian Philosophy”

Space metaphors in general and place metaphors in particular play a crucial role in the conceptualization, design and the discourses of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Marshall McLuhan consistently developed his theories and reflections on electronic media based on the increasing use of spatial metaphors (“galaxy” in 1962, “landscape” in 1969, and in 1989 the “Global Village”). According to Gow (2001), McLuhan put spatial metaphors at the center of his conceptualization of new media. Based on and inspired by his pioneering work and the resulting and widely adopted conceptual-metaphorical framework, the WWW further developed more productive spatial metaphors, and more precisely place metaphors for various user scenarios. In E-Learning and E-Science, for instance, we nowadays use “platforms”, “repositories”, virtual learning “rooms”, digital “libraries”, work “environments”, collaborative “laboratories” (or more concisely in the blending “collaboratories”, etc. as “places” where teachers and students, as well as scientists “meet” and work together.

Li and Chen see the implications of this divergence as crucial to understanding the philosophical and cultural histories of China and the West. For them, “one-world” thinking makes Chinese traditions unique as well as invaluable to global philosophical discourse. This is because such thought suggests alternative approaches to how we understand and value our relationships with the other humans and things through which our world is constituted. It thereby further provides perspectives on ethical issues that have been generally overlooked in Western philosophy.

A pilgrimage must be distinguished from just any travel or tourism.  Setting out on an arduous self-purificatory journey from one’s own place to a distant holy destination played a crucial role in ancient and medieval religious lives. This paper would briefly discuss three classic examples of such pilgrimage, from Hindu, Christian and Islamic literature and theologies. Arjuna’s so-called “tīrtha-yātrā” before the great battle in the Mahabharata; the Parson’s tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; and Koranic scripture on the ongoing Islamic practice of Hajj to Mecca.

 

There are indisputably many good reasons for finding and restoring heritage sites and artefacts with the most impartial and accurate scientific methods and technological advances. Yet the ICOMOS Burra Charter defines cultural significance in terms of the value of a place as it helps people understand the past, as it enriches the present, and educates future generations, these values can be aesthetic, historic, social or spiritual, (and thus not just scientific). Therefore it does not necessarily follow that the best user-experience for members of the public is purely based on a rigorous scientific perspective, because such a perspective does not fully explain the cultural significance of a place as experienced by the originators of the locally situated culture.

This paper will open with the famous teaching of Satyakama in the Upanisads, wherein during his time in the forest, a bull teaches him the importance of being oriented to the four directions, the first "quarter" of his 16 fold learning experience.  It will continue with a comparative analysis of the elemental and bodily aspects of human experience as articulated in the Sāṁkhya Kārikā, the Abhidharmakosha, and the Tattvarthasutra.  The paper will conclude with passages in the Yogavasistha that connect inner space and outer space through the practice of concentration on Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Space.

As noun and verb, transitive and intransitive, the word “place” indicates as much of status, stillness, as of action or motion. The word could also connote the imaginary but indispensable locales that creative minds, such as Kafka, depend on for thought-provoking argument and imagery as his essay on “The Great Wall of China” and his novel America may so indicate. The word “place” could then also mean the crucial inborn knowledge not necessarily acquired through actual experiences. This seemingly unlimited or infinite space and power of the inborn knowledge is exactly what Goethe once so emphasizes to Eckermann in as much the same way as it is so stressed in Daodejing, which states how “a wise [person who] may know the world without leaving his home” (ch. 47), or confirmed, along with Emerson and Zhuangzi, by Dickinson, who insists likewise how “I never saw a Moor--/I never see the sea--/Yet know I how the Heather looks.” (J1052). Place could certainly also suggest a never ending process of search for common ground across cultures for transplanting, transforming, and translation of ideas. Similarly, it could also suggest a Daoist version of choice, adaptation, and freedom regarding where and when to fit in -- whether at the center, in the “marginal spots,” at the “low places,” or around “back positions.”

“Problematizing the Liberal Notion of ‘Self’ via Aristotle and Confucius”

Both Aristotle and Confucius prioritize the collective before the individual. Contrary to modern liberal rights, Aristotle’s to dikaion and Confucius’s ren are both ad alterum (to another) rather than ad se (to oneself). A major difference, however, exists between the Hellenic and the Chinese thinker regarding the meaning of the “other.” As evident from Nicomachean Ethics, the “other” must be “either a ruler or a copartner” (NE V 1). Justice for Aristotle, in other words, can only occur between “equal members of a civil or political society, who alone can properly be called 'others'” (Annabel Brett).

…The hundred joints, the nine openings, the six organs, all come together and exist here [as my body]. But which part should I feel closest to? I should delight in all parts, you say? But there must be one I ought to favor more. If not, are they all of them mere servants? But if they are all servants, then how can they keep order among themselves? Or do they take turns being lord and servant? It would seem as though there must be some True Lord among them. But whether I succeed in discovering his identity or not, it neither adds to nor detracts from his Truth. (Watson’s translation; emphasis mine.)

Over the past 40 years in southwestern Okinawa, views of the sea and ino (nearshore coral reefs) have shifted as this region has become a site of stewardship among coastal residents.  Village life shapes and is shaped by the coral reef in multiple dimensions. Spiritual interests in the nearshore sea result in engagements with the sea during annual festivals and in daily prayers, occasions during which the nearshore sea (ino) becomes a site for purification and protection. At the same time, Shiraho village has emerged as a cohesive target of mainland scientific and tourist interest because of its presentation as an eco-village with a strong “coral reef culture.” Past and present articulations of Shiraho as a cohesive village shaped by its coral reef are conditioned by demographic changes that have brought increasing numbers of newcomers from mainland Japan. Two recent conservation projects involve residents in new kinds of material engagements with the ino, and I examine how the Sunday Market and periodic walks provide the platform for self-reflective enforcement of a village sense of place as well as aspirational place-making by mainland Japanese conservationists. 

Throughout his professional career, Nietzsche employs a hermeneutic method of deliberately and experimentally estranging (entfremden) himself from the time, place, and culture of the present so that he might “look 'into the world' otherwise.” The practice involves a strategic distancing that seeks to awaken ordinarily dormant perspectives on emerging futures. This “subtler art and aim of travel” reveals a global sensibility that we can trace from Nietzsche’s first book to his last. His genealogical and depth-psychological searching of the ancient past presages a trans-historical philosophy of a global future, his interest in traveling to North Africa arises from a specific desire to sharpen his “judgment and eye for all things European,” and finally, his admitted trans-cultural need employs “the foreign” to “learn to think more orientally,” even “emigrate to Japan.” This global aspiration matures in the “trans-Asiatic eye” of Zarathustra and the enigmatic experience of eternal recurrence, which arrives through the spontaneous cycle of process itself. Since this eye “sees under itself,” it undermines fixed place. Nietzsche’s places are strategic: calls to wander, signposts for global travelers. His culminating figure of the “Hyperborean” is curious in many ways. For one, the self-proclaimed “disciple of Dionysus” in a final flash of lucidity again identifies himself as a pious worshiper of Apollo, thereby establishing a global task.

Starting off with an analysis of the recent attempts at comparative epistemology surrounding Ernest Sosa, I argue that much of the original comparative work done by major analytic Chinese philosophers in the Twentieth Century is ignored because it does not conform (and perhaps even undermines) contemporary models of knowledge. One major cause for this confirmation bias amongst English-speaking analytic epistemologists is the lack of attention to the importance of place, power, and history.

“Voluntary Captive: Hanayama Shinshō’s Prison Pure Land”

with Buddhism: Paul Tillich, Robert Merton, and Raimon Panikkar.  As it happened, all three relied for guidance mainly on two Japanese Zen Masters: Daisetz Suzuki and Shin'ichi Hisamatsu. The encounter was most troubling for Tillich because of Zen's central teaching of "emptiness" (sunyata).   As an existentialist theologian, he missed the role of personal-intentional striving; and without a personal God, what was the point of Buddhist prayer?  Both Merton and Panikkar were able to overcome these reservations: the former by relying on trans-individualism, the second on advaitic non-dualism.  

The denial that persons exist, in some ultimate sense, is widely understood to be a central Buddhist doctrine. In Consequences of Compassion, Charles Goodman (2009) suggests that in a range of classical Buddhist sources some version of this metaphysical thesis about persons helps to underwrite an ethical thesis, that we ought to minimize the total amount of suffering there is in the world. There is a compelling connection between these two ideas: since we all agree that our own suffering is to be avoided, if there are ultimately no distinctions between persons, then perhaps one ought to act or live in whatever way will most effectively reduce all of the suffering there is in the world, regardless of whose it is.

During the last decades, there has been a lively debate on the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy and its continuous exclusion from the academic world. This debate has reached a point where it would benefit from more focus upon different periods and regions within and beyond China. As for the Western world, the situation in the United States has been mostly discussed. In this paper, I focus upon the situation in Europe, using my own university and research funding organizations as a case-study. The position of “Chinese philosophy” at European universities not only reflects longstanding views or assumptions concerning philosophy, but is also representative of the institutional rejection of China (along with other non-Western regions) in other disciplines of the human sciences. Detailed documentation of the non-place of Chinese philosophy at European institutions shows how different Europe is from the United States in this respect.

A Buddhist concept of rebirth might be understood as a way to enable a continuous presence, a determinate linking place, as it were, enabling karmic continuity. Or rebirth may be seen as a conduit to a place on the karmic wheel where a relative position is held within a sequence of possible ethicized places and, here, rebirth may be conditioned by craving and not by karma. However rebirth is envisioned, imagined or understood, the relation of rebirth to place is complicated. Rebirth is both place and not place since rebirth meets some of the conditions of place, but it also rejects such categorization. If rebirth is a place in the sense of a momentary existent determined by past acts it is also, in an important sense, no more of a place than any other moment in existence. The Buddhist doctrines of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) and impermanence (anitya) reject the belief that rebirth indicates a continuity, and the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anātman) is a challenge to any claim that rebirth is an event in the history of a continuous being. In spite of these foundational Buddhist principles, rebirth seems to function in the manner of a fixed place for a rebirth-seeking-consciousness bound to the ethicized space of worldly samsara. Since no one account of the rebirth doctrine crossing all Buddhist schools is agreed upon, this paper instead will focus on the work of Santideva where, for example in the Bodhicharyavatara, rebirth is referred to as a snare. An explication of his thinking may provide a way in which the Buddhist idea of rebirth as place, or as not-place, can be best understood.

I seek in this paper to develop an understanding of sagacity (sheng聖) and of those who embody it that genuinely engages with the terms and texts of the classical Confucian tradition from which these notions emerged. Rather than making any explicit claims about sagacity, I instead attempt to understand it as it has unfolded within its own context. What I have determined in making these examinations is that, contrary to many interpretations of the sages (shengren 聖人), one cannot properly define them as individuals nor can one define sagacity as an achievement of individuality. To do so is to misconstrue what it means to be a person within this tradition and to misinterpret what the attainment of sagacity entails. In order to highlight these concerns, I approach sagacity from two different but complementary perspectives.

This paper explores how the prominent scientist-mathematician al-Hassan ibn al-Hytham (354-433 A.H / 965-1042 A.D.) contributed to the development of modern science. Till his time, philosophers and scientists had operated with the concept of makān as a notion closer to place. Ibn al-Hytham rejected this, criticizing his ancestors and contemporaries in details. In his elaborated concept of al-Makān, he introduced the idea of ‘al-aba'ād al-mutakhayyila الأبعاد المتخيّلة’ which means "imaginary dimensions". He thereby moved the concept into space, and contributed to a development which led to the formulation of "absolute space" in modern physics.

 

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? 
This paper examines the logic used to establish the correspondence between cosmic deities and bodily functions as described particularly in the Praśna Upaniṣad and then compares it to the logic used in contemporary cognitive studies to map external stimuli to neural activity.  By doing this it will be shown that the "ancient" idea of mapping things seen as located in an external space into a space that seems to be internal like our bodily organs presents a dynamic interrelation between cosmos and individual that makes one the reflection of the other. If the “external” space expresses the functions of the “internal” space, then this suggests the important role that self-transformation has in re-structuring our relationship with the environment.
GANGULY, Deb Kamal (Film and Television Institute of India, India)
“Territorialization by Moving Image Practices: The Transformations of Spatiality and Placiality in Cinematic Creation and Reception”

'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.

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”

“The Place of Yoga in Brazilian Culture”

Against Plato’s image of “leaky pots” that symbolizes the impossibility of language in a state of flux, Daoism introduces “spillover-goblet words” (zhiyan 卮言) that resist the language of presence and logocentrism by continually emptying themselves out, only to be filled again with the always contingent. To put each the ideas and metaphors of each of these perspectives into conversation, the paper drafts a comparison between two manners of animal classification, with classical taxonomy aligning with Platonism on the one hand, and the evolutionary science of “cladistics” – taxonomy based on ancestry – allying with Daoism on the other. In the end, it is Plato who is left holding his pejorative “leaky pots,” as under conditions of change it is putatively unchanging categories themselves that are shown to be poor receptacles of knowledge.

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’?

Coming to realize that reality is ultimately conventional is, according to Mahāyāna Buddhists, transformative in a positive way of how a person acts and reacts to her lived world. However, and perhaps ironically, the claims to conventionality threaten to undermine the epistemic and ethical norms required to support the Buddhist soteriological project and defend it against rivals. In an effort to address this concern, this paper explores the role that lived experience pragmatically plays in shaping that conventional reality and determining its norms in non- arbitrary ways. Focusing on a comparison between Madhyamaka and Yogācāra articulations of the conventionality of reality, I will argue that the Yogācāra account of representation that is defended by Dharmakirti provides a pragmatist account that can support the necessary norms while retaining the conventionality that is important to the Buddhist account of the reality of one’s lived world.

Arguably, places are empty; they become meaningful after they are filled with different kinds of meanings. These meanings are generated through social relations and are communicated through language. Logic of social hierarchy for example, tends to fragments place thus nesting people in stigma and un-freedom. Spaces with their dynamic nature, on the other hand, assigns liberating meaning to places thus erasing the stigma that is associated with place.

Places provide basic normative condition for the realization of values such as freedom, equality and dignity. Place, in order to develop this normative capacity has to be reconfigured along new organizing principles such as democracy. Thus, the realization of freedom depends on places that are seamless both in terms of time and space. One could argue and scholars have been arguing that reconfiguration of place occurs in the modern time.

It is here one can raise the point: do we require modernity as the moment of arrival for such a reconfiguration of places on egalitarian line? Does one require modernity to release dynamic spaces that then can effectively attack the constraining logic that tends to fragment the places? I , in this essay, would like to interrogate the modernity thesis and argue that even before the arrival of modernity in India, certain humanitarian tradition did generate spaces which were accommodative of associational aspirations of different social groups.

As is implied throughout the text, no particular name (no doctrine, innovation, affair, action, etc.) enjoys any special cosmic or natural warrant. Cosmically speaking, each actual name is allowed for with equal indifference. Naming is simply one more process of life.

However, speech is not only natural but also normative and both texts recognize it. The Hengxian notes that human activity is the source of disorder in the world (亂), and the Qiwulun explores the problem of inter–school conflict that is predicated on the distinction between right and wrong (是非).

“Samsara is Nirvana: Locating the kleśas in Buddhist Cosmic Psychology”

 

All of this hints at the radical rejection of dualisms we find in later Mādhyamika and Yogācāra metaphysics.  Here the dichotomy between virtuous (kuśala) and negative (kleśa) mental states is itself destabilized, but the basic soteriological movement we find in the spatialization of the kleśas repeats within the psychological domain.   Nirvana with remainder is no longer merely constituted by a subset of virtuous qualities, but is now a mode of experiencing all phenomena whatsoever as empty of intrinsic existence (svabhāva) or of subject object duality. 

Another major aspect of this paper will be to show how shendu translated here as "being vigilant about one's singularity" can serve as a bridge concept in comparative philosophical adventures by facilitating constructive conversations between global philosophies of process metaphysics and radically empirical approaches to personal identity formation—without assuming ipseity as an ideal foundation or ontoteleological outcome. Using the concept of singularity as it is developed in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I will show how a process oriented, pre-individual, idea of virtual potential as pure becoming fits quite snuggly with the Confucian concept of du 獨. While most metaethical (metaphysics + ethics) theories have tended to overlook the importance of pre-individual singularity in discussions of ethical agency and personal identity formation, I will be suggesting that this comparative philosophical conversation between Confucian shendu and Deleuzean singularity has the potential to shed much needed light on the vital root-source of any narrative oriented ethical theory (e.g. Virtue ethics, Care ethics, Role ethics).

with wu 無 ? How to read the dislocation of the body? How and what does it for

In this paper I describe a place-based kind of validity claim that I refer to as “ecological truth”, and suggest that it shows up the limitations of Jurgen Habermas’ ontology of reasons. Habermas suggests that there are three kinds of reasons that are able to be offered in discourse: claims of fact, claims of normative validity and claims of honest self-expression. These three kinds of reason constitute, he thinks, the full range of validity claims available to us, and he identifies the ability to clearly distinguish between them as a specifically modern accomplishment. He holds that non-modern societies, many indigenous ones among them, blur the lines between these three categories and hence fall short of the ideal practices of discourse.

Yet climate is not only experienced as something seemingly ‘objective’ in the world; our own emotions may very well be experienced as a form of climate or weather, as Hermann Schmitz points out. We may be swept up by a mood that fills the air, or be aware of the tense atmosphere in the room we are in. In a more general sense we also speak of intellectual or political climates that determine what can be thought, done and said.

To think about climate means to reflect upon all the different ways we influence the world around us, and how our environment in turn influences us. Difficulties begin to arise when we begin to ask even the simplest questions, such as what is cold when we feel cold: is it the air, or us? In the following I hope to illuminate this fabric of climate, of place, we are woven into.

“Singapore’s Sun Yat-sen in Perspective”

“Environmental Virtue Ethics: Contributions from the Confucian Tradition”

“Servants of Heaven: The Confucian Gentleman’s Place Within the Cosmos”

The nature of the cosmos and humanity’s role within it are fundamental concerns of early Confucian thought. Confucian standards and aspirations are rooted in both an understanding of Tian or Heaven as the place in which human life unfolds, and also of the place of humanity within the cosmic system. Heaven’s mandate or ming both governs events outside of human control and provides a normative standard for human behavior. Hence understanding Tian and ming is essential to the Confucian ethos: “One who does not understand fate (ming) lacks the means to become a gentleman.”
Yet recent scholarship displays deep disagreements on how Heaven and its mandate are to be understood. In some cases, scholars suggest that early Confucians themselves lack a consistent conception of what they mean by these words, or that the operative conception shifts dramatically from one reference to the next. Robert Eno goes so far as to say that for Mencius, “Tian is not a stable concept but a chameleon-like notion that resembles nothing more than a convenient rhetorical device.” In a similar spirit, CHEN Ning finds a number of different notions of ming operating in early Confucian texts, with quite different meanings for the term appearing even within the same passage. Other scholars describe a reasonably unified conception, but one whose interpretation of the texts is debatable.
At the same time there is uncertainty over how humans should relate to Tian and ming. Since they are revered as the source of the moral standard, as most scholars agree, one might expect that the Confucian gentleman would see other aspects of ming in a similar light, as good or even normative, and would strive to align his life with them. Yet in recent years, several scholars have argued that the gentleman does not look for a harmony between his own goals and ming. Michael Puett, for instance, goes so far as to say that the gentleman’s relationship with ming is “potentially agonistic.” Edward

Slingerland takes the somewhat milder view that the gentleman should feel “indifference” toward ming.

Basho’s travelogues stand in a Buddhist lineage that renounces the desire to inhabit a particular kind of place in favor of aligning oneself with the impermanent nature of all things. Yet, I hope to suggest, this initial displacement away from fixed identification with place affords a renewed conception of place as taking refuge in processes of literary and spiritual transmission. Bashō’s travelogues can be treated as a from of phenomenological reduction that draws the reader to relinquish dualistic conceptions of home and journey as a precondition for entering into those liminal dimensions of human implacement that avail one of richer insight into one’s lived conditioned. I will argue that the travelogues model not only literary transmission but also mind-to-mind transmission. Viewed as a form of mind-to-mind transmission, the travelogues can be seen as linking modernist interpretations of Bashō’s haiku that emphasize the instantaneous nature of poetic practice to those that highlight Bashō’s refiguring the landscape of cultural memory.

In this paper, I will engage with a comparative-philosophical inquiry on the paradoxical place of self in Augustine and Zhi Yi. There has been some history of reading Augustine and the Tendai tradition (Dogen) respectively in light of the paradoxical place of the self, as can been seen from Jean Luc Marion (Marion, the Place of Self, 2008) and Nishida Kitaro (Nishida, The logic of Place and Religious Worldview, 1947). In a similar vein to these interpretations with a comparative philosophical concern, this paper addresses how Augustine and Zhi Yi argues that the self’s experience of valuation and desire in the world is shaped and transformed by the innermost source of the self which is alien to the self but traceable to the nowhere of the religious ultimate.

In constructing my argument I will distinguish between a strong claim and a more moderate claim; the latter of which I wish to emphasize. I will not make the strong claim that Confucians believed that values inherently conflict. Early Confucians did not believe that we live in a fractured world where values are necessarily at odds with each other. Yet they did believe in the reality of value conflicts such that tragic circumstances are possible. In other words, early Confucians recognized the complexities of life such that even the highly skilled moral agent (i.e., a sage) could encounter a situation were the values at stake were fundamentally incapable of being harmonized. As such, early Confucians could see the world as conflictual, although they did not see the world as necessitating conflict.

“Locating the Self: Between Memory, Attention and Discrimination”

This presentation looks into a particular aspect of Sinological challenge to the modern project of Chinese philosophy within the American academy through the lens of authorship. It explores philosophical implications for texts whose authorship is in doubt and develops a new heuristic model of authorship and textuality so that a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chinese classics can be carved out from the dominant historicist Sinological discourse.

Furthermore, this close and concrete description of ordinary yet essential features of our nondual way of being in the world also allows Watsuji’s views to be related quite readily to the work of thinkers in the tradition of existential phenomenology such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; moreover, there is little doubt that he has something singular and significant to contribute to the project of overcoming of dualism in this tradition. Here we find another ontology in which consciousness and thing, self and world, intertwine and mutually determine one another. Yet what thinkers in this tradition have overlooked, to varying degrees, is the manner in which both other people and the specific locale we find ourselves in are constitutive of the self even as they are also determined or shaped by it. In looking beyond Japanese philosophy to the wider philosophical world in these ways, Watsuji’s work expands and opens up our sense of what being-in-the-world, which has been a phenomenon of the greatest significance for contemporary phenomenology, and nondualism, which has been a concept of the first importance in East Asian philosophy, are and can be.

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.

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).

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

 

Philosophical reflection is dependent upon certain formal conditions of discourse. The eight-steps in the Great Learning represent such conditions for political philosophers in late imperial China. For example, Ming (Chinese dynasty, 1368 ~ 1644) thinkers took seriously the chain of causality linking the individual, the family, the state, and the world. It was the eight steps that set the spatial parameters of their philosophical discourse of politics.  Yet we should find expect to find tensions and instabilities in the interpretations of the eight steps, since it spanned roughly a few centuries and was used in a great variety of intellectual contexts. While philosophical discourses surrounding the eight steps are too amorphous to allow for unitary conception, they instead provide framework of comparative analysis.

7. as a central point in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy.

Wherever we are we are implaced, delimited in our being-in-the-world constituted by a horizon that implaces and de-limits us, not only literally but metaphorically, both semantically and ontologically. Whether we take place in its semantic sense or as ontological, I underscore its duplicity—taking off from Ueda Shizuteru’s concept of being-in-the-twofold-world (nijū sekai naisonzai)—as on the one hand demarcating a realm of determinacy, our ontological finitude or our social imaginary world, and on the other hand through its horizonal nature as pointing to its nether side or other, an exteriority demarcating or delimiting the world wherein we are implaced. That latter may be characterized as an excess irreducible to semantic or ontological determination or as a nothing or a-meaning. Jaspers had something like this in mind when he spoke of the “embracing” (das Umgreifende) and Heidegger spoke of this in terms of the “region/ing” (Gegend) or “that which regions” (Gegnet). Hence place at the limit-point of its horizon implies the interface of meaning and a-meaning, nomos and anomy, order and chaos, principles and anarché, or in Nishidian terms being and nothing (mu), in Heideggerian terms unconcealment and concealment or world and earth, horizon and region. In its contact with the unassmilable or irreducible excess beyond, the horizon’s line of demarcation is in flux and unpredictable. The horizon that constitutes our place or world thus entails both finitude within and an openness beyond, entailing alterity and alteration. The place determined within its horizon will thus always be provisional despite any appearance or claims to the contrary. Its determination is indeterminate.

Towards the end of this presentation I would like to discuss the implications of this understanding of the world in such terms of place and horizon, especially in relation to the world’s globalization, where previously isolated or demarcated regional cultural spheres are forced to confront and deal with one another and intermingle and face the threat of homogenization. But on the reverse side the alterity and alterations belonging to this place-horizon dynamic are also made explicit in our contemporary situation thus precluding complete homogenization. All of these issues have existential-ethical implications that must be addressed.

KUČINSKAS, Justas (Vilnius University, Lithuania)

“Lithuanian Philosophical Philotopy of Arvydas Šliogeris and the Wisdom of Place: The Relevance of Philotopical Perspective to Global Environmental Challenges”

“The Flow of the Land: Place in Dōgen and the Koyukon”

“Contested Space, Conceded Place: Negotiating Political and Historical Discord on China’s Southern Sacred Mountain”

The shrine has been maintained by the People’s Republic of China, and occupies by far the largest single “politico-religious-space” on the entire mountain—larger than either the base temple or peak temple, and dwarfing the size of all others. It focuses on the very Nationalist (Guomindang; Kuomintang) forces that the Communists defeated in 1949 to take possession of the “mainland.”

There has been recent interest in Confucian ethics as a form of role ethics. In this paper, I argue that while role ethics is correct in taking the personal bonds as a basis for normative demands, the personal attachment that is strongly emphasized in texts like the Analects and Mencius can be fruitfully understood in other ways. I consider how the Confucian ethical sensibility built around personal attachment implies novel ways to substantiate the basic categories of moral life – ethical obligation, motivation and justification. That is, the Confucian emphasis on personal attachment can be developed into an ethics that is richer than the concept of role can capture. Furthermore, this way of ordering the basic elements of ethical life offers a distinctive account of the highest ethical ideal, which these elements function to realise – the creation of joyful events in the course of everyday personal encounters. This paper explores the advantages and challenges of conceiving of ethics in these terms.

In this process, this proposal seeks to analyze the new concept of democracy, unveiling his new nature and difference with the classical view through the new boundaries of participation, especially through the concept of transparency of information. Discover the limit of cyberspace as a place of political constitution and the values found in the virtual world.

This proposal seek answer to questions about the nature of cyberspace from point of view of Philosophy of Information and reflexion of media after work of Marshall Mcluhan and Derrick de Kerckhove.

“Semiotic Place and Personality in Charles Peirce’s Theory of Determination”

My main attempt in this paper is to scrutinize “semiotic place” and “personality” with special regard to Charles Peirce’s “theory of determination.” In his theory of determination, Peirce considered two processes of determination, one from object to interpretant, and the other from idea to mind. A successful occasion of semiotics proceeds from object to interpretant. Semiotics is a place of an extensional process that consists of an infinite chain of references. While semiotic determination is reversible in terms of references, the epistemological process of determination is temporal and irreversible. In this intensional process, the idea grows into the individual mind, as the universe is unfolded by the agency of mind.

Based on these two processes of determination, personality, which Peirce calls mind, on one hand, is “objectified” as “sign” or “interpretant” in the place of semiotics through communicational inference that enables us to realize the particular in the realm of becoming. Mind, on the other hand, “subjectifies” the most primitive real, which Peirce calls idea, into this temporal world. This process of “subjectification” enables the continuity of ideas, through which idiosyncratic person as idea produces the generalized mind as idea in the particularized place of “here-and-now.”

These two thinkers demonstrate that Confucian thinkers of the Chosun Dynasty, on the one hand, struggled to solve social and political problems of the time in terms of Zhu Xi’s philosophy; on the other hand, they offered new interpretations of Zhu Xi’s philosophy reflecting their own particular ‘place’. This is where we can indicate the particular place of Zhu Xi’s philosophy in Korean Confucianism. The investigation into this particular ‘place’ will elucidate why Confucianism chose a different path in Korea, drawing a stark contrast to Confucianism in China.

“The Length of Mourning versus the Nature of Mourning—A Critical Analysis of the Analects 17:21”

On the surface the debate between Confucius and Zaiwo at Analects 17:21 is about what would be the proper length of a mourning ritual for departed parents. But I think the core of the debate is actually about the nature of mourning for parents. In particular, it is about the connection and tension between feelings (spontaneous and reflective) that are associated with mourning for parents and the seemingly complete arbitrariness in the length of such mourning. With this understanding of the debate, I argue:

(1) that although Zaiwo seems to have appealing, practical reasons to challenge the practice of three-year mourning, his reasons, seen from Confucius’ perspective, severely deviate from the true root of mourning—one’s genuine appreciative feelings toward parents, and thus Zaiwo’s reasoning is morally misleading.

(2) that, contrary to prevalent readings of 17:21, Confucius’ connecting the rite of three-year mourning with one’s early childhood experience of being taken care of by one’s parents for three years should be better (or more charitably) read as an illustration of the importance of reflecting on moral feelings for the purpose of moral cultivation than as a justification (or proof) for the idea that the number of years of being taken care of by one’s parents in early childhood must match the number of years of mourning for one’s parents. 

(3) that in Confucius’ vision the three-year mourning rite, exemplified by junzi (君子) and established by the sage kings can serve as a regulative and uplifting moral ideal for common people. However, this is not to deny that three-year mourning, if taken as a heterogeneous (‘moral’) demand, can be too high for many people and its actual implementation may lead to ritual formalism and hypocrisy.

Today, the majority of sovereign states can fairly be described as “democracies” characterized by elected political leadership and some measure of individual rights and liberties.  Likewise, most states have economies where the marketplace is the chief arbiter of economic exchange.  Virtually all these polities and economies have as their underlying “operating system” Western liberal principles and values.

There is one place that stands as an exception to this model, the small remote country of Bhutan.  Because of its Himalayan location, its centuries of closure, and the good fortune of having avoided conquest and colonization, when Bhutan emerged as a democratic state with a relatively free internal market in the 21^st century, it did so with its 1300-year-old belief and value system intact. Its philosophical beliefs and mores are overwhelming Buddhist, not Western and liberal in character. Contemporary Bhutan, the country that seeks Gross National Happiness as its fundamental goal, is the only democratic, market-based state in the world constitutionally and culturally rooted in Buddhist principles and ethics.

This exceptionality matters because it provides and authentic basis for theoretical comparison between two distinct models of democracy and development. Here, the comparison is between two autonomous, identifiable traditions of thought (liberalism and Buddhism) that differ on important first-order philosophical principles.  Such comparisons can bring to light new questions, frames of inquiry and alternative approaches to our understanding of democracy and development.

This paper will compare the differences and similarities between Buddhist and liberal philosophy that lie at the core of two different approaches to democracy and development. To illustrate, Bhutanese Buddhist and Western liberal conceptualizations of the nature of the individual “self,” “human nature,” and “the pursuit of happiness”—the building blocks of social theory—are profoundly different.  Because of their distinctive ontological and ethical stances, what constitutes “good government” and “appropriate economic development” differs in critical ways, even though both Bhutan and Western nations can be described as “democratic” and “market-based.”

By understanding better a Buddhist approach to democracy and development, those of us in the West can develop a realistic and relativistic view of our own political principles and values and, perhaps, discover novel ideas useful in addressing contemporary political and economic challenges such as ideological polarization, income inequality, and sustainable economic development.

The third task is to explore two consequences of such a narrative understanding. The first is the idea that space in fact has the status of a place insofar as for something to be a space is for it to have a very distinctive significance for us, one that came fully into view only with the rise of modern science in the West in the seventeenth century. The second is the idea that the notion of place has after all a deep commonality with the notion of space insofar as even our understandings of the places within which we dwell can and in certain cases should be subjected to the sort of critically reflective scrutiny that has traditionally been associated exclusively with the concept of space.

By examining these various theses and their interrelations I hope at once to shed light on the character of philosophy as a discipline and a practice, and to develop and defend the idea that philosophy is and must be a conversation of all human beings, that is, of all rational beings with our kind of body, whatever their historical and cultural circumstances.
MAHOOTIAN, Farzad (New York University)
“Alam al-Mithal: Geographies of Speculative Experience”
The 12^th and 13^th century Sufi masters, Suhrawardi and ibn Arabi, conceived alam al-mithal, the imaginal world, as the world of real possibilities. They considered this to be an intermediate world less material than the actual world, but more material than the world of ideas: the real interface between the actual and the ideal. Otherworldly realities that shape spiritual striving (prophecy, grace, miracles, etc.) were thought to be located in the magnificent cities of alam al-mithal, accessible by active imagination and non-literal thinking.
The actual world has changed radically since the 13^th century, thus changing alam al-mithal with it. My thesis is that the imaginal world is metaphysically congruent with the world of models and theoretical entities, including prana, qi, entropy, subprime mortgage derivatives, ideal gases and other entities that shape our intentions and actions upon the actual world. Furthermore, I suppose that the denizens of alam al-mithal are metaphysical cognates of Whitehead’s “propositions,” what he called “lures for feeling,” and, specifically, “intellectual feelings” arising from the integration of physical and conceptual feelings. While propositions are typically judged as true or false, Whitehead maintained that the mode of “suspended” intuitive judgment is best suited to intellectual discovery and invention.
Modern thought has populated the imaginal world with many entities whose purposes are sometimes questionable. These run the gamut from the more empirical to the more ideal, the wondrous to the quotidian, and all of them capable of materializing and feeding our noblest and basest aspirations. For millennia, religion supplied map, compass and guidance to the imaginal world, but that world is now populated by previously unimagined entities. Furthermore, the tough-minded realism of modern thought has largely driven imagination into the shadow world of entertainment and intensely subjective diversions. Rehabilitation of the status of the imaginal could have fruitful impact on a more informed and intentional grasp of the power of imagination to shape individual and collective futures.
MAJOR, Philippe (National University of Singapore)
“Rethinking the Temporalization of Space in Early Republican China: Liang Shuming’s Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies”

One of the most fundamental aspects of the conception of space within the intellectual scheme of Western modernity, especially from the Enlightenment on, has been a gradual temporalization of space, in the sense that different locales have been accommodated within a unilinear meta-narrative of a human evolution perceived as emancipatory. Within this conceptual scheme, the spatial other becomes a temporal other as well, so that a European traveller to China could observe the indigenous population not only from a cultural (spatial) distance, but also from the vanguard of history. To observe the other from the future, as it were, meant that various dichotomies could secure a distance between self and other: agent vs subject of history, rational vs superstitious, autonomous vs heteronomous, etc. This temporalization of space, in Fabien’s terminology, meant a “denial of coevalness;” that is, an impossibility to dialogue with the other as a contemporary.

Interestingly, this denial of coevalness could also be related to a desire to uproot Europe and its others from their geographical and historical settings, and transplant them within a universal, abstract, imagined, and hierarchical meta-narrative. The modern narrative told of primitive people determined by their geographical locations (warm climate = laziness, etc.), but also of a path which could enable them to gradually free themselves from this determinism through a process of modernization, conceptualized as a disembodiment, an uprooting from local cultures equated with an entering into the universal culture of modernity. In practical terms, this temporal narrative made possible a discursive universalization of a spatially limited culture: that of modern Europe.

While the European philosophical critique of both the denial of coevalness and the meta-narrative of uprootedness (notably in Heidegger) has attracted quite a lot of attention, it remains little known that before the publication of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit; 1927), Liang Shuming (梁漱溟; 1893-1988) was already providing a critique of at least some aspects of the modern narrative touched upon above, a narrative which became pervasive in China during the New Culture Movement (新文化運動; 1915-1927). In his classic work Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (東西文化及其哲學; 1921), Liang provided both a critique and a reworking of the European meta-narrative of modernity. While opposing the idea that China could be temporally behind the West, notably by re-establishing coevalness through a cultural relativism which would allow different locales and cultures to be on a historical path autonomous from that of Europe, Liang nevertheless adopted the framework of the European meta-narrative of modernity. However, this framework was emptied of its Eurocentric content in Liang, and modern European culture, as the universal future of humankind, was replaced by Eastern cultures (that of China and India).

Against the historical background of Chinese philosophy's formation as an academic discipline in modern China, this paper seeks to highlight some of 'internal' challenges confronting the identity of Chinese philosophy today, including the question of just what it is that makes Chinese philosophy "Chinese".

This presentation is a philosophical reflection on and a comparative study of Arnold Berleant’s recent work, “Nature and Habitation in a Chinese Garden”, included in his book Aesthetics beyond the Arts. It reviews Berleant’s notes on the subject and the object relation, the bodily reaction, and the aesthetic experience evolved when situated in the environment of a Chinese garden. His reading of the nature and habitation in a Chinese garden is examined, and compared with the related comprehension of contemporary Confucian scholar Tang Junyi.

Tang proposes a metaphysical manifestation in the design of traditional Chinese architectures and gardens and the interactive relation between man and Nature in his influential work, The Spiritual Values of Chinese Culture. The comparative notes expand the reading of Berleant on the subject, which is suggested by Tang 's discussion of "hiding" (藏), "cultivating" (修), "resting" (息)and "wandering" (游) in a Chinese garden. Parallel correspondence is reviewed between the two writings, which invites comparative aesthetics and critical responses.

MANDELSTAM, Joshua (University Hawai'i)

“Where Do We 'Belong'? The Relation between Personal Identity and Location”

As walking on a path is as near to a universal human experience as we are likely to find, it seems that this embodied source of moral metaphors is available across cultures. However, there is more than one way to conceive of the path and how to stay centered and maintain one’s place upon it. One is to see the path as a fixed and universal route that all people must discover and conform to. Another is to see paths as steadily extending, spontaneously emerging, and meandering across a dynamic landscape.

The first conception gives rise to an idea of a moral journey that is clearly defined, rigid, and eternal. Theories of teleology, divine command, and universal reason seem to accord with this kind of path. The second gives rise to an idea of a moral journey that is underdetermined, flexible, and contextual. Theories rooted in the Chinese tradition of the Yijing (Book of Changes), in which the landscape is always transforming, accord with this second conception.

Hence, while it may seem at first as if a universal feature of human embodiment gives us a universal vocabulary of morality, the cultural assumptions built into these metaphors force us to remain attentive to the particular connotations that these concepts carry. This paper describes two ways of understanding the moral journey – the right road and the proper path – and the different strategies required for staying on each.

*These texts do not support a hard-fast distinction between time and space; instead, you find a continuum.

*As a result, the metaphorical uses of place get bound up with those of moving along a way, so that place becomes an essential part of the central Chinese preoccupation with ways and waymaking.

“Zen, Beauty, and Living with the Planet”

I use the word ‘place’ in two senses: in the sense of the pakṣa (place, subject) within a formal Nyāya inference (anumāna), but also in the sense of the importance of logic and argumentation more generally within the classical Indian tradition. After looking at the inclusion of place in the first sense in the discussion of inference as a means of knowledge, I argue that this first sense reveals an important feature about place in the second sense, which touches on what one might call the architecture and ethics of debate. Logic arose in the classical Indian tradition as rules for formal debate in particular and norms for rational discourse more generally. The pakṣa is an essential part of these rules and norms insofar as it grounds discussion in a mutually agreed upon subject/place, which allows for a more fruitful and virtuous debate. My discussion draws on classical sources such as the Nyāya Sūtra (1.1.32-39 and 1.2.1-9) and Dignāga’s Hetucakraḍamaru as well as contemporary sources such as Matilal’s The Character of Logic in India.

I then discuss two places in the Indian tradition where the pakṣa exemplifies its function: debates about the status of the external world and about the existence of a creator deity. I end with a contemporary reflection: given the tendency of discussants in many contemporary political and philosophical disputes to talk past one other (e.g., US Presidential Debates, analytic- continental disputes, etc.), the place of logic in classical India encourages reflection on ways in which we might keep our debates grounded, rational, and respectful.

MITCHELL, Ryan (Yale University)
“The ‘Heart of Things’ in a Heartless World? Representation and Spatial Imagination in Han Fei’s Disenchantment of the Sovereign’s Charisma”

While Han Fei has often been characterized, in both China and the West, as a proto-totalitarian thinker, competing interpretations of his oeuvre are gaining increasing prominence. Notable in such efforts is the attempt to discern the extent to which the Han Feizi operates as a descriptive theoretical critique of its contemporary politics rather than only as a normative or practical intervention therein. Indeed, the ultimate recommendation that Han Fei develops for the all-powerful sovereign developed in his writing is, paradoxically, to assume a position of quiescent passivity, refraining from any unnecessary use of his authority and choosing instead to “suffuse” the political system as a legitimating figure who operates only through objective, neutral standards—the law, or fa (法).

This paper proposes the idea that the lived and living body be understood as a place, and more generally, that although we may be ‘in a place’ or ‘in place’, places are not containing spaces as much as embedded and embedding co-constituting fields of activity. Conceiving ‘place’ in a much wider sense than geographical location or a nominal point of reference, enables us to explicate the greater significance of our places.

“the phenomenological fact of the matter is that space and time come together in place. Indeed, they arise from the experience of place itself.” E. Casey

“strictly speaking, time and space are not independent forms, but only two directions of self-determination in ‘place’.” Nishida

The experience of place, or of determining directions in ‘place’ is necessarily embodied. The lived and living body is not simply as a zero point of orientation, but a place of extensive feeling and activity, and a constant place of dwelling and habitus. Embodiment is always emplacement; and this particular placement not only serves as a reference frame for locating or denoting any other place, but as a particular locus of signification and meaning. The lived and living body is a unique place of coordinate self- and social-construction. Drawing on the work of Watsuji Tetsuro, G.H. Mead, Kitaro Nishida, Edith Stein, and Edward Casey, this paper explores embodiment as emplacement, and develops the idea of lived- and living-places.

MOHANTA, Dilipkumar (University of Calcutta, India)
“Reflections on the Cognitivist-Skeptic Debate in Indian Philosophy and Pyrrhonism”
In this presentation I will endeavor to demonstrate the unique 'space' in which the Pyrrhonian Skeptics and the Indian Skeptics can meet for dialogue. The skeptic who uses an attitude of doubt is a seeker of truth. S/he is a wise person who goes on questioning or raising doubt about cognitive claims on the basis of beliefs. In Indian philosophy, the attitude of doubt is accepted as an indispensable precondition for initiating any fruitful philosophical investigation. In the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy, we see that philosophical investigation begins with an ipso-facto doubt. Through the application of causal instruments of knowing (pramana) for eradicating doubt, they argue, we can arrive at right cognition / knowledge (which is free from doubt and error) about an object.

However, the primary concern of philosophical skepticism is cognitive. It is critical about any kind of cognitive guarantee or certitude. It questions the veracity of the necessary tie that is claimed to exist between the truth of any cognitive position and how we arrive at it. No knowledge-claim can be accepted as absolutely indubitable or certain. Our judgments are never free from obscurity and uncertainty. Had it been so, questions like ‘Is the judgment true?’ could not be raised. This indicates that there always remains an epistemic gap between our available evidence and the asserted content. The no certainty position is followed from the no criterion argument. For the Skeptic, in this strict sense, certainty here means absolute certainty and this is next to impossible. S/he questions the assumption that the Law of Excluded Middle cannot be doubted. The claimer of the possibility of knowledge relies on the assumption that the judgment about the world of fact is either true or false. You are to accept either ‘p or not-p’; there is no other alternative. But the Skeptic finds no sufficient rational ground to accept either of the two. To the skeptic, to any pro-argument for a thesis there is an equally strong counter-argument and, therefore, s/he cannot have any thesis (pratijna in Sanskrit) to put forward or a thesis of her/his own. This is known as no thesis argument.

However, Pyrrho refers to his philosophical opponents as a dogmatist whereas Nagarjuna calls them dristivādins (in Sanskrit). Pyrrho's senior contemporary Sanjaya-Belattiputra (5th century B.C.E.) and his disciple Supriya (4th C.B.E.) used to teach the method of philosophizing with four-cornered negation. In Sanskrit it is known as Amara-vikshepavada, the method of escaping like the movement of an eel fish. There is much similarity between the arguments developed by Sanjya-Nagarjuna-Jayarasi type skeptical arguments and Pyrrhonian arguments against the absolute claims to the possibility of knowledge. So it is wise to doubt everything and to abstain from advancing any thesis with absolute knowledge-claims. This abstention is called epoche in Greek. Nagarjuna calls it prasanga in Sanskrit. As all attempts to attain truth with certitude are doomed to failure, this abstention acts as the root of cultivating imperturbability, ataraxia.

I want this paper to set out a way to address the subjective/objective distinction of the mind/body problem by winding my way through an analysis of place and music. Place, as it pertains to musical experience, can be described in ways that can serve to help formulate the relation between objective, physical conditions and subjective, mental conditions. Internal places where we go to find refuge or to reflect are also places where we have musical experiences. Analysis of this sense of inner place indicates that the mind/body incommensurability problem is not a problem for musical experience and especially for creative performance and composition. Indeed, it is a vital tool for developing potential musical experience. I hope to disclose certain properties of musical experience that bridge the internal/subjective and external/objective conceptual gap, by showing that this bridge presupposes an underlying or implicate axiological order. If successful, it may not so much solve the mind/brain incommensurability problem, but could very well advance a non-reductive approach to explaining the incommensurability as a condition for musical creativity, and in the longer run, for creativity in moral life.

The interactions that take place about spaces have sociolinguistic meaning because they were socially formed to identify individual selves with communities (Bazerman, 2004). In other words, created spaces become a signifier of particular peoples and practices, or educational spaces and pedagogies and the discourse surrounding those signifiers becomes visualized, repeated, and perceived as truth (Lefebvre, 1991: Soja, 1996, Buendia & Ares, 2006) by both those within the community and those on the periphery.

There are educational inequities when race and social class are continually used as determinants for school boundaries. Research in urban areas demonstrates these educational distinctions in segregated spaces. For example, Pauline Lipman’s (2002) work in Chicago, amongst others (Noguera, P. 2003) demonstrates how segregated neighborhoods receive unequal educational practices. In Lipman’s work, she explains how schools relegate certain populations, characterized by race and class, to particular parts of the city by drawing school boundaries that reflect the segregated communities. She also demonstrates how existing race inequalities are not only maintained by geographical boundaries, but inequitable educational opportunities and experiences increase.

The Eastern model is different in that it grants property title to families rather than individuals. There is an enlightened recognition here that it is not just the individual qua individual that needs place. There must also be place that is reflective of our social natures and most fundamentally of our personal identities as formulated through our family relations. This arrangement makes clear the place of and for an individual in the family, the community, and the state. The individual finds a place by working together with family and members of the community.

“Chinese and Japanese Views on an Ethics of Place Situated at the Homestead”

 

"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.

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.

“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. 

“Derrida, Buddhism, and the Place of Ethics”

Recently, the TMT debate has revealed the conflict between modern scientific efforts and alternative indigenous epistemologies. The Thirty Meter Telescope project (TMT) is a multinational scientific effort to build the world’s largest telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. Underlying this effort is a particular set of philosophical assumptions about nature as ascribed by the Western scientific tradition. Where Westernized scientists see easily accessible terrain and superb atmospheric conditions, the Hawaiian people see a spirited and potent ancestor. For Hawaiians, Mauna Kea is sacred; the mountain is considered mother of the people and that active force upon which all Hawaiian life is forged. The Hawaiian protest is not against science, but rather, against the pending annihilation of a once potent sense of place upon which the Hawaiian identity had been critically formed. For the Hawaiian people, Mauna Kea is deserving of unconditional respect, preservation, and kapu (limits) in its own right. As the community has protested against the TMT development, a serious fault between the epistemological assumptions of modern science and indigenous peoples has been illuminated.

But aren’t we always here in any case, in the particular place where our bodies are? No, because when we’re distracted—as in day- dreaming, for example—we aren’t here in any robust sense, but are rather absent. And indeed one of the major differences between Nietzsche’s time and ours, some 150 years later, is that the prevalence of modern information and communications technology has enormous power to distract us from being here.

Taking the form of a dialogue between representatives of two generations (one from the old guard ignorant with respect to social media etc., and one from the tech-savvy avant-garde), this multi-media presentation affords a broader perspective on the question of how much the advantages of these technologies may be outweighed by the way so many of them diminish our ability to actually be here.

Raimon Panikkar went on pilgrimage to Kailāsa in 1994 at the age of 76. He put his life at risk, ready to die as on a real pilgrimage. He discovered the sacredness of Kailāsa As he said:

“There are many sacred places in the world and many sacred places of pilgrimage. The sacredness of Kailāsa and of Mânasasaras helps us to become conscious that any sacred space is unique. But their sacred character is not a defined space. It is the empty space that manifests its own sacredness, its ultimate reality. The marvellous aspect of the pilgrimage is that the empty space becomes visible, or even better, transparent: the void is filled by pure light, space by emptiness. The Kailāsa is not the limit, but the center. Man and Nature belong to each other, and the space is their link.”

To go with him as a spiritual master was to realize that Man participates in the cosmic adventure of the entire universe.

This paper proposes pragmatically employing the idea of skillful means,

Based upon the idea of kusala upaya, this paper proposes the term stress mastery. It is this ethic that gives MBSR the potential to change the clinical practice of stress treatment. The practice of MBSR offers a hermeneutics of interdependence to understand the experience of stress. Employing kusala upaya in MBSR means one can become proficient in handling stress, and in acting with great skill, one can master stress.

I blame both sides. Just war theory, though presently motivated in large part by a desire to reduce war crimes and atrocities, has suffered from an inflated notion of theory and moral authority which have proven to be largely impotent. Pacifism, even when taken narrowly as a position against war, has portrayed war as though it is an issue with clean boundaries, separable from the world’s largest and most grim issues. Both, then, have misled their audiences. Both underestimate how much war is entangled in a grim fabric of contemporary global issues regarding the relations of human beings to each other and to the natural world. Addressing war as a problem requires more than centers for study of war, or war colleges run by military authorities, or U.N. resolutions or peacekeepers. As Freud remarks about love, war is not on a separate page. Coming to terms with war will involve coming to terms with greed and bigotry and nationalism. But coming to terms with war also will require coming to terms with philosophical mistakes, including assumptions about what persons are which make empathy more remote a possibility because theoretically inexplicable. And it will have to dig more deeply than contemporary efforts to decide whether war is justifiable or not.

Antedating landscape theorists such as Dennis Cosgrove and Anne Cauquelin, Dōgen strongly articulates the view that “nature” becomes “landscape” through the assertion of a particular, personal perspective, which limits the experience of it. One way to read the text is precisely as an attempt to approximate praxis/enlightenment to a direct approach to nature and reality bypassing their conceptualisations, achieved from within, not from without the environment with which the subject interacts. The paper will present several close readings of key passages and analyse them in the broader context of Dōgen’s work.

“From Myth to Philosophy and Back Again: Expanding and Contracting Place in Asia and the Pacific”

“Experience of Space: Dialogical Dialogue of Cosmologies in Panikkar”

Both Parmenides (5^th cent. BCE) and Śaṅkara (8^th cent. CE) and contemporary phenomenologists refer to a fundamental reality that is prior to and contrasted with divisions, descriptions, opinions, stories we tell. I will look at similarities in the ways ancient and contemporary philosophers refer to the presumed fundamental reality, focussing especially on the spatial metaphors they use.

A problem faced by ancient and contemporary philosophers alike is that words seem unsuited to refer to the supposed fundamental reality, which is undivided. Parmenides and Śaṅkara tell us that words, even their own, can be “deceptive”, since they make us believe in the reality of the boundaries they trace around the items they describe by distinguishing each item from all the rest (Parmenides, DK B8,52, Śaṅkara, BSB II,1,27). Luckily, words can also be transformative (Robbiano 2006). They may trigger a realization that reveals how all divisions pointed to by words are fundamentally unreal (Ganeri 2007).

Whereas words are always carriers of distinctions, distinctions do not always point to ontological separations. For instance, Parmenides distinguishes being from ‘knowing’, ‘being aware’ (noeîn), but does not regard them as separate: being is the same as noeîn (DK B3), which does not mean ‘having mental states with cognitive contents’: cognitive contents are secondary; they are fruit of human words and opinions (DK B8, 38-41). Śaṅkara explicitly states that the self is the only fundamental certainty one can have and nobody can deny (BSB I.1.1), whereas every further elaboration on it is superimposition. Superimpositions are clearly distinguished from the self, but not separated from it: there is not separate, second reality next to the self (ātman) that is Brahman.

Especially intriguing is that Parmenides (cf. especially DK B8, 1-49) and Śaṅkara use words and phrases that are very similar to the ones used by 20^th and 21^st century phenomenologists to refer to pre-reflective self-consciousness: an ubiquitous self-awareness that accompanies all mental states and makes them possible (Zahavi 2006, 125). Such self-consciousness is more fundamental than any experiential content (Gallagher 2000, 15 in Krueger 2010, 38), unchangeable and constant (Zahavi 2005, 132, in Krueger 2010, 47), invariant (Tagini & Raffone 2010), unitary and continuous (Zahavi 2010, 76). It might possibly be quite invulnerable (Damasio 1999, 118, in Krueger, 2010, 40) and with no boundaries (Albahari 2010, 81-82). It might also be non-individualized: Ganeri among others has pointed out that pre-reflexive self-consciousness fails to individuate thinkers (Siderits, Thompson & Zahavi 2010, 21) and “is somewhat akin to the impersonal Advaitic ātman, present equally in all” (Ganeri 2010, 182).

One of the things that distinctions can do when used by philosophers that want to point to an undivided reality is foregrounding what is usually in the background (Sokolowski 1998, 516-518). Foregrounding the fundamental background can be attempted by means of spatial metaphors that suggest lack of divisions and continuity of reality across what seem to be boundaries. E.g. Śaṅkara suggests that our self is like ether or space (ākāṡa), which is the same notwithstanding its apparent enclosure in jars and pots: we are fundamentally self (ātman) that is Brahman, but we mistakenly identify with our different bodies and minds (BSB. I.1,5; BSB I,2,6). E.g. Parmenides visualises being as undivided and safely protected as if by an ultimate boundary (peîras pumatón, DK B8,42), i.e. a limit which does not separate two domains but whose function is to signal the invulnerability of what is inside, since there is nothing outside, which could endanger it. Pre-reflexive self-consciousness is also prone to spatial metaphors: it can be visualized in terms of “background”, “one coherent space”, which is not separated from the single experiences, like space is not separated —only distinguished— from objects in space (Fasching 2010, 204-206). Pre-reflexive self-consciousness, just as Parmenides’ being, which is noeîn, and Śaṅkara’s self, which is Brahman, can be foregrounded and pointed to as an undivided space, which is prior to —and on neither side of— the distinction between subject and object, since it is the condition of this and any other distinction.

Place is a sense of belonging and connection and can be experienced through physical location, community, and within the self. Traditional martial arts engage these very concepts. This paper will explore the topic of place as it relates to the philosophic and spiritual traditions inherent in the study of Uechi Ryu karate-do. The cultural and spiritual perspectives of Okinawa are incorporated in to the training precepts of karate-do such as the concept of “no first attack” and “respect” being intrinsic to the process. The goal of this work is to effectively articulate the value of such a study and to demonstrate its applicability and value beyond the practical methods of self-defense and towards the aim of creating a positive and useful personal place. The development of this system, and its philosophy, has taken root across the world, allowing for many students to find their own place within this style. Particular attention will be paid to the way this notion of place has been challenged and developed as Uechi Ryu has spread globally. This work will use the author’s experiences as a practitioner of Uechi Ryu as a framework for engaging this topic.

In 2009, Susan Chan Egan and Chih-p’ing Chou published A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The Half-Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams (Chinese University of Hong King), a biographical account that opened up the little-known love affair of Hu Shi and Williams to the world. Between 1914 and 1962, they exchanged some 300 letters in which they both challenged and dissected each other’s ideas.

Hu Shi (1891-1962) needs little introduction. Sometimes called "the father of the Chinese Renaissance," he was Dewey's most prominent Chinese disciple, as well as an enormously important and influential force in the turmoil of the early 20th century. As President of Peking University, he became one of the founders of China's modern educational system and a champion of everyday speech as a legitimate form of intellectual communication. In the Mao years, he was denounced for his promotion of independent, experimental thinking.

Edith Clifford Williams (1885-1971) is much less well known. An avant-garde painter, Ithaca native, and long-term veterinary librarian at Cornell University, she met Hu Shi when he was a student at Cornell. Their love affair began in the early 1930s.

In my presentation, which will include a serious analytic interpretation of the material provided in A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit, I’ll examine how this at times tortured relationship, born in romantic idealism but tempered by the reality of their times, helped form Hu Shi’s idiosyncratic worldview and peculiar version of pragmatism.

However, in speaking of the Dharma, the Buddha says, “Wherever this discourse is taught, Subhuti, that place on earth is worthy of veneration by the whole world with its gods, men and Asuras. That place is like a shrine in which flowers and incense are offered. That place is the Diamond Heart; it cannot be attained simply by intellectual means. Furthermore, even if a Bodhisattva offers all treasures, which are made of dharmas (elemental constituents), he/she would gain immeasurable merit, yet no merit. Dana (Charity) must be offered, without knowing it is Dana. No being has been led to Nirvana. The Dharma is Adharma, because on the Path, one is always at the place where he/she is going. Each person is the Path itself.

“In Between Time and Space (the Infinite and the Finite): ‘Histo-topo-philia’”

A common understanding shared among global society, based on scientific discoveries and research investigations, that humans are the cause of global environmental problems urges and calls for action to actively respond to the changing environment (climate change per se). However recent developments in studies of the global history, provides us with a longer and wider perspective of the relationship of humans and nature, identifying humans have faced drastic climate changes in our Anthropocene history. Though we have to humbly admit that there still remains uncertainties in the scientific findings due to our short-sightedness and blindness in how humans scientifically conceive nature, we cannot ignore the latest scientific findings. In this regard, the question arises: How can we build an optimal relationship between humans and nature under the given constraints of infinite time and finite space?

The author has been working on the concept of “Histo-topo-philia” by proposing and highlighting the importance of identifying and caring a meaningful place (or placeful-place vis-a-vis placeless-place) in our everyday life environment, rather than protecting particular places such as national parks. However, it is seemingly impossible to build an optimal mutual relationship with the nature only by addressing the importance and the idea of “care” (sorge) to everyday place we live. How can we build an optimal mutual relationship with our surrounding everyday environment to live our everyday lives in resonance and mutuality with the surrounding others in nature, and to realize us humans as a member of (a part of) the natural world? Is the idea of “care” sufficient enough as the bases to build such mutual relationships with living and non-living things in the world? By touching upon the notion of morphism in Zhuangzi and the idea of care by Heidegger, the paper is going to elaborate on the idea of “Histo-topo-philia” by considering the present world as a place where the spatial and temporal is unified.

These thoughts were explored further by his followers and the idea of the unconscious as being one and the same as emotions was suggested, with the greater depths of this unconscious state being much more highly charged in affective terms, that is, the more intense emotional states being more symmetrized. The key idea of the unrepressed unconscious, Freud's third unconscious, was brought to the center of further theorizing, as an unconscious that does not know consciousness, unlike the one usually discussed, the one repressed, consisting of conscious memories submerged in the ocean of non-conscious. The question of the drives, so central to Freud's later theorizing, the drives of life and death, were also considered in the light of these ideas.

The Bhagvad Gita asks a question: How does a sthitpragna (one whose intellect is secure) move, sit, speak and Walk? M K Gandhi pursued a life-long quest to attain the ideal state as described in the Gita. We know of his direct speech and his practice of silence, his economy of prose which saw use of extra words as a practice akin to accumulation, his posture developed for hours of incessant spinning. And his walk? The images of a reed thin man, walking with long, impatient, rapid strides are etched in our minds. The staff (or stick) he carried grew longer with each passing year, till it grew longer than him. He walked daily, ritually to prison gates and back from his Ashram in Ahmedabad. He walked in South Africa with miners, and in Noakhali to wipe tears from every eye. He walked for Swaraj to Dandi from his Ashram in Ahmedabad.

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’s Efficacy and 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. 
VAIDYA, Anand Jayprakash (San Jose State University) and Victor PINEDA (University of California, Berkeley)
“How Can Disability Studies Help Global Philosophy Think about Place and Space: Lessons from the work of Dr. Victor Pineda”

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.

“Mencius and Plato about Land Repartition: Humane Space is Well-divided Space”

One of the recurrent questions asked to Mencius by rulers who come to visit him, is how to gain the authority over all under Heaven (天下) and to unify the entire China under one sovereign power. Many rulers worry about the size of their territory which seems too small to achieve this goal. How to pretend to take command over all under Heaven with only a small kingdom? According to Mencius, to gain command over all under Heaven is not a question of the size of a territory but rather of the behavior of the ruler. If the ruler behaves like an authentic King and conducts a benevolent government - which includes giving the appropriate amount of space to each one in accordance with his rank - then all under Heaven will be willing to follow his leadership. To make a repartition of the available land, and to settle rules for the use of it, is also to give each one an opportunity to fulfill his needs and to make the world humane (otherwise wild beasts might come and enter into competition with men).

In Plato's Laws, the protagonists discuss a similar question, which is how to deal with issues relating to good governance. The goal was not to unify all of Greece but to create a colony in Crete, so as to make it an exemplary city. For that purpose, the city must not be too close to the sea (because ports bring business and business attracts all kinds of morally depraved people). The dialogue also addresses the issue of territorial repartition which should be done according to the size of the population. This division of the land is in fact closely tied up with the concern of avoiding conflicts among citizens. Therefore, an important aspect of this organization of space is agriculture, which should be the base of the economic life of the city. According to the Laws, a good King should act like a cloth-maker or a pastor.

Reading the Mencius and the Laws, we can observe that in both ancient texts, to divide land properly and to be strict on boundary issues is part of “good” government, whether the final objective is to unify China or to establish an exemplary city. For both Mencius and Plato: space is humane when it is politically organized, which first requires a well-divided space.

VOJTÍŠKOVÁ, Kristýna (Charles University, Czeh Republic)
“Rethinking Fûdo in a Global Perspective: Aidagara as a Means”
Watsuji Tetsurô's (和辻哲郎, 1889-1960) theory of fûdo (風土) as a “cultural climate” conceptualizes an “interrelatedness” (間柄) of humanity and milieu as inseparable and mutually determining. Watsuji tends to view fûdo as stable within a particular culture. However, the unfolding process of globalization as a homogenizing element undermines human attachment to physical space, as well as cultural and national differences, which seems to be a prerequisite of Watsuji's concept of fûdo. Thus it may seem that it tells us little about the ethics of inter-relationality between human being and his milieu in the context of globalizing world of globalization.
In the present paper, it is my intention to examine the possibility of application Watsuji´s concept of “cultural climate” in the framework of globalizing world by means of the “interrelatedness”. I contend that the “interrelatedness”, as a fundamental structure of human being within fûdo, embraces an ethical insight that enables Watsuji's view to shift from a theory of climatic (or national) characters, as it is often perceived to be, to an approach to cohabitation within a rapidly changing environment of a shared milieu.
WANG, Kun (Shandong University, China)
Zhengming (Attuning Names): Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and the Historical Narrative
The Confucian concept of zhengming, especially as found in Xunzi, has long been approached from a semantic viewpoint. However, the traditional logical-semantic approach is not useful for studying zhengming in so far as Confucian judgment prioritizes appropriateness over semantic truth as it is expressed through its historical narrative. It is in the roles and relations that stem from the family through the whole society within which people are constantly cultivating their persons. This sets the aesthetic context for the art of attuning names. Therefore, zhengming can be seen as pragmatics within the historical narrative.
WANG, Robin R. (Loyola Marymount University)
“Equality and Hieracrchy in A Swirling Space”

Based on a careful reading of some pre-qin Chinese texts this paper will focus on the space where equality and hieracrchy can be made compatible. It shows that equality and hieracrchy cannot be fixed in a frozen polarity and argue for a constructive and complicate relationship between equality and hieracrchy.

This paper revisits the global debates about Eurocentrism since the 1980s and offers a critical discussion of the variety of Eurocentrism charges. I distinguish between philosophical and political charges and argue that political Eurocentrism is something contemporary philosophy would do well to guard against. Ironically, more often than not lurking behind attempts at charging others with philosophical Eurocentrism is nothing more than a political anti-Eurocentrism. What needs to be examined, therefore, is what a philosophical Eurocentrism would amount to, how it could be philosophically defended if it can be so defended at all, and how best to attack it philosophically. Europe, whether understood as a concept or a place, is best understood relationally, which implies other concepts or other places.

“On Realising One's Fate and Finding Contentment in One's Environs”

 

In the Buddhist Abhidharma system, space (ākāśa) is classified as one of the unconditioned factors and enjoys a higher status than time (kāla), which marks the conditioned existence. All the conditioned existents, being bound in temporality, are inevitably impermanent. Owing to its unconditioned nature, space, however, is as permanent as nirvāṇa—the final goal of Buddhist practice. The privileged status of space is challenged by a group of Buddhists, who see it as violating the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. They try to reduce space to a conceptual construction and hence deny its existence. The current paper will examine the disputes on the reality of space between the two parties and try to articulate the Buddhist theories of space, a topic neglected by most contemporary Buddhist scholars.

The contemporary philosopher Richard Rorty suggests that it would be extremely hard to introduce a notion, even one as simple as the concept of “pain,” to another group of people who lack it in their language game. The concepts in a language are related, and one cannot grasp one concept without understanding a whole set of other concepts in the language game.

4. Each topos is enclosed within a larger environment, and yet each topos maintains its unique individual character, instead of being absorbed into a larger world. Moreover, each topos radically interacts with the environment, while it is being nurtured by it. It can be naughty and even exploits and destroys its environment, if it wills, by virtue of sharing in common the "topological" nature with the environment. In this way, dialectical movement incessantly takes place between the topos and the "world" (which is the Topos of the innumerable individual topoi) in the manner of "what is being created becomes what creates" (or from that which is created to that which creates).

This article uses McLuhan’s notions of hot and cool as heuristics to advance a critique of the city of Beijing as a living and lived material-symbolic complex. It both extends the applicability of these notions and draws attention to their paradoxical coexistence when the analysis becomes specific. The article ends by calling for a cooler Beijing, a society to come.

– Félix Guattari (1985, p. 460)

“the diameter of the octagonal crossing meausres nearly 140 feet (43 m), almost as great as the Pantheon in Rome.” The octagonal form of the Dome deviated from the classical hemispherical; Brunelleschi used eight visible ribs and sixteen concealed one—“in a manner similar to the construction of Gothic vaults.” Another kind of transformation of Chinese pagoda from square to octagon is from the Period of Simplicity (ca. 500-900) to the Period of Elaboration (ca. 1000-1300); in the former period, there the square form of one-storied, multi-storied, multi-eaved pagodas prevailed in China. After the end of Tang dynasty, one-storied pagoda disappeared; “the octagonal form became the norm and the square plan the exception.” “The octagonal pagoda which first appeared in the Tomb Pagoda of Ching-tsang in 746...” The term of pagoda may be a kind of southern pronunciation of Chinese “pa-chiao-t’a”—“pa-ko-t’a” meaning “eight-cornered pagoda”. Chinese architect, Liang Ssu-ch’eng in his A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture mentions: The word “pagoda” instead of “t’a” is deliberately used in this book because it is accepted in all the European languages as the name for such a monument. The very fact that the word finds its way into almost every European dictionary as the name for the Chinese t’a may reflect the popularity of the octagonal plan at the opening of Western contact. It’s hard to say that the Italian Gothic, eight-corner form have any genetic relation to Chinese pagoda. However, we may ask why this form had been prevailing in Europe (France, Spain, Italy...) and in Asia (e.g. India and China). What communal sense this form aroused in human beings? What is the meaning transmitted by this form? What functions of architecture with this form serve for? What’s the relation between space and architecture with this form in the Italian Renaissance Renaissance and in Chinese Song dynasty?

This paper aims to rethink the function of classrooms, a conventional learning space, to expand the ecology of language learning to natural and sociocultural places where learning while doing on the fly is of a normative practice. In place-based learning, learning materials are used as resources. Learners are brought out of the safe haven as protected by well-defined textbook boundaries, teacher expectations and classroom norms. Learners are forced to encounter strangers, odd things, and texts not written for language learners. The same place offers different features to natives vs. non-native speakers. Perception of place results from cultural experiences, which gives rise to different action potentiality (Chemero, 2009). Being in places extends language to things, signs, actions, and a sense of normativity (dialogical third parties in Linell’s sense (2009). Taking action in places cultivates and attunes learners’ affectivity to care for the world and themselves.

For over a decade, Confucian studies has gone through several evolutions and developments. From 2010 to today,this area has delivered a number of the fine scholars.In this paper, I will analyze and compare five current trends in Confucian studies:

In each movement I have in effect discussed certain types of challenges against “orthodox prejudice,” and also compared and contrasted them through a philosophical perspective. The significance of those trends is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian studies, and it extends the Confucius thought to Western scholars and people.

In his Philosophy Enquiry, Edmund Burke emphasised that moral emotions that bind governments to their population were partly rooted in aesthetic sensibility. Whilst beauty awakens our sympathy, the sublime inspires us with a kind of reverence. These moral emotions bond society together. Burke’s idea resonated strongly with Confucian philosophy which maintained the cultivation of moral emotions through rites and music (art) being central to social order.

Sir William Chambers (Architect to the King, George III) was both an amateur sinologist, and an intellectual student of and political ally to Edmund Burke. In his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), Chambers envisioned a landscape theory through which the city was transformed into a place for moulding the moral emotions of British citizens. Whilst the element of the beautiful in cityscapes and landscapes would improve our taste, evoke social affection, contributing to social harmony, the element of the sublime was envisaged as a remedy for the growing British social disorder in the age of commerce and ‘liberty.’