Phil14: Individual papers in Intellectual History and Philosophy VI

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Phil14

Individual papers in Intellectual History and Philosophy VI

Convenors:: Jan Gerrit Strala (Kinjogakuin University)
Roman Pașca (Akita University)
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Section:: Intellectual History and Philosophy

Sessions:: Friday 27 August, 10:15-11:45
Time zone: Europe/Brussels

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, 10:15-11:45

Voice of the voiceless: the Kyoto School’s absolute nothingness as an identity claim
Niklas Söderman (Tallinn University and University of Helsinki)

Paper short abstract:

My paper analyses the Kyoto School’s philosophical articulation of the concept of absolute nothingness on two levels: as a philosophical discourse, and as part of societal discourse it is located within, and seeks to understand the interplay between the content and the context of this concept.

Paper long abstract:

My paper analyses the Kyoto School’s philosophical articulation of the concept of absolute nothingness on two levels: as a philosophical discourse in itself, and as part of societal discourse in which the philosophical discourse is located in, and seeks to understand the interplay between the content and the context of this concept.

From this perspective, the Kyoto School’s use of absolute nothingness in their philosophy can be seen as an endeavour to move beyond recognition of identity to fundamental unity, while still having functioned as an identity claim for Japanese subjectivity’s special position in being particularly close to such fundamental truth. Nishida Kitarō’s philosophical work provided the basis to move Japan’s prewar discourse on identity to claims of ontology via aesthetics in an effort to reframe identity through a constructed opposition of East and West as that of being and emptiness. This move reflected the centrality of aesthetics in the production of a specifically Japanese subjectivity and how aesthetics was conceived as the ground left available by the universalisation of a ”Western” identity through modernity.

This paper considers the discursive context of the Kyoto School philosophy as central motivation for its concerns: what their philosophical position was articulated in dialogue with and what need it fulfilled in the wider discourse it participated in. Thus, this paper looks at the Kyoto School philosophy as a practice conducted within society in response to its contemporary issues, and while it admits the possibility of philosophy as being ”an eternal pursuit of truth of things”, it points out that the questions animating this pursuit at any given time tend to be motivated by their societal context.

Watsuji, the Confucian ethicist (?)
Alexandra Mustățea (Kanda University of International Studies)

Sakae Ōsugi Translating Peter Kropotkin: Anarchist Contestation of Human Nature in Global Intellectual Communication
Toru Oda (University of Shizuoka)

Paper short abstract:

Polyglot and polymorphous, Sakae Ōsugi was a provocative popularizer of Western anarchism in modern Japan. This presentation situates Ōsugi's translation activities in global contexts of cultural communication, examining anarchist conception of human nature and its utopian significance.

Paper long abstract:

Polyglot and polymorphous, Sakae Ōsugi (1885-1923) was a provocative popularizer of Western anarchism in modern Japan. Indeed, this non-academic autodidact translated a wide range of anarchist and non-anarchist literature, including two canonical anarchist texts by Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, in 1917 and 1920, respectively. Translation was so crucial to his intellectual self-formation that he frankly admitted his tremendous debt to foreign sources, even accepting such a derogatory name like "translational socialist." What should be emphasized here is a strange mixture of contemporary metaphysics and somewhat belated positivist social science, out of which his "patchwork" political knowledge had been woven: he was as much intrigued by intuitive philosophy of Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel, as by lesser-known sociological and anthropological texts, along with Souvenirs entomologiques by Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre. If, as Benedict Anderson persuasively depicts in Under Three Flags, the emergent "vast rhizomal network" of global communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled a wider and faster circulation of peoples and ideas, it also opened up productive yet cacophonous gaps for non-Western readers, providing diverse, even mutually antagonistic texts produced in different times and places at their disposal. What this presentation seeks to elucidate is how the Kropotkinian contestation of human nature against social Darwinism, and to a lesser degree, anarchist cosmology and natural philosophy, would negotiate with other Western disciplinary paradigms of knowledge and thinking. Put differently, examining what he translated as much as what he did not, this presentation situates Ōsugi's translation activities in global contexts of cultural communication, thus proposing to read them as an uneasy site of negotiations: how he would take side with biological understanding of nature that would adhere to something universal; how he would confront historical singularities of modern Japan without reducing the latter into the former; and what utopian possibilities could come out of anarchist conception of human nature that would problematize both options.

The School of Shingon Buddhism: Images-Symbols.
Federica Sgarbi (Doshisha University)