Bret W. Davis

The problem of the will has long been viewed as central to Heidegger's later thought. In the first book to focus on this problem, Bret W. Davis clarifies key issues from the philosopher's later period--particularly his critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological "will to will" and the possibility of Gelassenheit or "releasement" from this willful way of being in the world--but also shows that the question of will is at the very heart of Heidegger's thinking, a pivotal issue in his path from Being and Time (1926) to "Time and Being" (1962). Moreover, the book demonstrates why popular critical interpretations of Heidegger's relation to the will are untenable, how his so-called "turn" is not a simple "turnaround" from voluntarism to passivism. Davis explains why the later Heidegger's key notions of "non-willing" and " Gelassenheit " do not imply a mere abandonment of human action; rather, they are signposts in a search for an other way of being, a "higher activity" beyond the horizon of the will. While elucidating this search, his work also provides a critical look at the ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies of Heidegger's project, and does so in a way that allows us to follow the inner logic of the philosopher's struggles. As meticulous as it is bold, this comprehensive reinterpretation will change the way we think about Heidegger's politics and about the thrust of his philosophy as a whole

When I deliver an introductory lecture on Japanese Philosophy, I always raise the following question: Is it appropriate to modify the word philosophy with an adjective such as Japanese? Philosophy is, after all, a discipline that addresses universal problems, and so transcends the restrictions implied in geographical descriptors. However, as Kuki Shūzō argues in his essay “Tokyo and Kyoto,” I think that this is only part, and not the whole truth of the matter.One’s thinking takes place within the framework of one’s cultural heritage, and the different nuances of each of the words one uses can influence how one thinks. It is for this reason that every philoso­phy has its own unique character. As Otto Pöggeler suggests, there is something about the thought of Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji that does not fit easily into the framework of “philosophy” in the Western tradition. This is a conse­quence of the fact that they did not simply passively adopt, but rather attempted to critically challenge Western philosophy. I suppose that their grounding in Japanese and other Eastern traditions contributed to their critical challenge of Western philosophy. And I submit that there is a strong tendency in traditional East Asian thought to not simply grasp things within a presupposed framework of “knowledge,” but rather, since “knowledge” itself is understood to be a certain kind of restriction, to return to its roots.Needless to say, neither Nishida’s nor Nishitani’s thought is merely a philosophical reiteration of such traditional East Asian teachings. Nevertheless, we can say that the East Asian idea that knowledge is at root something restrictive lives on in their thinking. The radical­ity of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s thought can be understood to lie in the manner in which they cast light on the limits of the “knowledge” pursued by Western philosophy, problematizing the basis on which this knowledge is established as well as the framework it sets up.I think that the “character” of this or that philosophy arises from such different ways of seeing things and different attitudes toward “knowledge.” It is crucial to point out, however, that the gaps resulting from these differences need not become hindrances for philosophical thinking. Indeed, I think that the existence of such gaps, rather than hindering “dialogues” between different philosophies, is precisely what enables them to be meaningful. This is also what I have in mind when I stress the importance of dialogue in my lectures on Japanese philoso­phy. It is, after all, the creative dialogue engendered in this manner that enables philosophy to progress along its path of radical inquiry.

The central issue of Heidegger’s thought is the question of being. More precisely, it is the question of the relation between being and human being, the relation, that is, between Sein and Dasein. This article addresses the so-called turn in Heidegger’s thinking of this relation. In particular, it shows how this turn entails a shift from a transcendental-horizonal projection of world to “an indwelling releasement [inständige Gelassenheit] to the worlding of the world”. Although a wide range of pre- and post-turn texts are referenced, since this shift is explicitly thematized in Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations, these three fictional conversations from 1944/45 take center stage in this study

This article elucidates and interpretively develops Raimon Panikkar's hermeneutics of intertraditional dialogue by way of setting it into sympathetic and critical dialogue with the predominantly intratraditional hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. It argues that Panikkar's thought enables us not only to appreciate, but also to question the limits of the fundamental roles played by language and tradition in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Panikkar's own hermeneutical reflections arise directly out of intertraditional as well as interlinguistic experience; and they ultimately direct us toward the profoundest dimension of dialogue, a dimension in which the words we share arise out of and gesture back into the depths of an originary silence.

As we attempt to engender a dialogue between different philosophical traditions, one of the first of the topics which need to be addressed is that of the very nature of dialogue. In other words, we need to engage in a dialogue about dialogue. Toward that end, this essay attempts to rethink the nature of dialogue from the perspective of two key members of the Kyoto School, namely its founder, Nishida Kitar1945), and its current central figure, Ueda Shizuteru (b. 1926). The Kyoto School is the most prominent group of modern Japanese philosophers, whose thought emerges from the encounter between Western and Eastern traditions. This essay seeks to elucidate and further unfold the implications of rethinking of the nature of dialogue from the perspective of Nishida's and Ueda's primarily Zen Buddhist reception of and response to Western philosophy

This article examines the critique of philosophical Eurocentrism developed over the past two-and-a-half decades by Robert Bernasconi. The restriction of the moniker “philosophy” to the Western tradition, and the exclusion of non-Western traditions from the field, became the standard view only after the late eighteenth century. Bernasconi critically analyzes this restriction and exclusion and makes a compelling case for its philosophical illegitimacy. After showing how Bernasconi convincingly repudiates the identification of philosophy with Europe – asserted most explicitly by Continental philosophers such as Hegel, Husserl, Levinas, and most recently Rodolphe Gasché – the present article critically reflects on both the significance and the limits of Bernasconi’s own predominantly “immanent critique” of philosophical Eurocentrism, and ends by calling on philosophers to engage more thoroughly in studies of and dialogues with non-Western traditions of philosophy.

The questions pursued in this essay are: What can philosophers today learn from a tradition of psychosomatic practice such as Zen Buddhism? How does such a tradition challenge the very methodology of our cerebral practice of philosophy? And finally: What would it mean to bring Western philosophy and the psychosomatic practice of Zen together, not necessarily to merge them into one, but at least to commute between them so that they may speak to and inform one another? In pursuing these questions, it is demonstrated, we have much to learn from the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. The middle two sections of this essay explain how Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji challenged the disembodied methodology of Western philosophy by drawing on their psychosomatic practice of Zen. The final section of this essay critically compares and contrasts the psychosomatic practice of Zen with the pragmatist “somaesthetics” of Richard Shusterman. Shusterman himself pursued connections between his project and Zen practice, yet it will be argued that the guiding aims of his pragmatically and aesthetically orientated somaesthetics need to be distinguished from the primarily enlightening and liberative aims of the psychosomatic practice of Zen.

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking.

As the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, UEDA Shizuteru 上田閑照 has not only followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, NISHIDA Kitarō 西田幾多郎 and NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治, but has taken several strides forward in their shared pursuit of what can be called a “philosophy of Zen.” The “of” in this phrase should be understood as a “double genitive,” that is, in both its objective and subjective senses. Ueda not only philosophizes about Zen, he also philosophizes from Zen. Like Nishida and Nishitani before him, he has devoted himself to the practice of Zen as well as to the study of Western philosophy. However, what does it mean to speak, much less philosophize, about Zen experience? Ueda has in fact concentrated much of his attention on questions concerning the relation between Zen and philosophy or, more generally, between experience and language. Any development of a “philosophy of Zen,” Ueda recognizes, must begin with the question of what it means to “speak of experience.” What does it mean to express, that is, to speak from and about experience? This question has been at the heart of Ueda’s philosophical path from the beginning. His many works on this topic include a seminal early essay “Zen and Language,” later re-titled “The Language of Zen”, articles written in German including “Awakening in Zen Buddhism as a Word-Event”, and a recent article, “Language in a Twofold World,” which Ueda put together to represent his thought in a major anthology of Japanese philosophy. In these and other works, Ueda convincingly demonstrates that the question of the relation between language and experience has always been a pivotal issue for the Zen tradition itself. He also shows how this tradition can help us, in the wake of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, to return afresh to this fundamental question.

ABSTRACT This article examines East Asian as well as Western perspectives on the major metaphilosophical question: Is philosophy Western? Along with European philosophy, in the late nineteenth century the Japanese imported what can be called “philosophical Euromonopolism,” namely, the idea that philosophy is found exclusively in the Western tradition. However, some modern Japanese philosophers, and the majority of modern Chinese and Korean philosophers, have referred to some of their traditional Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist discourses as “philosophy.” This article discusses debates in East Asia as well as in the United States and Europe over the discipline-defining question of whether the academic field of philosophy should include Asian and other non-Western traditions of profound and rigorous—even if methodologically as well as conceptually unfamiliar—thinking about fundamental matters. It argues that, henceforth, the field of philosophy should be conceived as dialogically cross-cultural rather than as exclusively Western.

This essay aims to help prepare the way for those trained in Western philosophy to enter into dialogue with non-Western traditions of phi­losophy such as that of Japan. This will be done mainly by means of critical examination of some key instances of the ambivalence—the tension between the openings and closures—toward dialogue with non-Western traditions found throughout the history of Western phi­losophy. After tracing this ambivalence back to the Greeks, and to the figure of Socrates in particular, the essay focuses in particular on a selection of modern continental philosophers: Hegel, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Derrida. While ambivalences can be found in all four, the order in which they are presented corresponds roughly to the degrees to which they contribute to opening up the West to cross-cultural philosophical dialogue. The positive lesson we glean from an examination of their thought is that hermeneutical and deconstruc­tive reflection on one’s own tradition should accompany any venture into discourse with other ways of thinking and being. The critical point to be made, however, is that the latter venture into dialogue with others should at the same time accompany the former self-reflection. Even Heidegger and Derrida, after all, declined to fully engage in the kind of radical cross-cultural dialogue toward which they occasionally gestured. To begin with, in the opening section of this essay, a contrast will be drawn between the lingering Ameri-Eurocentrism of Western philosophy and the inherently cross-cultural nature of Japanese phi­losophy. The philosophers associated with the Kyoto School in par­ticular have endeavored to open up philosophical discourse between Eastern and Western traditions. In the second section of this essay, a critical reflection on Karl Löwith’s critique of modern Japanese intel­lectuals will serve as a pivot, turning our attention back on the ambiva­lence toward cross-cultural dialogue found in the history of Western philosophy. As will be discussed in the third section, this ambivalence can also be discerned in the recent “hermeneutical turn.” Together with the examinations of Hegel, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Derrida undertaken in the remaining sections of the essay, the purpose of these reflections is to assist in ushering those trained in Western phi­losophy toward an engagement in cross-cultural philosophical dia­logue with traditions such as that of Japan.

By drawing on the insights of a number of continental as well as Asian thinkers, this article reflects on the "significance" of comparative philosophy—both in the sense of discussing the "meaning" and in the sense of arguing for the "importance" of this endeavor. Encountering another culture allows one to deepen one's self-understanding by learning to "see oneself from the outside"; this deeper self-understanding in turn allows one to listen to what the other culture has to say. These two moments, or movements, are interdependent and mutually supportive. Without the step back to self-understanding, we unknowingly reduce the other to the unrecognized categories of our own thinking; but without encountering another culture, our understanding of our own culture remains shallow. This article argues that an engagement with non-Western philosophy, particularly with a set of traditions as rich and radically different as those of Asian thought, can and should take place as a hermeneutic circling between self-understanding and openness to encounter: the dialogical step back and step forward are mutually supportive endeavors. For only by way of such dialogue do we attain the concrete freedom and possibility for transformation and change, that is, the ability to critically and creatively develop old customs or modes of thought and to critically and creatively adopt new ones. Moreover, only through such dialogue can we learn to not only let others be, but to share insights with them, and to build together a global community which neither reifies nor abolishes cultural differences.

Philosophy must diversify or die.There are forms of difference undreamt of in academic philosophy's current efforts at diversification.Is Philosophy Western? Was philosophy born and raised exclusively in the Western tradition, or can it be found in at least some non-Western traditions? Is the phrase "Western philosophy" a specific restriction of a more universal field, or is it, as Heidegger and others have claimed, a tautology since philosophy defines the essential core of the Western tradition and it alone?1 Is it true, as Husserl thought, that "Europe is philosophy: the idea of Europe is the idea of philosophy—an idea of a universal rational science congruent with philosophy"?2 Or do such claims of what I will...

This book, the first of its kind, offers a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism. It is written by an academic philosopher who, for more than a dozen years, practiced Zen in Japan while studying in universities with contemporary heirs of the Kyoto School. The book lucidly explicates the philosophical implications of Zen teachings and kōans, and critically compares Zen with other Asian as well as Western religions and philosophies. It carefully explains the original context and sense of traditional Zen teachings and practices, and compellingly applies them to our twenty-first century lives. In addition to explaining the practice of Zen meditation, its twenty-four chapters treat perennial philosophical topics such as the self, nature, art, morality, language, peace, and death, as well as basic Buddhist teachings such as the four noble truths, the middle way, the no-self and true self doctrines, karma, mind and no-mind, rebirth, Nirvana, and the various meanings of the term “Buddha.” The chapters frequently engage Zen in interreligious dialogue with Christianity and with other religions and schools of Buddhism. The Zen inspired modern philosophies of the Kyoto School are introduced in one chapter and frequently referenced throughout the book. The concluding chapter reviews the entire path of Zen practice and enlightenment with an in-depth commentary on the beloved Zen classic, The Ten Oxherding Pictures. The book can be read in its entirety as a coherently organized introduction to the philosophy and practice of Zen, or chapters can be read independently according to the reader’s specific interests. While based on decades of scholarly study as well as practice and teaching, it is written in an accessible and engaging style. It is designed to be read by college students and lifelong learners as well as scholars and practitioners of the world’s great philosophical and spiritual traditions.

This essay seeks to understand the nature of both interpersonal and intercultural dialogue from the perspective of Zen Buddhism as it has been interpreted, in dialogue with Western philosophy and religion, by the central figure of the third generation of the Kyoto School: Ueda Shizuteru (1926–2019). It examines how Ueda develops a philosophy of interpersonal dialogue on the basis of Zen teachings and practices. In particular, it reveals how Ueda draws on Huayan and Zen Buddhist notions of “host” and “guest” to unfold the dialogical implications of the tenth of The Ten Oxherding Pictures, kōan interviews, linked verse poetry, and the Japanese greeting of the bow. The final sections of this article then explore the implications for intercultural dialogue of Ueda’s account of human existence as dwelling in a “twofold world” through a circulating process of “exiting language and exiting into language.”

What is the relationship between language and experience? This question was a central concern of the eminent Kyoto School philosopher and lay Zen master Ueda Shizuteru (1926–2019). In fact, this question has long been a focal issue of the Zen tradition. Famously, if also paradoxically, the Zen tradition has claimed to “not to rely on words and letters” even while producing volumes of texts: poetry and didactic discourses as well as encounter dialogues (mondō) and kōan collections. Critics have accused Zen of being self-contradictory in this regard, yet Ueda demonstrates that Zen’s paradoxical ambivalence toward language is not a problem, but rather the point. Moreover, he explains how Zen teachings and practices can help us radically rethink the relationship between language and experience after the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. In this article, I examine Ueda’s contributions to the philosophy of language by bringing his thought into critical dialogue with Continental philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer as well as with some scholars of Zen. In short, Ueda rejects both the view that we are trapped within the bounds of language and the view that we could meaningfully dwell in a world outside of language. Rather, he argues, in everyday life as well as—in an intensified manner—in Zen practice and poetic expression, we are called on to engage in a ceaseless movement of “exiting language and exiting into language.”

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking

This essay is about “knowing limits,” both in the sense of acknowledging the inevitable perspectival limits of our knowledge, and in the sense in which the act of knowing delimits the parameters of that which is known. Moreover, it aims to cultivate a versatile perspectivism that is ethically oriented by a capacity for ecstatic empathy rather than an egocentric will to power. The essay begins with an examination of the mind/body problem as a paradigmatic case of perspectival ambiguity, making reference to a wide range of authors. The focus of the central sections of the essay is on Nietzsche and Heidegger, while the final sections are devoted to developing a phenomenological reading of Zhuangzi and Zen. At issue throughout is the articulation of a versatile perspectivism responsive to both the demarcative and disclosive senses of knowing limits.