C. Y. Cheung

Ressentiment can be regarded as one of the most complicated feelings of human beings. It is a French foreign-loan word which is used as a noun, but originated from the verb ressentir, which means to feel, to experience or be aware of an emotion or sensation. As in the cases of many other European notions, ressentiment obtained an interesting profile when it traveled from the “West” to the “East.” While the word is usually untranslated in German and English, in Chinese it is translated into two characters, namely, 怨恨 (pronounced as yuàn hèn in Mandarin, and enkon in Japanese). As in the cases of many other vocabularies, yuàn hèn or enkon is a combination of two Chinese characters with similar meanings: 怨 yuàn or en means to rankle, to grudge, to blame, to reproach, to complain or to satirize; 恨 hèn or kon means to hate, to dislike, to resent or to regret.

This is a comparative study of the Chinese left-wing intellectual leader Lu Xun and the «gentle» Nietzsche. It covers four major aspects of their affinities: the intellectual, the political, the literary, and the personal. The study does not aim at demythologising the Lu Xun cult in China which has already been shattered in the hands of its creators. Through an examination of Nietzsche's influence on Lu Xun and an analysis of their similarities, this study reveals a new dimension of Lu Xun's radicalism which remains relevant to the present world. Looking at Lu Xun from the «gentle» Nietzschean perspective, this study also elicits new meanings in Lu Xun's arguments about Chinese «national character» and his insights into the crisis in Chinese culture which remain haunting questions in the Chinese intellectual arena.

The book is divided into two parts, namely, "Japanese Philosophy: Teaching and Research in the Global World;" and "Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline." In the first part, there are reports of the situation of teaching and research of Japanese philosophy. The areas discussed are Japan, Canada, France, Spain and English-speaking regions. In the second part, there will be papers on varies topics on Japanese philosophy, such as papers on Nishida Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, Tanabe Hajime to contemporary thinker such as Sakabe Megumi. These papers not only show the topics on Japanese philosophical debates, but also are the potential of Japanese philosophical thoughts.

How can we understand what happened in Fukushima? It could be rather difficult to imagine a place where it is the most beautiful but at the same time the most polluted. This lack of imagination, or more precisely the incomprehensibility of what happened in Fukushima, can be explained in the following historical context: The apparently beautiful Japanese environment is indeed a victim of Japan’s project of modernization. It is important to re-examine the history of pollution in Modern Japan, and see how people reacted to major environmental disasters. I will discuss the case of Tanaka Shōzō 田中正造, who is regarded as a social activist and the pioneer of democratic movement in Japan. I shall read Tanaka as an ethical person who develops an ethics to care about the nature as well as human beings.

Nishida Kitarō and Takahashi Satomi are two important philosophers in modern Japan. The former is famous for his maiden work An Inquiry of the Good, while the latter is known for a critic of Nishida’s philosophy. Nishida has never left Japan, and could only mention some basic thoughts of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger. Takahashi did visit Europe, and was one of the first commentators of Husserl’s phenomenology. This paper will discuss on Nishida and Takahashi’s notions of love, which can be understood as a way of the realization of the self.

Thomas Fröhlich's book has made an important contribution to Tang Junyi scholarship. It is probably the most systematic study of Tang's philosophical thought in English so far. While there are a number of pioneering works in English that have touched upon various aspects of Tang's philosophy, Fröhlich's is a fully-fledged monograph dedicated to the study of Tang in a comprehensive manner. It covers, among other things, the ideas of mind and nature in Tang's thought, his civil theology, moral vision, cultural conservatism, his philosophical ideas on history, politics and the demonic aspects of the political, and his...

Mobility is the key to overcoming the capital-nation-state. It can be divided into two types: the mobility of pastoral nomads and original hunter-gatherers. It is impossible for us to find a society of nomadic hunter-gatherers in today’s world, but we can have a thought experiment by observing existing wandering band societies. Yanagita Kunio is a thinker in Japan who drew attention to nomads. He has examined various types of nomads since his earlier years but is ridiculed for insisting on the existence of mountain nomads. Nonetheless, he has never given up on the reality of mountain nomads. Even though he later focuses on farmers with fixed settlements, or the common people, he still continues his search for the possibility of the existence of mountain nomads. Eventually, he came to look for traces of mountain nomads in indigenous beliefs. These indigenous beliefs were not limited to the Japanese.

In this paper, I shall discuss Nishida’s 西田 philosophy of body from the aspects of acting intuition, rhythm, and situatedness. Pure experience used to be the starting point of Nishida’s early philosophy. In his later philosophy, however, the keyword in Nishida’s philosophy is no longer “experience” but “acting.” It is neither “I think therefore I am” nor “I will therefore I am,” but “I act therefore I am.” As the organ of acting intuition, body is one of the most important philosophical concepts in Nishida’s later philosophy. I shall interpret the philosophy of acting intuition as a phenomenology of rhythm. Also, I shall argue that acting intuition can be understood as a situated action. For Nishida, our body is historical: I am not a knowing body, but an acting body

The Poetic Character of Human Activity: Collected Essays on the Thought of Michael Oakshott is a collection of nine essays by two Oakeshott scholars, most of which explore the meaning of Oakeshott’s pregnant phrase, “the poetic character of human activity” by comparing and contrasting this central idea with similar and opposing ones, in particular those of the Chinese thinkers, Zhuangzi and Confucius, but also of Western thinkers such as Plato, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Common themes addressed include the poetic or non-instrumental aspects of philosophizing, teaching and learning, morality and governance