• Introduction
    In John E. Drabinski & Eric Sean Nelson (eds.), Between Levinas and Heidegger, State University of New York Press. pp. 1-12. 2014.
  •  1
    Heidegger, Formal Indication, and Sexual Difference
    Eksistenz. Philosophical Hermeneutics and Intercultural Philosophy 1 (1): 65-77. 2022.
    This contribution unfolds an existential-ontological response to the question of sexual difference in the context of Heidegger’s formally indicative concept of “Dasein.” The question of Dasein’s “neutrality” concerns how formal indication formalizes, empties, and neutralizes the givenness of factical human existence. Ostensibly “given” biological and anthropological facts, such as sexual difference, are interpreted from an emptied and neutralized perspective that appears abstract and fictional t…Read more
  •  5
    Philosophy remains ensnared between reifying the isolated individual subject and reducing it to the structuring forces of nature and society. Neither strategy appears suitable to the first-person participant perspective of the lived-experience of being a finite, conditional self within the world. This self is experienced as embodied, social, and other-dependent, and as environmentally and perspectivally “my own” such that it potentially resists, rather than reproducing, structural forces. In thi…Read more
  •  15
    Daoism, Practice, and Politics: From Nourishing Life to Ecological Praxis
    Philosophy East and West 73 (3): 792-801. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays…Read more
  •  18
    We think of modern liberalism as the novel product of a world reinvented on a secular basis after 1945. In The Theology of Liberalism, one of the country's most important political theorists argues that we could hardly be more wrong. Eric Nelson contends that the tradition of liberal political philosophy founded by John Rawls is, however unwittingly, the product of ancient theological debates about justice and evil. Once we understand this, he suggests, we can recognize the deep incoherence of v…Read more
  •  12
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Sky Liu, Xiaomei Yang, Canpeng Zhao, Xinyan Jiang, Yong Huang, and Stephen J. Goldberg
    Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 3 (1): 143-165. 2003.
  •  84
    Claire Katz & Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers ; Thomas Bedorf, Andreas Cremonini, Verfehlte Begegnung. Levinas und Sartre als philosophische Zeitgenossen ; Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics ; Pascal Delhom & Alfred Hirsch, Im Angesicht der Anderen. Levinas’ Philosophie des Politischen ; Sharon Todd, Learning from the other: Levinas, psychoanalysis and ethical possibilities in education ; Michel Henry, Le b…Read more
  •  10
    In this chapter, I reexamine how the interpretation of nothingness and negativity in Schopenhauer—within the wider nineteenth-century philosophical context, particularly in reference to his perceived rival Hegel and his heir and critic Nietzsche—informed his encounter with “oriental thought,” his reception of Buddhism as a philosophical and religious system centering on negativity, and trace how he construed the central Buddhist concept of emptiness in the context of Western ideas of nothingness…Read more
  •  21
    Emptiness, negation, and skepticism in Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao
    Asian Philosophy 33 (2): 125-144. 2023.
    This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skep…Read more
  •  2
    European and Chinese philosophy: origins and intersections (edited book)
    with Zhongying Cheng and Linyu Gu
    Wiley. 2013.
    The Journal of Chinese Philosophy initiates this volume on the origins of philosophy and their relations in philosophical languages, be it Chinese or Greek or European as not merely derived from the Greek. Given this understanding we see how a philosophical issue could be discussed significantly from both the European-Western position and the Chinese perspective. Each position and perspective embodies a different historicity and viewpoint as experienced in the vision and pursuit of reality and h…Read more
  •  37
    Schopenhauer, Existential Negativity, and Buddhist Nothingness
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 49 (1): 83-96. 2022.
    Hegel remarked in his discussion of the nothing in the Science of Logic that: “It is well known that in oriental systems, and essentially in Buddhism, nothing, or the void, is the absolute principle.” Schopenhauer commented in a discussion of the joy of death in The World as Will and Representation: “The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes nothing, because our existence is, with reference to that, nothing. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana, …Read more
  •  22
    Existence, Emptiness, and Qi: Leah Kalmanson's Cross-Cultural Existentialism
    Philosophy East and West 72 (1): 278-289. 2022.
    Leah Kalmanson's Cross-Cultural Existentialism offers an original and provocative interpretation of existentialist themes and threads running through classical and modern East Asian Buddhist and Ruist philosophical sources. The book takes its point of departure in existential questions concerning meaningfulness and meaning-formative practices, as articulated in European existentialism and postexistentialism, and traces how these questions are and can be addressed in their own terms in dharmic an…Read more
  •  19
    Jason M. Wirth's Nietzsche and Other Buddhas is a thought-provoking work that lucidly engages elements of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in relation to Buddhist, Kyōto School, and other philosophical sources.This book offers innovative and suggestive strategies for addressing questions of inter- and cross-cultural philosophy in a situation "after comparative philosophy" without an underlying fixed grounding to engage in comparison. Wirth describes in the introduction an interpretive strat…Read more
  •  5
    Intersections Between Chinese and Western Philosophies
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39 (5): 5-9. 2012.
  •  2
    Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39 (5): 10-30. 2012.
    I explore how Heidegger and his successors interpret philosophy as an Occidental enterprise based on a particular understanding of history. In contrast to the dominant monistic paradigm, I return to the plural thinking of Dilthey and Misch, who interpret philosophy as a European and a global phenomenon. This reflects Dilthey’s pluralistic understanding of historical life. Misch developed Dilthey’s insight by demonstrating the multiple origins of philosophy as critical life-reflection in its Gree…Read more
  •  4
    The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the Zhuangzi
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41 (5): 723-739. 2014.
    One critique of the early Daoist texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi is that they neglect the human and lack a proper sense of ethical personhood in maintaining the primacy of an impersonal dehumanizing “way.” This article offers a reconsideration of the appropriateness of such negative evaluations by exploring whether and to what extent the ethical sensibility unfolded in the Zhuangzi is aporetic, naturalistic, and/or religious. As an ethos of cultivating life and free and easy wandering b…Read more
  •  12
    This contribution offers a sympathetic historical and intercultural reflection on Stephen Palmquist’s work Kant and Mysticism. It examines the appropriateness of this portrayal of Kant and mysticism in relation to its historical context, suggesting that Kant is committed to an account of rationality, ethical personhood and a ‘critical ethos’ in tension with mysticism; and the inadequacy of Kant’s understanding of mysticism in the context of South and East Asian philosophical and religious discou…Read more
  •  33
    Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other
    State University of New York Press. 2020.
    Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” mate…Read more
  •  253
    Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically …Read more
  •  4
    Intercultural Difference and Intercultural Critique: A Reply to Jean‐Yves Heurtebise
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy 47 (1-2): 130-134. 2020.
    Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  242
    Carine Defoort, Mario Wenning, and Kai Marchal offer three ways of engaging with Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought and the philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical issues it attempted to articulate and address.1 This work is historical with a contemporary philosophical intent: to reexamine a tumultuous contested epoch of philosophy’s past in order to reconsider its existing limitations and alternative possibilities. One dimension of this book is the in…Read more