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48Revisiting the Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the Frankfurt SchoolTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2011 (155): 105-126. 2011.As a contribution to a critical yet responsive materialist ethics of environments and animals, I reexamine the significance of nature and animals in the critical social theory of Theodor Adorno. In response to the anthropocentric primacy of intersubjective discourse and recognition in recent figures associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Habermas and Honneth, I argue for the ecological import of the aporetic dialectic of nature and society diagnosed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of…Read more
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31WILHELM DILTHEY, JOHN STUART MILL, AND THE LOGIC OF THE HUMAN SCIENCESRev. Roum. Philosophie 68 (1): 103-123. 2024.
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51Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū: Nothingness, Emptiness, and the ThingAsian Studies · Azijske Študije 11 (1): 27-50. 2023.
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Self-Awareness and Nothingness: Wang Yangming, Wang Ji, and Existential ConfucianismIn Kevin Aho, Megan Altman & Hans Pedersen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism, Routledge. 2024.
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43Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material OtherState University of New York Press. 2020.PDF with introduction and front and back materials. Abstract: A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book unfolds 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…Read more
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304Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing LifeRoutledge. 2020.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
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84Interpreting Dilthey: Critical Essays (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2019.PDF includes the introduction. Abstract: In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thou…Read more
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103Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, FreedomBloomsbury. 2023.What did Heidegger learn and fail to learn from Laozi and Zhuangzi? This book reconstructs Heidegger's philosophy through its engagement with Daoist and Asian philosophy and offers a Daoist transformation of Heidegger on things, nothingness, and freedom. PDF includes the introduction, bibliography, and index.
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6IntroductionIn John E. Drabinski & Eric Sean Nelson (eds.), Between Levinas and Heidegger, State University of New York Press. pp. 1-12. 2014.
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Liberalizing second nature : McDowell, Dilthey, and the sociality of reasonIn Daniel Martin Feige & Thomas J. Spiegel (eds.), McDowell and the hermeneutic tradition, Routledge. 2023.
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51Heidegger, Formal Indication, and Sexual DifferenceEksistenz. 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
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10Individuation and Self-Awareness in Wilhelm DiltheyIn Saulius Geniusas (ed.), Varieties of Self-Awareness: New Perspectives from Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Comparative Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 135-152. 2023.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
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23Daoism, Practice, and Politics: From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisPhilosophy 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
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33Emptiness, negation, and skepticism in Nāgārjuna and SengzhaoAsian 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
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5European and Chinese philosophy: origins and intersections (edited book)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
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Emptying ecology : Chan Buddhist antinomianism and environmental ethicsIn Hiroshi Abe, Matthias Fritsch & Mario Wenning (eds.), Environmental Philosophy and East Asia: Nature, Time, Responsibility, Routledge. 2022.
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14Orientalisme, occidentalisme et universalisme: Histoire et méthode des représentations croisées entre mondes européens et chinois, written by Jean-Yves HeurtebiseJournal of Chinese Philosophy 49 (1): 107-110. 2022.
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48Schopenhauer, Existential Negativity, and Buddhist NothingnessJournal 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
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26Existence, Emptiness, and Qi: Leah Kalmanson's Cross-Cultural ExistentialismPhilosophy 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
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20Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and European Buddhism: Reflections on Nietzsche and Other Buddhas by Jason M. WirthPhilosophy East and West 71 (4): 1082-1093. 2021.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
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5Intersections Between Chinese and Western PhilosophiesJournal of Chinese Philosophy 39 (5): 5-9. 2012.
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4Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of PhilosophyJournal 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
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5The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the ZhuangziJournal 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
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22Critical Mysticism or Critical Ethos? Intercultural Reflections on Stephen Palmquist’s Kant and MysticismKantian Review 26 (1): 119-127. 2021.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
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584Overcoming Naturalism from Within: Dilthey, Nature, and the Human SciencesIn Babette Babich (ed.), Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science: Introduction, De Gruyter. pp. 89-108. 2017.
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770Zhang Junmai’s Early Political Philosophy and the Paradoxes of Chinese ModernityAsian Studies 8 (1): 183-208. 2020.
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5Intercultural Difference and Intercultural Critique: A Reply to Jean‐Yves HeurtebiseJournal of Chinese Philosophy 47 (1-2): 130-134. 2020.Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.
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293Intercultural Philosophy and Intercultural Hermeneutics: A Response to Defoort, Wenning, and MarchalPhilosophy East and West 70 (1): 247-259. 2020.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
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