Philosophy

Arnold Toynbee, the noted British historian, remarked that the most important event for the West in the twentieth century was to be its encounter with Buddhism.

The paradox of the Zen kōan resists in a significantly different way what Emmanuel Levinas identifies as the totalizing “way of the same.” Zen Buddhism provides a critical insight into faciality that goes beyond Levinas’s fundamentally anthropocentric view and undercuts his refusal of “paganism,” thereby providing the ground for a deeper realization of the ethical relationship between humans and animals. The question at hand is whether there exists a fundamental experience of the “original face” of the animal, which is possible only by way of a direct face-to-face encounter.

One of the great unanswered questions in the history and philosophy of science is why science arose in the West and not in the East. Scholars point to the early technological developments from China such as gunpowder and rockets and wonder how China failed to capitalize on these and other developments to establish a theoretical basis for science, as did western culture. But in these speculations, and they are no more than idle and prejudicial speculations, there is at least an inaccurate presumption if not a dangerous assumption that Chinese and other Eastern philosophies are somehow unscientific, a view which mistakenly places eastern ideas in an inferior position relative to western science.

The category of Agni related items includes everything of a hot, fiery, dry, or parching type,
while Soma-related items are moist, nourishing, soothing, and cooling. Items so classified range from medicinal herbs to mountain ranges to the seasons of the year.

Ecosophy is a broad-based movement that utilizes the findings of ecology as the foundation for philosophical reflection and spiritual practice rooted in environmental activism.

World philosophies are gradually gaining in recognition. Today, philosophers in Southeast Asia can freely construct their regional philosophies without philosophical tyranny of the West. However, this situation has not come so easily. Many Asian and African philosophies have experienced a struggle for acceptance. And even this recognition is limited by selectivity and philosophical fashion centered in Western academia and perpetuated by Western educated eastern intellectuals. This paper attempts to show how regional philosophy in general and Southeast Asian philosophy in particular can be constructed and accepted.

How can comparative philosophy help us to cope with and ideally overcome terror? How can it help us envision a world without terror and the steps toward making such a world a reality? My approach in this paper is to situate the question of terror in the larger context of the question of violence more generally (of which terror is of course a sub-variety) and ultimately in the even larger context of suffering (of which violence is a sub-variety).

​Different from grasping, the gesture of greeting enables openness between the subject and object.  Greeting is an invitation to the abyss within. Meditation is a gaze within that provides an already sublimated energy to thought (Irigaray, 1991, 171). The gaze of the meditating Buddha is not divisive, or incisive, it does not grasp, but wistfully sits, open to existence as it is.  In the realization that nowhere is anything lasting, phenomena appear, exist, and then disappear; gone forever, existing only in the tumultuous caverns of memory. The decrepitude of the material realm, the impermanence of the body, is an “invariable form of variation” (Deleuze, 1994, 2).