30Oct 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Podcast interview: Justyna Weronika Kasza, “Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku”

Podcasts
In literature, evil can appear in a broad spectrum of shapes, images and motifs. For Endō Shūsaku, the problem of evil is central to the reality of human existence, and it has to be accepted as such. In Hermeneutics of Evil in the Works of Endō Shūsaku. Between Reading and Writing (Peter Lang, 2016), Justyna Weronika Kasza starts from the assumption that the notion of evil informs many of Shūsaku’s most renowned novels; on the other hand, she argues that Shūsaku’s body of work should be treated and analyzed as a whole, as his essays and critical texts are in fact complementary to his works of fiction. Kasza’s book is, on the one hand, an attempt to trace Shūsaku’s line of thinking and, on the other hand, to apply certain categories of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics…
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14Oct 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Podcast interview: Ronald P. Loftus, “The Turn Against the Modern”

Podcasts
Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) was a literary critic and thinker who was active from the early 1890s in Meiji period Japan. Not satisfied with the meaning of bunmei kaika (“civilization and enlightenment”), the trajectory that the government had mapped out for the modernization of the country, he called on his readers to question its premises and promises. He found himself drawn to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, but at the same time he turned to ancient Indian and Chinese thought, from the Upanishads to Zhuangzi’s essays. In The Turn Against the Modern: The Critical Essays of Taoka Reiun (1870-1912) (Association for Asian Studies, 2017), Ronald Loftus, professor of Japanese language and East Asian History at Willamette University, retraces Taoka Reiun’s personal and professional life from the point of view of the…
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25Sep 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

CFP: Why the Kyoto School Today?

CFP
WHY THE KYOTO SCHOOL (京都学派) TODAY? The Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy, King’s University College at Western University, announces a call for papers for an upcoming international conference: Why the Kyoto School Today? Date: March 21-24, 2019 Location: King’s University College at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada Plenary Speakers: • Dr. Bret Davis (Loyola University Maryland) • Dr. Rolf Elberfeld (Universität Hildesheim) • Dr. John Krummel (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) • Dr. John Maraldo (University of North Florida) • Dr. Brian Schroeder (Rochester Institute of Technology) • Dr. Mayuko Uehara (Kyoto University) • Dr. Jason Wirth (University Seattle) • Dr. Michiko Yusa (Western Washington University) The so-called Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy arose out of a critical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the European philosophical tradition at the beginning…
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13Jun 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Podcast interview: Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.), “Rethinking Japanese Studies”

Podcasts
Rethinking Japanese Studies. Eurocentrism and the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2018) is co-edited by Kaori Okano and Yoshio Sugimoto. The book tries to look at the discipline of Japanese Studies from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of contexts, starting from the premise that – as the authors put it – Japanese Studies is not the exclusive property of the anglophone world. In the volume, the authors try to answer several key questions:   What variations are there among the academic communities of Japanese Studies in Asia? Is there a local intellectual approach that displays a degree of autonomy from the global scholarship in the English-using world? In what ways have some academic disciplines or approaches been affected by Anglo-Western scholarship to a greater extent than others? Why? What…
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18May 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Philosophy lunches with students

Education
I'm so excited! Today, I just got the final version of the poster for the philosophy lunches I will be doing with my students, and I think the Media Center at the university did a really god job with the design. It's finally happening! I actually came up with the idea for these "philosophy lunches" about half a year ago, but it was the middle of the semester so I decided it would be better to wait for the new academic year. In the mean time, I thought a lot about the format (they were not "lunches" in the beginning), about the texts we would read (Japanese? Western? modern? premodern?), about the topics we would discuss, about how to initiate and moderate the discussions,  etc. etc. etc. My idea was…
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15May 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Sympathies and symphonies

Education
One of the courses I have been teaching for the last couple of years at KUIS is a Creative Writing class - to be more specific, "Creative Thinking, Living and Writing". I was in class the other day, with my students - they were working in groups on creating the plot for a fairy tale. (One of the things we do is to tell different stories in different formats, from fairy tales to manga.) I was walking around the room, observing the interactions within the groups, giving a piece of advice here and there and trying not to interfere too much with the whole process. The task was to take the characters they had created during the previous class, integrate them within the story while at the same time thinking…
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20Apr 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

CFP: 4th ENOJP Conference on Japanese Philosophy

CFP
Call for Papers: 4th ENOJP Conference on Japanese Philosophy *** The 4th European Network of Japanese Philosophy (ENOJP) Conference at University of Hildesheim​, Germany​ (Sept 5–8 2018)  ​​Übergänge – Transitions – 移り渉り: Crossing the Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy *** We encourage applicants to send in proposals for individual presentations or group proposals of 3 presenters to collaborate on a panel together. Papers dealing with the conference theme “Übergänge – Transitions – 移り渉り” are particularly welcome, but papers on other aspects related to Comparative & Japanese Philosophy will also be considered. It is not necessary to adjust your presentation to the general theme in a very strict manner – we want to use the topic in a thought provoking rather than restrictive way! Please feel free to interpret the theme creatively.…
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16Apr 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Japan Guidebook

Books
The Research Institute for Japanese Studies at Kanda University of International Studies has just published Japan Guidebook, the second edition. (You can find the official press release here.)  The guidebook consists of 20 parts with more than 100 short, dictionary-like entries that cover a variety of topics and themes, from basic information about the geographical characteristics of the country to articles focusing on history, art, literature, education, economy, politics, popular culture, etc. It also includes 20 one-page essays that present the topics from a more general, comprehensive perspective. All the entries and essays are bilingual (Japanese / English). The book is the result of a collective effort - all the researchers associated with the Institute contributed - not only articles, but also time, ideas, and energy. It was not always…
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25Mar 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

Book review: “Japanese Environmental Philosophy”

reviews
J. Baird Callicott, James McRae, eds. Japanese Environmental Philosophy. New York Oxford University Press, 2017. xxiii + 310 pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-045633-7. The Oxford University Press website describes Japanese Environmental Philosophy as "an anthology that responds to the environmental problems of the 21st century by drawing from Japanese philosophical traditions to investigate our relationships with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment." This is a fairly accurate description, and if I were to change only one word in it, it would probably be the word "response," as the book does not offer a unitary "response" to the environmental crisis - there is no red thread connecting the essays to combine them in a single, undivided entity (this is not to say that there should be such a red thread).…
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31Jan 2018 by Roman Pașca No Comments

The future is bleak

Education
Finally, Romania has a new government. It's actually the third one since the coalition between PSD (Social Democratic Party) and their junior partner ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats) came into power in December 2016, which is very telling as to the (in)stability of the country's political system. I will just note that both governments so far, even though initially supported by the ruling coalition, were actually ousted when the leaders of the two parties realized that the prime minister's actions had veered away from their own personal agenda. An agenda which prioritizes, for instance, a so-called "reform" of the justice system which would make it almost impossible for corruption cases to make it to court, as well as an increasingly anti-European discourse in which institutions like the European Parliament…
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