This book examines the psychological dimensions of emotions and humour in Buddhism. While there is a wealth of material concerning human emotions related to humour and the mindful management of negative emotions, very little has been written on the theory of Buddhist humour. Uniting both Buddhist and Western philosophy, the author draws upon the theory of 'incongruity humour', espoused by figures such as Kierkegaard, Kant and Hegel and absorbed into the interpretation of humour by the Buddhist monk and former Western philosopher, Nanavira Thero. The author makes extensive use of rich primary sources such as the parables used by Ajahn Brahm while interweaving Western theories and philosophies to illuminate this original study of humour and emotion. This pioneering work will be of interest and value to students and scholars of humour, Buddhist traditions and existentialism more widely.

This edition makes available an entirely new version of Hegel's lectures on the development and scope of world history. Volume I presents Hegel's surviving manuscripts of his introduction to the lectures and the full transcription of the first series of lectures (1822-23). These works treat the core of human history as the inexorable advance towards the establishment of a political state with just institutions-a state that consists of individuals with a free and fully-developed self-consciousness. Hegel interweaves major themes of spirit and culture-including social life, political systems, commerce, art and architecture, religion, and philosophy-with an historical account of peoples, dates, and events. Following spirit's quest for self-realization, the lectures presented here offer an imaginative voyage around the world, from the paternalistic, static realm of China to the cultural traditions of India; the vast but flawed political organization of the Persian Empire to Egypt and then the Orient; and the birth of freedom in the West to the Christian revelation of free political institutions emerging in the medieval and modern Germanic world. Brown and Hodgson's new translation is an essential resource for the English reader, and provides a fascinating account of the world as it was conceived by one of history's most influential philosophers. The Editorial Introduction surveys the history of the texts and provides an analytic summary of them, and editorial footnotes introduce readers to Hegel's many sources and allusions. For the first time an edition is made available that permits critical scholarly study, and translates to the needs of the general reader.

The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology offers clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The chapters in this volume approach the question of how to do philosophy from a wide range of perspectives, including conceptual analysis, critical theory, deconstruction, experimental philosophy, hermeneutics, Kantianism, methodological naturalism, phenomenology, and pragmatism. They explore general conceptions of philosophy, centred on the question of what the point of philosophising might be; the method of conceptual analysis and its recent naturalistic critics and competitors; perspectives from continental philosophy; and also a variety of methodological views that belong neither to the mainstream of analytic philosophy, nor to continental philosophy as commonly conceived. Together they will enable readers to grasp an unusually wide range of approaches to methodological debates in philosophy.

The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology offers clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The chapters in this volume approach the question of how to do philosophy from a wide range of perspectives, including conceptual analysis, critical theory, deconstruction, experimental philosophy, hermeneutics, Kantianism, methodological naturalism, phenomenology, and pragmatism. They explore general conceptions of philosophy, centred on the question of what the point of philosophising might be; the method of conceptual analysis and its recent naturalistic critics and competitors; perspectives from continental philosophy; and also a variety of methodological views that belong neither to the mainstream of analytic philosophy, nor to continental philosophy as commonly conceived. Together they will enable readers to grasp an unusually wide range of approaches to methodological debates in philosophy.

Originally published in 1933, this book was developed from a dissertation written at Cambridge University in 1929. The text provides a concise discussion regarding the nature of value and value theories, taking the view that an understanding of value is 'a no less necessary part of the equipment of every competent philosopher, than is epistemology'. This book will be of importance to anyone with an interest in theories of value and the history of philosophy.

Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education theorizes the equal privileging of ontology and epistemology towards a balanced focus on 'being-becoming' and knowledge acquisition within the field of higher education. In response to the shift in higher education's aims and purposes beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, this book reconsiders higher education and Western subjectivity through southern African (Ubuntu) and Eastern (Buddhist) onto-epistemologies. By mapping these other-than-West ontological viewpoints onto the discourse surrounding higher education, this volume presents a vision of colleges and universities as transformational institutions promoting our shared connection to the human and non-human world, and deepens our understanding of what it means to be a human being.

Kant on Intuition: Western and Asian Perspectives on Transcendental Idealism consists of 20 chapters, many of which feature engagements between Kant and various Asian philosophers. Key themes include the nature of human intuition (not only as theoretical-pure, sensible, and possibly intellectual-but also as relevant to Kant's practical philosophy, aesthetics, the sublime, and even mysticism), the status of Kant's idealism/realism, and Kant's notion of an object. Roughly half of the chapters take a stance on the recent conceptualism/non-conceptualism debate. The chapters are organized into four parts, each with five chapters. Part I explores themes relating primarily to the early sections of Kant's first Critique: three chapters focus mainly on Kant's theory of the "forms of intuition" and/or "formal intuition", especially as illustrated by geometry, while two examine the broader role of intuition in transcendental idealism. Part II continues to examine themes from the Aesthetic but shifts the main focus to the Transcendental Analytic, where the key question challenging interpreters is to determine whether intuition (via sensibility) is ever capable of operating independently from conception (via understanding); each contributor offers a defense of either the conceptualist or the non-conceptualist readings of Kant's text. Part III includes three chapters that explore the relevance of intuition to Kant's theory of the sublime, followed by two that examine challenges that Asian philosophers have raised against Kant's theory of intuition, particularly as it relates to our experience of the supersensible. Finally, Part IV concludes the book with five chapters that explore a range of resonances between Kant and various Asian philosophers and philosophical ideas.

This volume situates Indians in the contemporary world and profiles the major facets of their thought and behaviour; then goes back to trace their roots to ancient thought to see how the past predisposes and the present guides Indians in their everyday life. The volume begins with a conceptual framework showing how the Indian worldview has encompassed and enveloped a variety of ideas and influences from divergent sources. As a result, Indians are both collectivists and individualists, hierarchically oriented while respecting merit and quality, religious as well as secular and sexually indulgent, spiritual as well as materialists, excessively dependent but remarkably entrepreneurial, non-violent in principle but violent in practice and comfortable in shifting between analytical, synthetic as well as intuitive approaches to reality. Such a coexistence of opposites often causes inaction, hesitation and perfunctory action, but also equips Indians to be innovative by continuously aligning their thought and behaviour to the demands of a milieu. The milieu has an inner layer consisting of desh (place), kaal (time) and paatra (person), which are embedded in the larger societal contexts of castes and classes, poverty, corruption, fragmenting politics, conflicts and violence and unfolding global opportunities and challenges. Cultural heritage permeates in all these. Indians function in this tiered, multifactorial, dynamic space. This volume draws evidence from ancient texts and the latest national and international research, many of which were conducted by the author and his associates. It does not, however, hesitate to indulge in anecdotal evidence, cases and speculative ideas in order to complete the picture. The author takes an in-depth view of the Indian mindset without getting the reader lost in either the intricacies of ancient philosophical abyss or the trivialities of present-day non-events.

In Eliminativism, Objects, and Persons, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that he doesn't exist. In this book, he also defends the view that this book itself doesn't exist. But this did not prevent him to write the book, and although in Benovsky's view you don't exist either, this does not prevent you to read it. Benovsky defends a brand of non-exceptionalist eliminativism. Some eliminativists, typically focusing on ordinary material objects such as chairs and hammers, make exceptions, for instance for blue whales (that is, living beings) or for persons (that is, conscious organisms). Benovsky takes one by one all types of allegedly existing objects like chairs, whales, and persons and shows that from the metaphysical point of view they are more trouble than they are worth-we are much better off without them. He thus defends an eliminativist view about ordinary objects as well as the 'no-Self' view, where he explores connections between metaphysics, phenomenology, and Buddhist thought. He then also considers the case of aesthetic objects, focusing on musical works and photographs, and shows that the claim of their non-existence solves the many problems that arise when one tries to find an appropriate ontological category for them, and that such an eliminativist view is more natural than what we might have thought. The arguments provided here are always topic-specific: each type of entity is given its own type of treatment, thus proving a varied and solid foundation for a generalized, non-exceptionalist, full-blown eliminativist worldview.

Sanchez and Sanchez have selected, edited, translated, and introduced some of the most influential texts in Mexican philosophy, which constitute a unique and robust tradition that will challenge and complicate traditional conceptions of philosophy. The texts collected here are organized chronologically and represent a period of Mexican thought and culture that emerged from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and which culminated in la filosofia de lo mexicano (the philosophy of Mexicanness). Though the selections reflect on a variety of philosophical questions, collectively they represent a growing tendency to take seriously the question of Mexican national identity as a philosophical question-especially given the complexities of Mexico's indigenous and European ancestries, a history of colonialism, and a growing dependency on foreign money and culture. More than an attempt to describe the national character, however, the texts gathered here represent an optimistic period in Mexican philosophy that aimed to affirm Mexican culture and philosophy as a valuable, if not urgent, contribution to universal culture.

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers-including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond-to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science.

Western philosophy and science are responsible for constructing some powerful tools of investigation, aiming at discovering the truth, delivering robust explanations, verifying conjectures, showing that inferences are sound and demonstrating results conclusively. By contrast reasoning that depends on analogies has often been viewed with suspicion. Professor Lloyd first explores the origins of those Western ideals, criticises some of their excesses and redresses the balance in favour of looser, admittedly non-demonstrative analogical reasoning. For this he takes examples both from ancient Greek and Chinese thought and from the materials of recent ethnography to show how different ancient and modern cultures have developed different styles of reasoning. He also develops two original but controversial ideas, that of semantic stretch (to cast doubt on the literal/metaphorical dichotomy) and the multidimensionality of reality (to bypass the realism versus relativism and nature versus nurture controversies).

This book assesses the rapid transformation of the political agency of religious groups within transnational civil society under the conditions of globalization that have weakened the sovereign nation-state. It offers a comprehensive synthesis of the parallel resurgences of Jasper's axial thesis from the distinct lines of research initiated by Eisenstadt, Habermas, Taylor, Bellah, and others. It explores the concept of cosmoipolitanism from the combined perspectives of sociology of religion, critical theory, secularization theory, and evolutionary cultural anthropology. At the theoretical level, cosmoipolitanism prescribes how local, national, transnational, global, and virtual spaces ought publically to engage in transcivilizational discourse without presuming secular assumptions tied to cosmopolitanism. As a transnational extension of the moral-ethical universality of the great Axial Age traditions, cosmoipolitanism provides an ideal description of empirical data. Employing the insights of critical theory, this book offers a micro-level analysis of the pragmatics of discourse of each of the major axial traditions producing a genealogy in iterated stages of the dialectics of secularization as a multi-faceted narrative of the role of religion in alternative modernities. While circumscribing the particular historical limits of each tradition, the book extends their internal claims to species universality in light of the potential for boundless communication Jaspers saw as initiated with the Axial Age. In Jon Bowman's novel and important work, he rethinks the challenges of global justice. Bowman is not just concerned with global justice in the modern world, but with a genealogy that begins with a better understanding of the Axial age, one that is also the unique signature of cosmoi-political institutions. Arguing with depth and precision, Bowman challenges Kantian and Rawlsian universalism. His argument provides a new interpretation of cosmopolitan justice as he explores the deeper roots of cosmopolitan justice. James Bohman Saint Louis University Jon Bowman's Cosmoipolitan Justice is an important, innovative and timely work. Construing globality in terms of pervasive conditions of worldwide interdependence, Bowman advances a decidedly pluralistic account of cosmopolitanism, one uniquely shaped by recent theories of multiple modernities. His analysis is sustained by a highly informed appropriation of such diverse thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Abudullah An-Naim, Talad Asad, Schmuel Eisenstadt, Jurgen Habermas, Karl Jaspers, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Charles Taylor. One special feature is the book's synthesis of research on global governance with that on post-secularity and the place of religion in the public sphere. On this basis Bowman presents a distinctive account of the world's axial religions, one underwriting a multi-polar, intercultural global public realm able to address social, political, and economic issues confronting the global community today. This book should be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, political theory, international relations, sociology, and religious studies. Professor Andrew Buchwalter Department of Philosophy University of North Florida

Originally published in 1934, and undertaken at the suggestion of Sayajirao Gaekwad III, then Maharajah of Baroda, this book examines the similarities and differences of ethical traditions in the East and the West. Saunders uses Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew and Christian texts to compare and contrast each system with the others, noting that 'East and West must cease from provincialism in a world now made one'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in comparative religion and in the history of Western reception of Eastern ideas.

The critical condition and historical motivation behind Time Studies The concept of time in the post-millennial age is undergoing a radical rethinking within the humanities. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present newly theorizes our experiences of time in relation to developments in post-1945 cultural theory and arts practices. Wide ranging and theoretically provocative, the volume introduces readers to cutting-edge temporal conceptualizations and investigates what exactly constitutes the scope of time studies. Featuring twenty essays that reveal what we talk about when we talk about time today, especially in the areas of history, measurement, and culture, each essay pairs two keywords to explore the tension and nuances between them, from "past/future" and "anticipation/unexpected" to "extinction/adaptation" and "serial/simultaneous." Moving beyond the truisms of postmodernism, the collection newly theorizes the meanings of temporality in relationship to aesthetic, cultural, technological, and economic developments in the postwar period. This book thus assumes that time-not space, as the postmoderns had it-is central to the contemporary period, and that through it we can come to terms with what contemporaneity can be for human beings caught up in the historical present. In the end, Time reveals that the present is a cultural matrix in which overlapping temporalities condition and compete for our attention. Thus each pair of terms presents two temporalities, yielding a generative account of the time, or times, in which we live.

The present collection of writings on postcolonial philosophy of religion takes its origins from a Philosophy of Religion session during the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in New Orleans. Three presentations, by Purushottama Bilimoria, Andrew B. Irvine, and Bhibuti Yadav, were to be offered at the session, with Thomas Dean presiding and Kenneth Surin responding. (Yadav, unfortunately could not be present because of illness. ) This was the ?rst AAR session ever to examine issues in the study of religion under the rubric of the postcolonial turn in academia. Interest at the session was intense. For instance, Richard King, then at work on the manuscriptof the landmark Orientalism and Religion, was present; so, too, was Paul J. Grif?ths, whose s- sequent work on interreligious engagement has been so noteworthy. In response to numerous audience appeals, revised versions of the presentations eventually were published, as a "Dedicated Symposium on 'Subalternity'," in volume 39 no. 1 (2000) of Sophia, the international journal for philosophy of religion, metaphysical theology and ethics. Since that time, the importance of the nexus of religion and the postcolonial has become increasingly patent not only to philosophers of religion but to students of religion across the range of disciplines and methodologies. The increased inter- tionalization of the program of the American Academy of Religion, especially in more recent years, is a signi?cant outgrowth of this transformation in conscio- ness among students of religion.

In this innovative volume contemporary philosophers respond to classic works of Jewish philosophy. For each of twelve central topics in Jewish philosophy, Jewish philosophical readings, drawn from the medieval period through the twentieth century, appear alongside an invited contribution that engages both the readings and the contemporary philosophical literature in a constructive dialogue. The twelve topics are organized into four sections, and each section commences with an overview of the ensuing dialogue and concludes with a list of further readings. The introduction to the volume assesses the current state of Jewish philosophy and argues for a deeper engagement with analytic philosophy, exemplified by the new contributions. Jewish Philosophy Past and Present: Contemporary Responses to Classical Sources is a cutting edge work of Jewish philosophy, and, at the same time, an engaging introduction to the issues that animated Jewish philosophers for centuries and to the texts that they have produced. It is designed to set the agenda in Jewish philosophy for years to come.

The role of women in Islamic societies, not to mention in the religion itself, is a defining issue. It is also one that remains resistant to universal dogma, with a wide range of responses to women's social roles across the Islamic world. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the editor of this volume has assembled the latest research on the issue, which combines contemporary with historical data. The material comes from around the world as well as from Muslim and non-Muslim researchers. It takes in work from majority Muslim nations such as Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey, as well as countries with troubled interfaith relations such as India and Israel. Nations with minority Muslim populations such as France, the UK, Canada and Australia, are also represented. The work also features varying Islamic sub-groups such as the two main ones, Sunni and Shi'a, as well as less well known populations such as the Ismaili Muslims. In each case, the work is underpinned by the very latest socio-theological insights and empirical data.

This collection of essays assumes the main thesis of Constructive Realism: reality is created. In this volume, it is constructed by authors from various scientific disciplines and very different cultures. The Festschrift is dedicated to the founder of this philosophical approach, Professor Dr. Friedrich Wallner (University of Vienna), in celebration of his 70th birthday. Dieser Sammelband geht von der Hauptthese des Konstruktiven Realismus aus - wir konstruieren Realitat. Hier wird sie von Autoren aus verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen und sehr unterschiedlichen Kulturen aufgebaut. Dem Grunder des philosophischen Ansatzes Professor Dr. Friedrich Wallner (Universitat Wien) ist diese Festschrift anlasslich seines 70. Geburtstags gewidmet.

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word 'know' and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of "S knows that p," or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true that S knows that p, or whether saying "S knows that p" is false, deviant, etc. in that situation. However, English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world, and is the native language of less than 6% of the world's population. When Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not even exist. So why should we think that facts about the English word "know," the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of "S knows that p" have important implications for epistemology? Are the properties of the English word "know" and the English sentence 'S knows that p' shared by their translations in most or all languages? If that turned out to be true, it would be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation. But if it turned out to be false, what are the implications for epistemology? Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not? In what ways do the concepts expressed by 'know' and its counterparts in different languages differ? And what should epistemologists make of all this? The papers collected here discuss these questions and related issues, and aim to contribute to this important topic and epistemology in general.

The polemic excited by Batouala's controversial Preface has conditioned an enduring, near-universal acceptance of a disjunction of Preface and novel. This is the first book to challenge that premise. The fallacious underpinnings of the origin persistence of this view are shown to lie in Western, dichotomously structured thinking. Through offshoots of the civilised-versus-savage dichotomy, namely oral-versus-written, form-versus-content and music-versus-narrative, Batouala's Signifyin(g) discourse spills beyond the novel's borders to reveal the sterility of dichotomy as a conceptualising structure. Dichotomy's anachronism is thrust upon it through the work's faithful representation of African ontology, whose water-inspired philosophy precludes it. Batouala's structural basis is compared with that of jazz, which similarly bridges European and African civilisations, and whose African philosophical stance also acts as a provocation to the dichotomous thinking model. As Batouala "Fixed" transmutes to Batouala "Free", the pejorative implications of its widely touted ambiguity evaporate to expose a novel that is both lucid and coherent when viewed as jazz-text and jazz performance.

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what Jewish philosophy is or could be. The idea of Jewish philosophy begs the question of philosophy as such. But "Jewish philosophy" does not just reflect what "philosophy" lacks. Rather, it challenges the project of philosophy itself. Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, the book highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their "Jewish questions" inform the rethinking of philosophy's disciplinarity in principal terms. The long overdue recognition of the modernity that informs the critical trajectories of Jewish philosophers from Spinoza and Mendelssohn to the present emancipates not just "Jewish philosophy" from an infelicitous pigeonhole these philosophers so pointedly sought to reject but, more important, emancipates philosophy from its false claims to universalism.

The unforeseeably complex socio-economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century must be tackled by placing faith in the power of mankind to integrate established wisdom and new knowledge, and in our ability to collaborate for a sustainable future. Departing from this, a global 2011 conference debating papers devoted to the impact of ancient philosophy, focusing on Confucius and Aristotle, in modern leadership and management was organized by Hanban, the Athens University of Economics & Business, and the University of International Economics & Business, Beijing, China. A rich sourcebook for a broad audience, this unique volume presents the wide array of conference contributions by international thought-leaders. Departing from a foundation of general concepts of ethics and leadership the book then delves into questions about how philosophy shape emerging economic and business systems, to end with direct lessons from ancient philosophy for contemporary business challenges.

There seems to have been a view that different cultures experience happiness differently. The West is considered materialistic, and happiness comes from achievement and acquisition. The East is said to be more people-oriented, where happiness is a result of deep personal interactions. Thus, poor people can be happier in the East than the West, because they are not so concerned with possession and more with society. It is certainly true that people experience happiness differently. Some people are resilient, and can put difficult times behind them easily; others cling to sorrow and hard times. Some are philosophically inclined to accept their situation the glass is half full not half empty. Whether this is a matter of culture or personality is hard to gauge; most likely it is a combination of both. This book will explore notions of happiness in different non-Western cultures. Some of the essays will do some comparison with the East, but I have tried to keep the essays culture-specific when possible. There are also some cross-cultural essays and some philosophical and scientific studies that are not related to one culture only. There are some obvious problems. Most obvious is the fact that no political state has one culture. In a country the size of China, almost any explanation of one group might not apply to another. I have tried to include a few chapters on China to correct for this. This is even the case in a country as small as Bhutan; there is a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu people in the country, and there ideas of what makes one happy could be quite different. In South America, there is more likely a connection between mountain dwellers in different nations and rainforest dwellers than with, say, all Peruvians."

The yearbook Zutot serves as a platform for small but incisive contributions, and provides them with a distinct context. The substance of these contributions is derived from larger perspectives and, though not always presented in an exhaustive way, will have an impact on contemporary discussions.