Taking a cue from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is widely known as "the first American public intellectual," this essay is an attempt to define the critical function of comparative political philosophy in today's world of multiculturalism in the era of globalization which is in dire need of dialogue on a global scale. In the first place, Western modernity has overlooked and marginalized the non-West, the phenomenon of which is called Eurocentrism. All ethnocentrisms, including Eurocentrism, are myopic and have no place in the globalizing world of multiculturalism. This essay proposes that Eurocentric universality be replaced by transversality which is consonant with the multiple realities of the changing world. Transversality as a global imaginary allows all kinds of border-crossing and thus blurs traditional disciplinary genres. Thus it is at once intercultural, interspeciesistic, and interdisciplinary. In the second place, the role of comparative political philosophy radically shifts from the individualistic and anthropocentric tradition of "rights talk" to the ethics of responsibility based on the primacy of alterity. If, according to Levinas, ethics is "first philosophy," then responsibility becomes "first ethics."
The eastern and western philosophies have elaborated greatly on the issue of conflict, conflict resolution, development, war, peace, etc. The common axis in many of the theories is the human factor, the way the individual perceives and is affected by these phenomena. In these theories there is an attempt to establish a working connection between the practical and the ideal. While conflict can be either a basis for societal development or non development, it also substantiates a perspective for the existence of values which are eventually intrinsic to political and moral improvements. Such values aim at the direction of prosperity and well- being, which remains an ecumenical and diachronic problem, not only under economic terms. Human societies are still faced with the dilemma, whether material progress is the fast track to the resolution on conflict. However, what is still disregarded, as shown in comparative philosophical literature, is that development has to take into consideration a richer notion of the human being; one concerned with elements of his inner reality. In that sense, development is the aftermath not only of the avoidance of war or conflict but of the enrichment of human life and action with certain advancements in individual and collective virtues, advancements that offer macroscopically benefit to the political. ; U istočnoj i zapadnoj filozofiji uveliko su razmatrana pitanja sukoba, rešavanja sukoba, razvoja, rata, mira itd. Uobičajena osa mnogih teorija jeste ljudski faktor, način na koji individua sagledava te fenomene i način na koji oni utiču na nju. U tim teorijama postoji pokušaj uspostavljanja radne veze između onoga praktičkog i onoga idealnog. Dok sukob može biti osnov ili za društveni razvoj ili za nerazvijanje, on takođe potvrđuje perspektivu o postojanju vrednosti koje su na koncu intrinzične moralnim i političkim poboljšanjima. Takve vrednosti za cilj imaju usmerenje prosperiteta i blagostanja, koje ostaje ekumenski i dijahronijski problem, i to ne samo u ekonomskom smislu. Ljudska društva su još uvek suočena s dilemom da li je materijalni napredak prečica za razrešenje sukoba. Ono što je, međutim, još uvek zanemareno, kao što je pokazano u komparativno-filozofskoj literaturi, jeste to što razvoj u obzir mora uzeti bogatiji pojam ljudskog bića; onaj koji brine o elementima njegove unutrašnje stvarnosti. U tom smislu, razvoj nije samo posledica izbegavanja rata ili sukoba, nego bogaćenja ljudskog života i čina praćenog izvesnim unapređenjima u individualnoj i kolektivnoj vrlini, unapređenjima koja nude makroskopsku dobit onome političkom.
The purpose of this study is to identify the similarities and differences between the political philosophy ofPlato and political philosophy of Aristotle. Such comparative study is very important for politicalthought in general. The main significance of this paper is the precise meaning of the political philosophyof Plato and political philosophy of Aristotle, as well as the meaning of differences and similarities.Often, Plato's political ideas appear as Aristotle political ideas, and Aristotle's political ideas appear asPlato's political ideas. The main method of study in this paper is the comparison method. The ancientpolitical debate between Plato and Aristotle is important to modern political philosophy as it is the basisof modern political theories. The data for paper are taken from the books of these two authors. Thepolitical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, although they have similarities in some points, but differ inmany other issues, such as: different categories of political analysis, different methodologies of policystudy, and different reasons for state creation, different opinions why democracy is a bad form ofgovernment and why aristocracy is the right form.
The creativity of Spengler and the ambiguity of his theory have caused and continue to cause profound interest, as well as fierce debates. Spengler introduced his cultural historical doctrine in the book "The Decline of the West", in which he sought to reflect all the diversity of historical metamorphoses of humanity. His advanced concept of high cultures allowed him to approach the analysis of contemporary political processes from a historical perspective. "The Decline of the West" has already become an integral part of the European spiritual culture. This paper attempts to analyze Spengler's philosophy of history. During the research, the authors have used the comparative-historical method, the methodology of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as the integrative anthropological approach.
This comparative education article explores the purpose of education in the Indonesian context. My aim is to see if there are any differences between the purpose of education during the colonial era and present-day Indonesia. In order to do that, I draw mostly on the philosophy of Ki Hadjar Dewantara, who is regarded as the father of Indonesian education. This article is particularly relevant because the Indonesian government has recently started to critically re-examine two of the educational concepts proposed by Dewantara, which are "pendidikan karakter" (character education) and "merdeka belajar" (independent learning). In conceptualising education, Dewantara, who was influenced by Tagore, Montessori, and Fröbel, saw the importance of imparting local wisdom and values ignored by the colonial schools. Therefore, in this article, I will compare his educational views with the Dutch view of schooling during the colonial era. I will then look at Indonesia's current approach to education to find the similarities and differences of purpose relative to Dewantara's views of education. In this article, I argue that Dewantara's philosophy is still very much relevant today. I conclude that the Indonesian government should refer back to its history when defining education for its next generation.
Derrida's philosophical understanding of justice and "messianic," which Derrida considers "undeconstructible," serves as a hermeneutical key to the transcendence to the singular other. This approach enables him to propose a radically different understanding of certain conventional themes like forgiveness, gift, hospitality etc., which is both desirable and imperative in present day's global situation. Derrida's deconstruction is therefore an invitation to transcend all possible and visible horizons in order to ensure a world without boundaries where in every singular other can retain the meaning of his very being. If Derrida's deconstruction insists on transcendence as that which motivates the "creation" of a world without boundaries, a just world for every singular other, the Tamil Saiva tradition, believed to have its roots already in the 5th century BCE and philosophically established since 6th century CE, surprisingly arrives at the same objective as Derrida, that is, a world beyond boundaries. Already in the classical period of Tamil philosophical literature (Sangam between 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE), Kanniyan Poonkonranar has expressed this desire in the form of poetry: "Yadhum Ouré; Yavarum Kélir," "Every town is ours and every person belongs to our family." This radical boundary breaking vision is well-developed by Tirumular, a Tamil Saiva Saint (Tamil Saiva siddha) in the 6th century CE in his Tirumantiram (sacred prayers) consisting of more than 3000 poems. Such a radical vision beyond boundaries is an interesting area of convergence between Derrida's philosophical thinking and that of Tamil Saiva philosophical tradition, notably that of Tirumular. However, Tirumular, while underscoring the importance of transcending visible horizons has insisted on an inward journey of the consciousness through spiritual means of Yoga. Our task is to first penetrate into Derrida's philosophical venture: to raise questions with which he grapples and for which he seeks responses, by entering his "life world" to borrow a term from Habermas. This research is an attempt to make a comparative study of two philosophical heritage, one of Derrida and the other of Tirumular ; Dans la philosophie de Derrida, « déconstruction » signifie, entre autres, découverte de l'autre, négligé, oublié ou poussé à la périphérie. Derrida tient que la justice et le « messianique », en tant que clés d'une transcendance vers tout autre, ne peuvent pas être déconstruits. Cette approche lui permet de traiter d'une manière radicalement nouvelle des thèmes conventionnels comme le pardon, le don, l'hospitalité, etc., souhaitables et impératifs dans un monde déchiré par des divisions de toutes sortes, soutenues par des oppositions binaires où le premier élément de chaque binôme exerce sa domination sur le second. Il est étonnant de découvrir que la tradition sivaïte tamoule que l'on croit remonter au IIe siècle avant J.-C., et qui commença à se formuler philosophiquement au VIe siècle, a un même objectif : un monde ouvert dépassant les frontières. Déjà à l'époque classique de la littérature philosophique tamoule (l'époque du sangam, du IIe siècle), Kanniyan Poonkonranar exprima ce désir sous forme poétique: « Yadhum ouré; yavarum kélir », « nous sommes tous du même village et de la même famille ». Cette vision radicale qui veut briser l'horizon est bien développée par Tirumular, saint shivaïte tamoul (saiva siddha) du VIe siècle, dans son Tirumantiram (prières sacrées) composé de 3000 poésies. Cependant, en soulignant qu'il est important de dépasser les frontières, Tirumular ne cesse d'affirmer le rôle central d'une expérience mystique de l'immanence dans la conscience par les chemins du yoga. Une telle vision « au-delà des frontières » est notamment un point de convergence entre la pensée philosophique de Derrida et celle de la tradition philosophique du sivaïsme tamoul, et particulièrement celle de Tirumular. Cette idée d'un monde ouvert est-elle une utopie ou une invitation à la sagesse ? L'issue serait-elle la « déconstruction » ? Quel pourrait être, en la matière, le rapport entre la tradition indienne et la philosophie occidentale dans sa version contemporaine ? Notre tâche consiste à pénétrer la réflexion philosophique occidentale, en interrogeant la pensée de Derrida touchant cette ouverture. Cela nous permet d'entrer dans les traditions qui l'ont formé et celles qui ont été initiées par sa pensée. Cette recherche est aussi un approfondissement de la philosophie de Tirumular. C'est une étude comparative entre deux pensées, l'une occidentale et l'autre indienne
Derrida's philosophical understanding of justice and "messianic," which Derrida considers "undeconstructible," serves as a hermeneutical key to the transcendence to the singular other. This approach enables him to propose a radically different understanding of certain conventional themes like forgiveness, gift, hospitality etc., which is both desirable and imperative in present day's global situation. Derrida's deconstruction is therefore an invitation to transcend all possible and visible horizons in order to ensure a world without boundaries where in every singular other can retain the meaning of his very being. If Derrida's deconstruction insists on transcendence as that which motivates the "creation" of a world without boundaries, a just world for every singular other, the Tamil Saiva tradition, believed to have its roots already in the 5th century BCE and philosophically established since 6th century CE, surprisingly arrives at the same objective as Derrida, that is, a world beyond boundaries. Already in the classical period of Tamil philosophical literature (Sangam between 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE), Kanniyan Poonkonranar has expressed this desire in the form of poetry: "Yadhum Ouré; Yavarum Kélir," "Every town is ours and every person belongs to our family." This radical boundary breaking vision is well-developed by Tirumular, a Tamil Saiva Saint (Tamil Saiva siddha) in the 6th century CE in his Tirumantiram (sacred prayers) consisting of more than 3000 poems. Such a radical vision beyond boundaries is an interesting area of convergence between Derrida's philosophical thinking and that of Tamil Saiva philosophical tradition, notably that of Tirumular. However, Tirumular, while underscoring the importance of transcending visible horizons has insisted on an inward journey of the consciousness through spiritual means of Yoga. Our task is to first penetrate into Derrida's philosophical venture: to raise questions with which he grapples and for which he seeks responses, by entering his "life world" to ...
This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized and organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations or peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shintō, and Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, and political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language and of the Japanese tradition of writing "world histories of philosophy." As a first step towards a "history of the historiography of philosophy" in non-European languages, we hope that this guide will provide a useful tool for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective.
Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky is a collection of essays with a broad interdisciplinary focus. It includes contributions by leading Dostoevsky scholars, social scientists, scholars of religion and philosophy. The volume considers aesthetics, philosophy, theology, and science of the 19th century Russia and the West that might have informed Dostoevsky's thought and art. Issues such as evolutionary theory and literature, science and society, scientific and theological components of comparative intellectual history, and aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century Russia form the core of the intellectual framework of this book. Dostoevsky's oeuvre with its wide-ranging interests and engagement with philosophical, religious, political, economic, and scientific discourses of his time emerges as a particularly important case for the study of cross-fertilization among disciplines.
Marino & Merskin's comprehensive review of cognitive complexity in sheep is a laudable and important contribution to comparative psychology. It is also valuable because it shows promising directions for future research on this neglected species. The relatively small number of neurons in the bovid cerebral cortex indicates that sheep cognitive performance on traditional measures of complex learning is limited. Nevertheless, the social and emotional complexity of sheep underscores the importance of further research into domains including personality and psychological well-being.
Commentators Washington (2019) and Tiffin (2019) point out that the individual vs. collective dichotomy is much more complex than what is considered in the target article. This commentary will focus on why individuals are more important than collectives. Species differences in cognition and emotional processes and individuals' feelings and experiences need to be taken into account.
Ecocriticism started out in the early 1990s in the framework of American literary studies - in the Anglo sense that equates "America" with the "United States." In fact, the new field's first professional organization, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, was founded as an offshoot of academic interest focused on a particular region of the United States, in the backroom of a casino in Reno, Nevada, during the 1992 annual convention of the Western Literature Association. During its first decade, the bulk of ecocritical attention focused on American literature as shaped by Thoreau and British literature as shaped by Wordsworth - a limited but powerful concentration on nature writing in the genres of poetry, nonfiction prose, and the noveI, with particular attention to Native American literature. By the turn of the millennium, in a story that has by now been told repeatedly, interest in the literature-environment nexus had grown and diversified enough that ecocriticism almost literally exploded into a much broader research area encompassing multiple historical periods (from the Middle Ages to postmodernism), genres (from poetry to the graphic novel and narrative film), and regions: the Caribbean, Latin America, East Asia, and Western Europe all emerged as new areas of ecocritical exploration. New encounters between postcolonial theory and ecocritical analysis proved particularly productive for both fields: linking historical exploration and political ecology with literary analysis, the emergent "poco-eco" matrix opened new perspectives on the connections and disjunctures between imperialism, ecological crisis, and conservation. Over the last few years, the concept of "Environmental Humanities" has increasingly co me to accompany and to superimpose itself as an umbrella term on ecocriticism and comparable research areas in neighboring disciplines: environmental history, environmental anthropology, environmental philosophy, cultural geography, and political ecology. Driven by the impulse to connect environmental research across the humanities, to justify humanistic research at institutions often prone to cut first in the humanities, and to bring the knowledge generated through humanistic research into the public sphere, environmentally oriented scholars have used the term "Environmental Humanities" as a shorthand for what they hope will be a new vision of their discipline. As of this writing, the concept remains somewhat more aspirational than real. While ecocritics and environmental philosophers have long collaborated in Australia, and environmental historians and ecocritics sometimes collaborate in the United States, the disciplines that make up the Environmental Humanities have to date largely pursued their own disciplinary trajectories. But there are signs that the tide may have begun to turn. Various universities and research organizations have started programs in the field. The Swedish environmental historian Sverker Sörlin published a brief outline of the new interdisciplinary matrix in the journal 'BioScience' in 2012, and a longer manifesto followed from the editorial collective of the newly established journal 'Environmental Humanities' at Macquarie University in Australia (Rose et al. 2012). Another journal focusing on the environmental humanities began publication in early 2014 from the University of Oregon under the title 'Resilience'.
This dissertation assesses the relevance of Georges Bataille's philosophy for film studies and explores the conjunction between the political and the erotic operative in his work. It is widely held that, at the time of the German occupation of France, Bataille experienced the "inward turn," which had marked his transformation from being a political activist to a solitary philosopher preoccupied with eroticism. My project contests the view that he had lost interest in politics at that point as it discloses the political dimension of erotic experience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the logic of the "inward turn" helps to illuminate the work of Japanese New Wave film movement of the 1960s. What precipitates the "inward turn" is the experience of disappointment. In Bataille's case, it stems from the rise of fascism in Europe and the failure of the Left to assume power in France. In the case of Japanese New Wave, it has roots in the political protest movement that opposed yet ultimately failed to offset the renewal of the Japan-U.S. Mutual Security Pact of 1960. In each case, the turn towards eroticism constitutes a different kind of refusal - an act of separation from the social order as opposed to an act of destruction, a movement away from the community of militants and towards the community of lovers.
Michael Howard takes the title of his recent essay, The Invention of Peace, from the nineteenth-century jurist and historian of comparative law Henry Maine, who wrote that "war appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modem invention."' We moderns tend to assume that the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were aberrant eruptions marring the peaceful status quo, but the opposite better describes the long view. Outside the Garden of Eden, human communities have always been involved in political conflict and that conflict has regularly escalated to the use of lethal force, both within the community and between communities. The ways in which peoples have both justified and constrained the use of such force are windows into how they see themselves and the other peoples with whom they share, often reluctantly, the world around them. To watch the changes that develop in even a single society's understanding of war is to watch that society being born and reborn. To juxtapose different societies and their distinct ways of understanding war, as Clifford Geertz once said of anthropology, is "not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said." In this introduction I want to do three things. First, I plan to sketch the ways in which the ancient Greeks and their legatees discussed the restraint of war. Second, I will provide a sketch of contemporary just war thinking. Finally, I want to make some suggestions about comparative ethics and the restraint of war.
Humanist ideas in education have been promoted by both Western thinkers and classical wisdom texts of Asia. Exploring this connection, I examine the educational philosophy of an iconic ancient Tamil (Indian) text, the Thiruvalluvar Kural, by juxtaposing it with a contemporary humanist classic, Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As this comparative study reveals, both texts offer humanist visions of relevance to education, politics, and society. Notably, however, the Kural takes what might be described as a more mainstream humanist stance vis-à-vis Freire's radical humanist approach. Nevertheless, both educational philosophies share a common humanist bond representing important breakthroughs within their own given contexts. More specifically, the Kural supports a shift in consciousness and social practices away from caste rigidity, superstition, and pre-humanist beliefs while Freire championed transitioning from rigid, top-down and alienating educational delivery models and economic systems to learning processes and societies that are more democratized, dialogic and egalitarian.