This article compares the transreading of Chinese texts in German by Sinologist

This paper considers what it would mean to conceive of philosophy as living. In the first part, by way of a discussion on intercultural encounter recently taken up by Cora Diamond, I first illustrate why philosophical conflict cannot be resolved within already given modes of thought or self-contained finite philosophical traditions, but instead transcends those. In the second part, I show why this dynamic plays out not only between cultures but also between the individual and that individual’s own tradition. I do this by drawing from insights of the two major proponents of xinxue 心學 (Learning of the Heart-Mind), Lu Jiuyuan 陸九淵 and Wang Yangming 王陽明. The way xinxue deals with both orthodox and heterodox traditions illuminates how we can understand philosophy as something living. It is neither self-contained and indifferent to its own heritage or to the culturally alien, nor does it consist of the mere accumulation of diverse philosophical contents. The deepening of individuality that xinxue introduces into Chinese philosophy consists in the relation of the individual to what has already been conceived. Ultimately, by grasping this dynamic that happens through the individual, we may better grasp why philosophy is not reducible to given modes of thought nor to self-contained finite philosophical traditions, but instead is infinite.

In this article, I argue that the infamous discussions around “overcoming modernity” that occurred in Japan in 1942 shared Michel Foucault’s conceptual conflation between humanism and modernism. That is, these discussions were not only declarations—in line with other postcolonial struggles of the time—against the dominance of the West politically and culturally. Philosophically, the programme of overcoming modernity can be understood as a set of discourses on anti-humanism that, in some ways, foreshadow those we find in Europe two decades later. In the case of the Kyoto School, the anti-humanist standpoint arose quite naturally from the particular philosophical history of Japan, combined with the fact that the philosophers in this school were close readers of Nietzsche and Heidegger, anti-humanists avant la lettre. For Sakaguchi Ango, whose ideas were very much opposed to the Kyoto School, a critique of the human was developed from his enthusiastic embrace of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ultimately, I argue, we need both the Kyoto School and Sakaguchi in order to understand the theoretical foundation for the various forms of critical non-humanism we find in contemporary Japanese art, philosophy, and culture.

This article explores how vernacular aesthetics have been re-appropriated from pictorial to modern documentary photography over the past century to instigate a modern collective imagination of the industrial disintegration in the Chinese urban milieu. Within the scope of a discursive visual process, Jean Philippe Gauvrit (b.1963) documents the departure of the industrial urban society in his photo-essay Shanghai in JP Gauvrit (2008). The paper claims that Gauvrit’s documentary photography can be understood as a visual critical discourse of several representational perspectives of time that render visible anachronistic and new social structures that come into being: between utopias of the past and visions of the future in an alternative chronotopic ‘present’ cartography. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) conception of chronotope, in this study, the sublime industrial comes to be represented as an intelligible reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time. By linking that socio-economic reality of that time with a collective consciousness, documentary photography can serve as a chronotope that reveals both the tension and the assimilation relating to the historical myths that lie between the fall of an industrial mode of production and the birth of a post-industrial cultural city in an era of de-industrialization.

Marxist anthropology, as a kind of philosophical anthropology and an integral part of Marxist philosophy, seeks to find an answer to the question of its primary concern—what is humanity or human nature? From the Marxist perspective, human beings are distinguished from animals by making and using tools, and the creation of tools is closely related to the birth of language and consciousness. In this context, Marxist anthropology tries to trace the origin of humankind through tracing that of tools, language and consciousness. Consequently, it is endowed with a dimension of the philosophy of language. In his article “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”, Engels proposed a hypothesis on the origins of humankind and human language, which constructed the framework of Marxist anthropology. This framework was subsequently adopted and developed by Li Zehou and Tran Duc Thao, renowned philosophers in contemporary China and Vietnam, in establishing their own philosophical systems. This article, through illuminating and comparing Engels, Li Zehou and Tran Duc Thao’s hypotheses on the origins of humankind and human language, aims to shed new light on Marxist anthropology through the lens of the philosophy of language. I believe that this exploration will profoundly inspire the Marxist philosophy of language, an emerging trend in the field of the philosophy of language.

That artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and related technologies could use a few good booster shots of “humanism” is widely apparent. In both program code and implementation, AI and algorithms have been accused of harbouring deep-seated flaws that conflict with human values. They are prime examples of the skew towards white, Western, men and demonstrate the bankruptcy in the face of neoliberalist, profit- and market-oriented social paradigms that this special issue seeks to address. Currently, computer scientists and AI researchers who are looking to remedy these problems are often in favour of more data, more powerful machines, more complex algorithms—in short, that we should fix problems with AI by building better AI. In this view human beings and the world can be modelled in code—our lives, interactions, society, and our very selves can be broken down into data points which can be assessed by highly advanced technologies. When these scientists and researchers seek to broaden their approach they often look to philosophy. However, the philosophy they look to is overwhelmingly Anglo-analytic, which views the world in extremely similar ways. Both AI and Anglo-analytic philosophy argue for solutions to humanistic problems which are essentially mathematical. They share in seeing important concepts, such as persons, emotions, agency, and ethics, as mechanistic, atomistic, and calculable. In this paper I will argue that Classical Chinese philosophy offer insightful resources for addressing the humanist problems in AI. Rather than arguing for mathematical solutions, or envisioning persons, emotions, agency, and ethics, as other rigid, atomistic, and mechanistic approaches, Chinese philosophy emphasizes transformation, interrelatedness, and correlative developments. Accordingly, it offers tools for appreciating the world, society, and ourselves as spontaneous, complex, and full of tension. AI can be programmed and used in ways that do not reduce the complexity and conflict in the world, but provide us instead with tools to make sense of it—tools that are humanistic in nature. To this end, Chinese philosophy can be a helpful collaborative partner.

We are living in an era in which the world is being turned into an object to be exploited and nature into a storehouse. From environmental pollution and deforestation to toxic waste and the depletion of resources, the Earth is in trouble and we need to act. To address this environmental crisis, I propose to recover early Confucian philosophy because it can be used to develop a more desirable way of interacting with the environment. Confucian philosophy conceives a kind of humanism that promotes a harmonious relationship between people and nature. Thus, this article attempts to describe a distinctive attitude towards nature and the role of humans that we can find in early Confucianism as a way of rethinking our current ecological concerns.