Embodiment Theory And Chinese Philosophy

This book analyses some of the seminal texts of the Chinese tradition in light of the embodied tradition: the Analects of Confucius, the Zhuangzi, and the Treatise on Music. Margus Ott's study shows how they exemplify aspects of embodiment theory while highlighting others that have been neglected in contemporary work. Ott also develops far-reaching possibilities of an embodied philosophy. The embodied understanding did not go unchallenged in Ancient China. There were important counter-currents, most notably the Mohists and the so-called Legalists. It has been argued that this challenge set the Chinese philosophical tradition in motion. By using embodiment theory Ott demonstrates how these ideas can be seen as a decontextualizing tendency of thought that plays an important role in human affairs.

This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression. Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.

"Chinese philosophy has long recognized the importance of the body and emotions in extensive and diverse self-cultivation traditions. Philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body are often described in terms of mind-body dualism and its opposite, monism or some kind of "holism." Monist or holist views agree on the unity of mind and body, but with much debate about what kind, whereas mind-body dualists take body and mind to be metaphysically distinct entities. The question is important for several reasons. Several humanistic and scientific disciplines recognize embodiment as an important dimension of the human condition. One version, the problem of mind-body dualism, is central to the history of both philosophy and religion. Some account of relations between body and mind, spirit or soul is also central to any understanding of the self. Recent work in cognitive and neuroscience underscores the importance of our somatic experience for how we think and feel"--

This volume offers arguments from eastern and western philosophical traditions to enrich and diversify our present conceptions of knowledge. The contributors extend contemporary Western epistemology in novel directions, through investigating and questioning entrenched conceptions of knowledge. The cross-tradition engagement with the neurosciences, psychology, and anthropological studies is an important feature of the volume’s methodological approach that helps broaden our epistemological horizons. It presents a collection of perspectives on epistemic agency by engaging philosophical traditions east and west, including Japanese, Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and Anglo-analytic.

​This book gathers research and writings that reflect on traditional and current global issues related to art and aesthetics, gender perspectives, body theories, knowledge and learning. It illustrates these core dimensions, which are bringing together philosophy, tradition and cultural studies and laying the groundwork for comparative research and dialogues between aesthetics, Chinese philosophies, Western feminist studies and cross-cultural thought. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, the book also integrates philosophical enquiries with cultural anthropology and contextual studies. As implied in the title, the main methodologies are cross-cultural and comparative studies, which touch on performances in art and aesthetics, social existence and education, and show that philosophical enquiries, aesthetical representation and gender politics are simultaneously historical, living and contextual. The book gathers a wealth of cross-cultural reflections on philosophical aesthetics, gender existence and cultural traditions. The critical thinking within will benefit undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the area of comparative philosophies. It blends academic rigor with personal reflection, which is a critical practice in feminist philosophy itself.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.

In this collection of original essays, international scholars put Asian traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, into conversation with one or more contemporary feminist philosophies, founding a new mode of inquiry that attends to diverse voices and the complex global relationships that define our world. These cross-cultural meditations focus on the liberation of persons from suffering, oppression, illusion, harmful conventions and desires, and other impediments to full personhood by deploying a methodology that traverses multiple philosophical styles, historical texts, and frames of reference. Hailing from the discipline of philosophy in addition to Asian, gender, and religious studies, the contributors offer a fresh take on the classic concerns of free will, consciousness, knowledge, objectivity, sexual difference, embodiment, selfhood, the state, morality, and hermeneutics. One of the first anthologies to embody the practice of feminist comparative philosophy, this collection creatively and effectively engages with global, cultural, and gender differences within the realms of scholarly inquiry and theory construction.

Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The 'Head'edited by Iwona Kraska-Szlenk adds to linguistic studies on embodied cognition and conceptualization while focusing on one body part term from a comparative perspective. The 'head' is investigated as a source domain for extending multiple concepts in various target domains accessed via metaphor or metonymy. The contributions in the volume provide comparative and case studies based on analyses of the first-hand data from languages representing all continents and diversified linguistic groups, including endangered languages of Africa, Australia and Americas. The book offers new reflections on the relationship between embodiment, cultural situatedness and universal tendencies of semantic change. The findings contribute to general research on metaphor, metonymy, and polysemy within a paradigm of cognitive linguistics.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently in response to personal relationships and local realities. Drawing from empirical research, the author uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores intimacy and kinship within masculinity. She showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. This is a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and an invaluable resource for understanding the profound social changes that transformed gendered arrangements in urban China.