What Can't be Said

Author(s):  
Yasuo Deguchi ◽  
Jay L. Garfield ◽  
Graham Priest ◽  
Robert H. Sharf

Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many (but not all) philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers—both in the Daoist and the Buddhist traditions—have openly embraced paradox. They have taken compelling arguments for contradictory positions to suggest that the world is—at least in some respects, and often in very deep respects—inconsistent, and that our best theories of the world will therefore be inconsistent. This book is an initial survey of the writings of some influential East Asian thinkers who were committed to paradox, and for good reason. Their acceptance of contradiction allowed them to develop important insights that evaded those who consider paradox out of bounds.

Author(s):  
John Lie

In the 2010s, the world is seemingly awash with waves of populism and anti-immigration movements. Yet virtually all discussions, owing to the prevailing Eurocentric perspective, bypass East Asia (more accurately, Northeast Asia) and the absence of strong populist or anti-immigration discourses or politics. This chapter presents a comparative and historical account of East Asian exceptionalism in the matter of migration crisis, especially given the West’s embrace of an insider-outsider dichotomy superseding the class- and nation-based divisions of the post–World War II era. The chapter also discusses some nascent articulations of Western-style populist discourses in Northeast Asia, and concludes with the potential for migration crisis in the region.


2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 1141
Author(s):  
Yoshiaki Sato

The emergence of de facto cosmopolitan law-making activities, as well as the institutionalization of cosmopolitan law-making, is gradually changing the transnational legal landscape. This article explains the original concept of cosmopolitan law as it was first put forward by Immanuel Kant and describes how the emergence of de facto cosmopolitan law-making activities has resulted in the adoption of various treaties and international norms. It identifies the two types of institutionalization of cosmopolitan law-making as a hybrid of international and cosmopolitan law-making, and a purer version of cosmopolitan law-making. The article then argues that in order for cosmopolitan law-making to be recognized as legitimate, cosmopolitans must limit themselves to advisory roles and remain accountable to stakeholders around the world. The article concludes by discussing the proposed “Draft Charter of the East Asian Community” as an epoch-making proposal for regional integration in East Asia.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Yang Gao

This article centers around the Anavatapta Lake. In East Asian pictorialization of worldview, Maps of Mt. Sumeru, which depict the mountain at the core of the world, are often paired with Maps of India, in which the Anavatapta Lake occupies a significant place. When the concept of the Anavatapta Lake was transmitted from India to China and Japan, it was understood through the lens of local cultures and ideologies, and the lake was envisioned as a site spatially connected to various places in China and Japan. As a result, the idea of the Indian lake located at the center of the human world helped China and Japan formulate their statuses and positions within the religious and geopolitical discourse of Buddhist cosmology. Through investigations of both pictorial and textual sources, this article explores the significance and place that the Anavatapta Lake occupied in East Asian religion and literature.


2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Satoshi Honda ◽  
Dina Muthmainnah ◽  
Ni Komang Suryati ◽  
Dian Oktaviani ◽  
Somboon Siriraksophon ◽  
...  

To compensate the decline of the populations of temperate anguillid eels, tropical anguillid eels become getting attention of East Asian eel market in recent years. Many eel farms have been established in Java Island to culture tropical anguillid eels intending to export the products to East Asia. Since eel farming is reliant on wild-caught anguillid eels such as glass eels, elvers and yellow eels, these eel seeds have been captured in various places in Indonesia. However, it is still unknown that how much of tropical anguillid eels are caught as seeds for eel farming. This study showed two different patterns of the commodity chains of eel seeds from both Sukabumi Regency and Bengkulu Province to the eel farms in Java Island. Official catch statistics on anguillid eels found in both Sukabumi Regency and Bengkulu Province were also analyzed on their features and problems underlied. Considering the sustainable use of anguillid eel resources and critical stances on exploitation of eel seeds from all over the world, the Indonesian government should take an immediate action for developing the national catch statistics on anguillid eel fishery as soon as possible.  


Author(s):  
Michael T. Rock ◽  
David P. Angel

Grow first, clean up later' environmental strategies in the developing economies of East Asia pose a critical regional and global sustainability challenge in this area of continuing rapid urban-based industrial growth which is the most polluted region in the world. Using detailed case studies and rigorous empirical analyses Rock and Angel show that East Asian governments have found institutionally unique ways to overcome the sustainability challenge, thus proving an important antidote to those who argue that poor countries cannot afford to clean up their environment whilst their economies remain under-developed. The authors, leading experts in the field, demonstrate that low income economies outside East Asia can also use the same policy integration effectively.


2021 ◽  
pp. 030582982110506
Author(s):  
Ji-Young Lee

The field of international relations has long treated the Westphalian system and states in the territorial sovereign sense as the standard or ‘normal’ in IR. The World Imagined by Hendrik Spruyt boldly challenges this habit as the biases of our times and instead brings non-European historical international systems into their rightful place in our study of international order and international relations theorising more generally. Unpacking Spruyt’s discussion of ‘the East Asian interstate society’, the article argues that an in-depth examination of what is known as a ‘tribute system’ and early modern East Asian historical orders richly illuminates the book’s arguments on the heterogeneity and diversity of order-building practices. It also argues that from a practice-oriented approach, the experience of early modern East Asia presents a compelling case that legitimation holds the key to explaining order building processes at both the domestic and international levels, with legitimation at these two levels working in tandem.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Kang

AbstractIR theorizing about international order has been profoundly, perhaps exclusively, shaped by the Western experiences of the Westphalian order and often assumes that the Western experience can be generalized to all orders. Recent scholarship on historical East Asian orders challenges these notions. The fundamental organizing principle in historical East Asia was hierarchy, not sovereign equality. The region was characterized by hegemony, not balance of power. This emerging research program has direct implications for enduring questions about the relative importance of cultural and material factors in both international orders and their influence on behavior—for describing and explaining patterns of war and peace across time and space, for understanding East Asia as a region made up of more than just China, and for more usefully comparing East Asia, Europe, and other regions of the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Timo Fleckenstein ◽  
Soohyun Christine Lee ◽  
Young Jun Choi

This chapter brings together leading experts from across two world regions, Europe and East Asia, to discuss social investment strategies — currently one of the most influential policy approaches around the world. It tackles some of the key challenges faced by contemporary welfare states — namely greater social inequality and the decline in social mobility. By inviting a number of authors to address the same social issue using different country cases (rather than just examining cases side by side), the chapter not only deepens our understanding of varieties of social investment strategies, but also discusses how some of the drawbacks connected to social investment may be overcome. The chapter shows that, despite remarkable differences, at the level of the problems associated with social investment measures, the countries studied also show significant similarities. Ultimately, it presents the case studies of East Asian countries which provide important lessons for benchmarking or cautionary tales for more established Western welfare states as well as the emerging welfare geography in the Global South.


Author(s):  
Thomas Kalinowski

East Asia is the third world region that is crucial for an investigation of international economic conflicts and cooperation. The rise of East Asia as the ‘factory of the world’ since the 1970s is as important for the global political economy as US-led financial globalization and European integration. This chapter begins with an explanation of East Asia’s role in the trilemma triangle and then turns to an analysis of the historic genesis of the East Asian (developmental) state-led model of capitalism. We then investigate the economic origins of the East Asian success story and in particular the formation of large export-oriented business conglomerates. Finally, we look at the political foundation of the East Asian model, which can be described as an authoritarian corporatist model that is shaped by the alliance of state and business at the expense of labour.


Author(s):  
Michael T. Rock ◽  
David P. Angel

Since the 1960s, developing Asia has been going through a historically unprecedented process of urbanization and industrialization. This process, which began in East Asia with Japan after World War II (Johnson 1982), then spread first to Korea (Amsden 1989; Rock 1992; Westphal 1978), Taiwan Province of China (Wade 1990), Hong Kong, China (Haggard 1990), and Singapore (Huff 1999) and subsequently to Indonesia (Hill 1996), Malaysia (Jomo 2001), Thailand (Pongpaichit 1980; Rock 1994), and China has spawned enormous interest. While most of the debate surrounding the East Asian development experience has centered on the proximate causes of its development trajectory and the economic and political consequences of this trajectory for the East Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs), because Asia looms so large in the global economy and ecology, interest has belatedly turned to the environmental consequences of East Asia’s development path and to the political economy of governmental responses to deteriorating environmental conditions in the region (Brandon and Ramankutty 1993; Rock 2002a). The focus on the environment came none too soon. Rapid urbanization, industrialization, and globalization in the East Asian NIEs, when combined with ‘grow first, clean up later’ environmental policies, have resulted in average levels of air particulates approximately five times higher than in OECD countries and twice the world average (Asian Development Bank 1997). Not surprisingly, of the 60 developing country cities on which the World Bank (2004: 164–5) reports urban air quality, 62% (10 of 16) are in developing East Asia, all but one of the rest are in South Asia. Measures of water pollution in East Asia, such as biological oxygen demand (BOD) and levels of suspended solids are also substantially above world averages (Lohani 1998). With the prospect for further rapid urban-industrial growth rooted in the attraction of foreign direct investment and the export of manufactures in East Asia, the rest of Asia, and the rest of the developing world as the East Asian ‘model of development’ spreads, local, regional, and global environmental conditions may well get worse before they get better (Rock et al. 2000). At the core of this environmental challenge in East Asia is rapid urban industrial growth.


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