Nishitani Keiji (1900–90)

Author(s):  
Graham Parkes

Nishitani Keiji is generally regarded as the leading light of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Influenced by Zen thinkers from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as well as by figures from the Western mystical and existential traditions, he is a pre-eminent voice in East–West comparative philosophy and late twentieth-century Buddhist–Christian dialogue. Primarily a philosopher of religion, Nishitani strove throughout his career to formulate existential responses to the problem of nihilism.

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Ilana Rosen

Contemporary Israeli literature is presently preoccupied with the past diasporic lives of the previous generation, the one that came to Israel from practically all four winds in the mid-late twentieth century. Hungarian-Israeli writers—e.g., Yoel Hoffmann, Judith Rotem, Yael Neeman and Esti G. Hayim—constitute a distinct group within this stream of 1.5 and second generation poets and novelists who have written about immigration and State foundation, often using a documentary or fictionalized memoirist mode. This article highlights the components of these writers' complex burden of a whole world destroyed, in most cases, not long before they were born and which they strive to restore or at least re-imagine in their oeuvre as contemporary Israeli writers. These components include: Holocaust trauma and its transference to the second generation, Hungarian speaking families within the Israeli multicultural setting, the ties of these families with their Hungarian foreign relatives, and household objects related to this past.


Théologiques ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 341-363
Author(s):  
John P. Keenan

Abe Masao’s contribution to late twentieth-century Buddhist-Christian dialogue was important in opening new avenues of interfaith understanding. However, some clarity in this dialogue was sacrificed when Christian participants were given to believe that they encountered « the Buddhist view » in Abe’s presentations. The present article contends that in significant ways Abe represented only the Kyōto School philosophy that drew on earlier Japanese philosophers of Absolute Nothingness and their appropriation of Zen enlightenment as the locus for all religious understanding, a place where all negation and affirmation are simultaneously affirmed and denied. The present article contends that Abe’s Kyōto School philosophy does not represent the broad classical traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism, wherein emptiness does not mean absolute nothingness, but the dependent arising of all places and all philosophies.


2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 453-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Sargent Wood

Approximately 20 percent of Americans today resist traditional religious classification and practice a personalized, eclectic faith. California's Esalen Institute reflects this development. Since its inception in 1962, this human potential center, which drew on San Francisco's vibrant East-West scene, has offered a cornucopia of spiritual possibilities. Leaders and participants from around the world shared religious beliefs and scientific theories there. Through these exchanges, Esalen, both a physical and spiritual borderland along the Pacific Rim, served as an experimental hothouse for germinating a variety of religious hybrids and contributed to the changing nature of religion in late twentieth-century America. In the process, it helped revitalize religious notions within a scientific culture. By highlighting this cross-fertilization of ideas and practices, this article adds to our understanding of the dynamic process in which religion is made, remade, and rejuvenated by combining and adding beliefs and practices.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Murad Idris

This article tells the archival story of how Rawls invented a hypothetical Muslim state that he called “Kazanistan.” It examines drafts of The Law of Peoples from 1992 to 1998, Rawls's notes, his personal correspondence, and the sources preserved in his archives. I track Rawls's gradual interest in Islam, which resulted in his invention of Kazanistan during the final revisions, in March 1998. Contrary to the aesthetics of rigor and simplicity in ideal theory's methods, Rawls's actual method in his incursion into “comparative philosophy” and Islam was circuitous and contingent. And contrary to ideal theory's self-presentation as emerging from an ahistorical conceptual realm, the idealized abstraction of Islam emerges from Rawls's own history, or from an ideologically limited set of texts, conversations, and political debates about Islam. The genealogy of Kazanistan illustrates how liberal philosophy extracts data from other disciplines to construct other peoples, without regard for the surrounding disciplinary politics.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.


1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259
Author(s):  
Ethan White

In the second century, the Roman Emperor Hadrian deified his male lover, Antinous, after the latter drowned in the Nile. Antinous’ worship was revived in the late twentieth century, primarily by gay men and other queer-identified individuals, with Antinous himself being recast as “the Gay God.”


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