Engaging with the Japanese Philosophical Tradition of Engaged Knowing

Main Article Content

Bret W. Davis

Abstract

This review examines the main topics and the main thesis of Thomas Kasulis’s Engaging Japanese Philosophy. The book covers the entire fourteen-hundred-year history of philosophical thinking in Japan, with a focus on seven key Buddhist, Confucian, Native Studies, and modern academic philosophers. The author’s main thesis is that Japanese philosophers have predominantly aimed at an existentially “engaged knowing” rather than the kind of objectively “detached knowing” that has come to dominate modern western and—by colonial extension—most of modern Japanese academic philosophy.

Article Details

How to Cite
Davis, B. W. (2020). Engaging with the Japanese Philosophical Tradition of Engaged Knowing. Journal of World Philosophies, 5(1), 256–258. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/view/3611
Section
Book Reviews
Author Biography

Bret W. Davis, Loyola University Maryland

Bret W. Davis is Professor and T. J. Higgins, S.J. Chair in Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Along with earning a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, he has studied and taught for more than a year in Germany and for more than 13 years in Japan. He has published more than seventy-five articles, including “Beyond Philosophical Euromonopolism—Other Ways of, Not Otherwise than—Philosophy” (Philosophy East and West, 2019), and seven books, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2020).