Heidegger's Hidden Sources documents for the first time Heidegger's remarkable debt to East Asian philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Reinhard May shows conclusively that Martin Heidegger borrowed some of the major ideas of his philosophy - on occasion almost word for word - from German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. The discovery of this astonishing appropriation of non-Western sources will have important consequences for future interpretations of Heidegger's work. Moreover, it shows Heidegger as a pioneer of comparative philosophy and transcultural thinking.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In every part of the world and in every era, philosophers have reflected on the meaning of culture and its philosophical significance. Japanese Philosophers on Society and Culture:Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō, and Kuki Shūzō explores how three of Japan's preeminent philosophers of the twentieth century—Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō—defined culture and analyzed what it tells us about social relations. Graham Mayeda also explores little-known aspects of the work of each philosopher, including a philosophical analysis of Watsuji's travel diary, Pilgrimages to the Ancient Temples in Nara, the place of intuition in Kuki's ethics of otherness, and the role of culture in realizing Nishida's concept of reality as the historical world. Each of these three philosophers adapted philosophical methodologies such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical logic to studying the traditional sources of Japanese culture: Confucianism, Buddhism, Bushidō and Shintō. This book focuses on the way that Nishida, Watsuji and Kuki critiqued the methodologies that they adopted from European philosophy and modified them to reflect the values that form the basis of their own cultural tradition. Finally, Mayeda engages with the problem of cultural essentialism by identifying the progressive and conservative elements of each philosopher's characterization of Japanese culture.

Although somewhat marginal in relation to the other senses, smell is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. We subconsciously find our place in it by sniffing our body, the body of the one next to us, the room in which we are, the culture with which we are familiar. There is an incessant olfactory flow consisting of bodies, human and nonhuman, that are agents of generation, consumption, diffusion, reproduction and dissolution of odours. As they move or pause, as they cluster with others or try to move away, these bodies constantly partake in this olfactory flow, this dense planetary swirl that leaves nothing outside. The law aims at presenting itself as rational and objective. Smell, on the other hand, is one of the least integrated senses in the legal edifice, in comparison to, say, seeing and hearing. This can be attributed mainly to the fact that sense-making of smell and law are different, even antithetical. Smell operates undercurrent, tickling the olfactory antennas of individual and collective bodies while habitually hiding behind other sensory volumes. Law, on the other hand, has an interest in appearing present, universal, constant. Olfactory sense-making relies on its elusiveness; legal sense-making invests in its obviousness. Yet, the two can interact in most unexpected ways, as this volume amply shows. If anything, smell airs the way in which law conceptualises and contextualises its own actuality. Smell brings law forth by allowing it to show its underbelly, its elusive sense-making that is invariably sacrificed in preference to the necessity of legal impressions of constancy. However, smell’s fragmentary, discontinuous and unstable nature, despite all the ordering that goes to it, poses a peculiar challenge to the law. This volume sets out to investigate this juncture.

On a people of Tripura State.