Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader is an anthology of contemporary (post-war) Japanese philosophy showcasing a range of important philosophers and philosophical trends from 1945 to the present. This important and comprehensive volume introduces the reader to a variety of trends and schools of thought. The first part consists of selections and excerpts of writings from contemporary Japanese philosophers who have made original contributions to Japanese philosophy and promise contributions to world philosophy. Most of these selections appear in English for the first time. The second part consists of original essays written for this volume by scholars in Japanese philosophy on specific trends and tendencies of contemporary Japanese philosophy, such as feminist philosophy, the Kyoto School, and environmental philosophy, as well as future directions the field is likely to take. Ideal for classroom use, this is the ultimate resource for students and teachers of Japanese philosophy.

'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.

“Unified Reality Theory demonstrates that the source of reality is a universal consciousness, and that we are in no way separable from that source, and so in no way truly separable from each other or any other aspect of reality. I recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the nature of reality and their place in it.” —Deepak Chopra Unified Reality Theory describes how all reality evolves from an absolute existence. It also demonstrates that this absolute existence must have consciousness as an attribute that’s intrinsic to its being. Thus, Unified Reality Theory shows that consciousness, rather than being a product of the evolution of physical reality, is itself the source of what we experience as physical reality, and that physical reality is itself but one aspect of an evolving universal consciousness. Unified Reality Theory shows that, most fundamentally, this absolute consciousness-existence evolves into reality by means of a single process: self-relation. That is, consciousness-existence becomes reality by forming relationships with itself, analogous in a very limited way to what happens to a rubber band that’s twisted upon itself, i.e., it remains whole while differentiating into other forms. Thus, Unified Reality Theory demonstrates that reality is a state of existential self-relation. The idea that the universe consists of existence which has formed relationships with itself isn’t new; Taoists have understood this idea for at least a couple of thousand years. What’s new here is the presentation of this idea in the form of a detailed and defined structural model that correlates with the behavior of physical reality as described by science in general and physics in particular. Ultimately, Unified Reality Theory uses science and logic to make the case that God exists, as a pervasive and absolute consciousness that transcends the realities of space and time, and that we, as well as everything else, are that!

How can we “know”? What does “knowledge” mean? These were the fundamental questions of epistemology in the 17th century. In response to continental rationalism, the British empiricist John Locke proposed that the only knowledge humans can have is acquired a posterior. In a discussion of the human mind, he argued, the source of knowledge is sensual experience – mostly vision. Since vision and picture-making are the realm of art, art theory picked up on questions such as: are pictures able to represent knowledge about the world? How does the production of images itself generate knowledge? How does pictorial logic differ from linguistic logic? How can artists contribute to a collective search for truth? Questions concerning the epistemic potential of art can be found throughout the centuries up until the present day. However, these are not questions of art alone, but of the representational value of images in general. Thus, the history of art theory can contribute much to recent discussions in Visual Studies and Bildwissenschaften by showing the historic dimension of arguments about what images are or should be. “What is knowledge?” is as much a philosophic question as “What is an image?” Visual epistemology is a new and promising research field that is best investigated using an interdisciplinary approach that addresses a range of interconnected areas, such as internal and external images and the interplay of producer and perceiver of images. This publication outlines this territory by gathering together several approaches to visual epistemology by many distinguished authors.

This essay deals with the difficulty of understanding understanding, taking the understanding of natural language fragments as a paradigm.