The present volume endeavors to make a contribution to contemporary Whitehead studies by clarifying his axiological process metaphysics, including his theory of values, concept of aesthetic experience, and doctrine of beauty, along with his philosophy of art, literature and poetry. Moreover, it establishes an east-west dialogue focusing on how Alfred North Whitehead’s process aesthetics can be clarified by the traditional Japanese Buddhist sense of evanescent beauty. As this east-west dialogue unfolds it is shown that there are many striking points of convergence between Whitehead’s process aesthetics and the traditional Japanese sense of beauty. However, the work especially focuses on two of Whitehead’s aesthetic categories, including the penumbral beauty of darkness and the tragic beauty of perishability, while further demonstrating parallels with the two Japanese aesthetic categories of yûgen and aware. It is clarified how both Whitehead and the Japanese tradition have articulated a poetics of evanescence that celebrates the transience of aesthetic experience and the ephemerality of beauty. Finally it is argued that both Whitehead and Japanese tradition develop an aesthetics of beauty as perishability culminating in a religio-aesthetic vision of tragic beauty and its reconciliation in the supreme ecstasy of peace or nirvana.

A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. "The Anthropocene," or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate - that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth's geology - while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today's Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity's eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial. The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Zizek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz. Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of "engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness" - aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene.

This study establishes a comprehensive transcultural dialogue between Whitehead's process metaphysics and East Asian Hua-yen Buddhism, including both the profound parallels and the doctrinal debates that arise between these two traditions. To advance this dialogue, Dr. Odin has called upon several other Western hermeneutical systems in order to radically reinterpret Hua-yen modes of thought: phenomenology, depth psychology, linguistic analysis, and dialectical discourse. Of special interest is Dr. Odin's exposition of Korean Hua-yen (or Hwaom) Buddhism, including a full translation of the famous Ocean Seal (with Autocommentary) composed by Uisang (625-702), the first patriarch of Korean Hua-yen Buddhism. This is the first published translation of a major Korean Buddhist's treatise into English.

Environmental law has aesthetic dimensions. Aesthetic values have shaped the making of environmental law, and in turn such law governs many of our nature-based sensory experiences. Aesthetics is also integral to understanding the very fabric of environmental law, in its institutions, procedures and discourses. The Art of Environmental Law, the first book of its kind, brings new insights into the importance of aesthetic issues in a variety of domains of environmental governance around the world, from climate change to biodiversity conservation. It also argues for aesthetics, and relatedly the arts, to be taken more seriously in the practice of environmental law so as to improve our emotional and ethical capacities to address the upheavals of the Anthropocene.

While Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles to aesthetics specifically, aesthetic motifs permeate his entire philosophical opus. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead; most attempts to reconstruct Whitehead’s aesthetics have come from process philosophers, and even in that context aesthetics has never occupied a central position. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy vs. mediation, and aesthetic contextualism vs. aesthetic isolationism. For their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics, the concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty. The first chapter introduces Whitehead’s philosophical method of descriptive generalization. This method assumes that every philosophical system is based on a particular entry point. We show that for Whitehead this entry point was aesthetics. Chapter Two compares Whitehead and Dewey’s philosophies to show that both viewed aesthetic experience in terms of complex rhythms; this helps us better understand the differences and the continuities between everyday experience and art. Chapter Three compares Whitehead’s ideas with those of Henri Bergson, showing the way art reveals the form of immediate experience and how the aesthetic experience of art relates to truth. The final chapter details the processes that constitute aesthetic experience in a narrower sense, analyzing aesthetic experience from the perspective of the types of abstractive processes it involves and the complex types of experience it produces.

This book brings together an impressive group of scholars to critically engage with a wide-ranging and broad perspective on the historical and contemporary phenomenon of Zen. The structure of the work is organized to reflect the root and branches of Zen, with the root referring to important episodes in Chan/Zen history within the Asian context, and the branches referring to more recent development in the West. In collating what has transpired in the last several decades of Chan/Zen scholarship, the collection recognizes and honors the scholarly accomplishments and influences of Steven Heine, arguably the most important Zen scholar in the past three decades. As it looks back at the intellectual horizons that this towering figure in Zen/Chan studies has pioneered and developed, it seeks to build on the grounds that were broken and subsequently established by Heine, thereby engendering new works within this enormously important religio-cultural scholarly tradition. This curated Festschrift is a tribute, both retrospective and prospective, acknowledging the foundational work that Heine has forged, and generates research that is both complementary and highly original. This academic ritual of assembling a liber amicorum is based on the presumption that sterling scholarship should be honored by conscientious scholarship. In the festive spirit of a Festschrift, this anthology consists of the resounding voices of Heine and his colleagues. It is an indispensable collection for students and scholars interested in Japanese religion and Chinese culture, and for those researching Zen Buddhist history and philosophy.

In this book leading scholars come together to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the tragic tradition-updated in performance-still spoke to 20th- and 21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary focus of investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the essays also cover tragic representation-often re-mediated, fragmented and provocatively questioned-in film, art and installation, photography, fiction and creative non-fiction, documentary reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7 news cycles travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are reported across the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries, this volume includes intercultural encounters, various forms of hybridity, and postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.