Home » News and Events » [CCP & GAI Joint Workshop] Nishida on Well-Being: Reflections from Medieval Buddhist Philosophy

[CCP & GAI Joint Workshop] Nishida on Well-Being: Reflections from Medieval Buddhist Philosophy

The Center for Comparative Philosophy & Global Asia Initiative Joint Reading Workshop

Nishida on Well-Being: Reflections from Medieval Buddhist Philosophy

Time: 12:00 – 14:00 Thursday Oct 13th

Location: West Duke 204

Main SpeakerTakushi Odagiri (M.D. Tokyo, Ph.D. Stanford).
takushi
He is a postdoctoral research fellow for the Global Asia Initiative at Duke University and a visiting faculty member for the Asian & Middle Eastern Studies department.
Commentator: Bobby Bingle (Ph.D. Student, the Department of Philosophy, Duke University)

** The Center for Comparative Philosophy will provide a light lunch for the workshop. The room will open from 12:00 for people to serve themselves and take a seat.

Nishida, Kitarō (1870-1945) is one of the most influential twentieth-century Japanese philosophers. Influenced by Fichte and Hegel, Nishida’s work is often compared with Lebensphilosophie [philosophy of life], the philosophical trend that arise around the turn of the 20thcentury. His main works include An Inquiry into the Good(1911), Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness (1917), Place(1926), and The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview (1945).

This workshop will discuss Nishida’s ideas of well-being, which is closely related to his philosophy of life and the environment. There are two seemingly contradictory ideas of well-being in his thought, unity and self-negation (or “dialectics”). According to Nishida, although well-being is defined by the unity of experience, it is more fundamentally characterized as self-negation. Drawing upon Medieval Buddhist philosophy, the speaker will discuss these notions in Nishida’s early essay from An Inquiry into the Good (1911), and his late essay Logic and Life (1936).


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