Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

In the Winter semester of 1925/26 Heidegger gave what appears to have been his first seminar on Hegel. Still unpublished in any form, this neglected seminar is of extraordinary importance, and not only for the in-depth and critical reading it pursues of Hegel’s Logic I, a critique that charges Hegel with not knowing how or where to begin. The seminar is also important for its attempt to demonstrate that Hegel’s philosophy was thoroughly Greek. In the class of 25 November 1925, (...) Heidegger is reported to have said: “Therefore am I in the habit of saying that Hegel is the most radical Greek there ever was. With the means that were pre-formed in Greek ontology as if in a seed, the means that lay at the roots of Greek ontology, Hegel mastered something (roughly speaking: spirit, history) that in this form was never experienced by the Greeks. This is only asserted here. Proof of this thesis is naturally very difficult.” Heidegger therefore turns towards the end of the seminar to Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics to show that both this understanding of time and the conception of being it presupposes are also Hegel’s. Yet Heidegger entrusts the initial presentation of Aristotle’s conception of time to a student whose reading is at odds with his own, so much so that Heidegger accuses the student of turning everything on its head. The student’s name is H.-G. Gadamer. (shrink)