Locating and Losing the Self in the World

Book excerpt: Comparative philosophy brings into focus relationships found across philosophies of disparate cultures. In the contemporary globalizing world, this perspective is vital – it ensures that diverse voices have the opportunity to be heard and refines the understanding of the many varieties of philosophical thought. Philosophy departments around the world are beginning to see the import of this broader perspective. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in the areas of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, African, Latin American, and indigenous philosophies. Every year, graduate students from around the world gather at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the defining center of this comparative movement, in order to attend the Uehiro Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. These students bring a range of philosophical interests that converge to a definite theme over the course of the conference. At the 2012 meeting, this theme revolved around human beings’ recognition of themselves as selves, the discovery of the nature of these selves, and their relation to the world at large. These issues are comparative in the best sense of the word, drawing on the interests of canonical Western philosophy, as well as reflecting the fundamental concerns of non-Western philosophies. The three sections of this volume capture the stages of thought moving from self-awareness to self-transcendence, and leading to the general theme of the volume: locating and losing the self in the world. The papers in this volume represent diverse philosophical viewpoints, from canonical Western figures such as Immanuel Kant and Simone de Beauvoir, to those of non-Western philosophers who have been gaining interest in the English-speaking world, such as Nāgārjuna and Nishida Kitarō. By gaining familiarity with these figures’ perspectives, readers will become better able to distinguish and think through issues including linguistic and phenomenological understanding of the self, the self’s full engagement with the world, and the world’s reciprocal determination of the self.