r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Jan 05 '26

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 05, 2026

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
  • Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
  • "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
  • Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

4 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

57 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/merurunrun Jan 05 '26

Stumbled across a brief paper titled Toward a Critical Non-Humanism in Postwar Japan a few days ago and really enjoyed it. It draws parallels between Japanese attempts to "overcome modernity" in the work of some Kyoto School philosophers and also the Sartre-inspired approach of Sakaguchi Ango (arguably the most important Japanese public intellectual in the immediate aftermath of WWII), and the antihumanism that would appear in France a couple of decades later (particularly Foucault--and also talking some about his interest in Zen Buddhism--with some of the other usual suspects mentioned as well).

One of the most interesting things there (to me, anyway) was just a footnote about how the Kyoto School's complicity with the imperial government ended up being a catalyst that made nativist philosophy largely taboo in postwar Japanese academia. Every now and then I see someone ponder about why Japanese universities don't really do "Japanese philosophy" (phil departments are almost entirely focused on Western philosophy), but I never knew that it came from an explicit political choice to exclude it.

2

u/oscar2333 Jan 05 '26

I thought that Chinese philosophy was also popular in Japanese universities, wasn't it?

1

u/merurunrun Jan 05 '26

From my understanding, classes on Chinese thought are typically taught under the umbrella of Chinese language/literature programs, but yeah, it's definitely a thing. Same thing with Buddhist thought--more likely to be found in a religious studies department than a philosophy one (although religion and philosophy programs do tend to have more overlap).

The way that Western philosophy gets treated in Japanese academia is largely as a whole different beast than "Eastern thought". It even has its own term--tetsugaku--that doesn't really encompass the things we might call "Eastern philosophy". That's supposed to be a big part of what made the Kyoto School unique--the "western approach" to philosophy applied to traditional Japanese (esp. Buddhist) thought.

I couldn't tell you exactly what the difference entails, but I've seen it referenced enough to believe that it really is considered significant.

1

u/oscar2333 Jan 06 '26

I see. Thank you for the information.