Vorträge
Mittwoch, 12. Februar 2025, 18:30–20:00 Prof. Ueeda Yoshinori: “’Western‘ Philosophy in Japan – Medieval Thought and its Path to the East”
This lecture explores the path, how “Western” medieval philosophy, which has evolved in a Christian environment, has made its way to Japan.
Japan imported Western civilization, including philosophy, in one fell swoop after the Meiji Restoration (1868), following a long period of isolation during the Edo period. This is quite different from the way Europeans have accepted and developed their philosophies through the long history of their respective peoples. For the Japanese of the Meiji era, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were all collectively “Western thought”. It is just like the stars in the sky that seem to be on the same celestial sphere, even though they are all at different distances from the earth. All thinkers suddenly appeared in the middle of the 19th century. This was a very poor situation for learning about ideas.
Let us be more specific with examples. When Japanese students study Western religious philosophy, they find it most difficult to understand the problem of evil. The reason
for this is that understanding the problem of evil requires understanding the idea of the Absolute, but the idea of the Absolute is very difficult for the Japanese to understand. The most important consequence of this is that it is very difficult for the average Japanese student to understand the idea of freedom.
Needless to say, the idea of freedom in Western thought has developed along with the problem of evil. To protect God from the evils of the world, i.e. to show that God did not create the evils of the world, people must be free.
On the other hand, Japan received “freedom” as if it were a gift from heaven, without all this history. Thus, for the Japanese, freedom is not a uniquely valuable thing; it is, in a sense, only a given, blessed, and fortunate state.
I am not going to say that this is a bad situation for Japan and that the people there need to progress. What I want to show is that there are different ways of relating to the world, that it is nevertheless possible to be interested in each other, and that this possibility is being realised.
Ueeda Yoshinori is Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters at Keio University in Tokyo. He holds a BA and MA in History of Western Philosophy (Medieval) from Kyoto University. He then studied for his PhD at Fordham University, USA, with Brian Davies et al. He then taught mainly philosophy of religion at Fukuoka University in Japan until 2010. He has been in his current position since 2011 and has been President of the Japanese Society for Medieval Philosophy since 2021. His research focuses on the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and on contemporary epistemology. He is the author of well-established introductory texts on philosophy of religion (Kami to iu nazo, 2000) and contemporary epistemology (Gendai ninshikiron nyūmon, 2022) in Japan.
Dies ist ein Vortrag in englischer Sprache aus dem „Seminar Religion“.