7DOI: 10.4312/as.2023.11.1.7-11 Introduction Jana S. ROŠKER, Editor-in-chief This issue (Volume 11, Issue 1) of the journal Asian Studies is the second part of a special double issue on the problems of transcultural (post)comparative philos- ophy. This special double issue is entitled Transcultural (Post)Comparative Phi- losophy, Part 1 and Part 2, respectively, and the two interconnected parts address problems and developments in the methodologies and practices of various (post) comparative approaches to transcultural philosophical dialogue between Asia and Europe. The first part of the double issue was subtitled Methods and Approaches. It focused mainly on purely theoretical and methodological issues, but also proposed some innovative practical approaches. In this way, several innovative methods for the study of transcultural philosophy were proposed. The volume addressed sever- al key problems or thematic areas which are reflected in its structure, consisting of three sections. The first section dealt with the relations between Asian and global philosophies and included studies by Robert A. Carleo III, Li Chenyang, Vytis Silius, and Jana S. Rošker.1 The second part dealt with various problems of lan- guage and logical reasoning in a transcultural perspective. The authors who pub- lished their papers in this section were David Bartosch, Jaap van Brakel, Ma Lin, and Bo Mou.2 The third section presented several new approaches that can be applied in the field of comparative and post-comparative philosophy. The authors of this section were Dimitra Amarantidou, Paul J. D’Ambrosio, Hans-Georg Mo- eller, Margus Ott, and Sašo Dolinšek.3 To place this special issue in a broader context of the conceptualization of Asian Studies, its editor concluded the volume with a review of earlier articles published in the same journal that addressed sim- ilar questions (Rošker 2022b). The present volume (Volume 11, Issue 1) is the second part of this double issue and deals with more concrete examples or demonstrations of the theory presented in the first part of this double issue. The articles in this volume contrastively ana- lyse philosophers, theories, methods, and exchanges between Asian and European philosophical discourses. The subtitle of the volume is therefore Philosophical Dia- logues between Asia and Europe: from Plotinus to Heidegger and Beyond. 1 See Carleo (2022); Chenyang (2022); Silius (2022); Rošker (2022a). 2 See Bartosch (2022); van Brakel and Ma (2022); Mou (2022). 3 See Amarantidou and D’Ambrosio (2022); Moeller (2022); Ott (2022); Dolinšek (2022). 8 Jana S. ROŠKER: Introduction It comprises five sections with different emphases. The articles published in the first section, entitled Dialogs with Heidegger, deal with various elements of the philosophical work of this German thinker that can be compared to (or enriched by) East Asian philosophy. The section contains three articles written by Fabian Heubel, Eric Nelson, and Mario Wenning. Each of them explores different ele- ments in the philosophical interaction between Heidegger and East Asia: Heu- bel’s contribution treats dialogs with Heidegger from the point of view of trans- cultural philosophical comparisons and argues that they are interdependent. The author demonstrates this thesis by analysing the relationship between compara- tive and transcultural philosophy through a connection between François Jullien’s “comparative” and Martin Heidegger’s “transcultural” understanding of “Being” (Sein) and “Between” (Zwischen). Eric Nelson, in turn, shows how Heidegger’s reflections on nothingness and emptiness are interwoven cross-culturally with East Asian discourses by thoroughly examining the work of Kitayama Junyū, a neglected Japanese philosopher who was active in Germany and one of the ear- liest East Asian interpreters of Heidegger. The author of the final contribution in this section is Mario Wenning, who problematizes Heidegger’s preoccupation with the importance of rootedness for his existentialism and shows how and why the transfer to East Asia allows for a deprovincialization of Heideggerian themes. The second section continues to focus on the thought and possibilities of the cross-cultural analysis of a particular European philosopher, namely Plotinus. The section is entitled Conversations with Plotinus, and consists of two articles. The first was written by Marko Uršič and aims to explore the similarities and differ- ences between Plotinus’ idea of the One and Plato’s chóra, on the one hand, and Nishida Kitarō’s notion of basho, on the other. David Bartosch, the second author in this section, also examines Plotinus’ philosophy, but from a different, more epis- temological angle, namely by focusing on the problem of the relations between consciousness and reality and establishing a productive contrastive tension with the ideas of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming on the same topic. The next section is entitled Philosophical Comparison between European and Japa- nese Philosophy and consists of three papers, all dealing with three different ways of comparing European and Japanese thought. The section begins with Jay Het- ric’s article on Deleuze and the philosophy of the Kyoto School, and the two discourses are compared in their ethical and aesthetic aspects. Marko Ogrizek’s article then focuses on historically more distant philosophies. He compares the ideas of two philosophers from Japan and Europe who lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, Itō Jinsai on the one hand and David Hume on the other, focusing in particular on their views of the role and importance of moral motivation. The third author in this section, Abe Hiroshi, takes us back—once 9Asian Studies XI (XXVII), 1 (2023), pp. 7–11 again—to Heidegger, but this time in a very different way, exploring the Japanese philosopher Tetsurō Watsuji’s idea of community as an alternative to Heidegger’s somewhat dangerous notion of the “Volk”. According to Hiroshi’s interpretation, Watsuji’s specific idea of nonduality between the self and the other can help us look at our primary coexistence in a different way to that offered by Heidegger. The fourth part of the volume deals with creative comparisons of certain con- cepts and categories in the context of transcultural philosophy. While Steven Burik offers readers a new way of deconstructing transcultural dialogues, David Chai explores different ways of establishing interhuman philosophy through a creative comparison of the thought of Martin Buber and Daoism. The third article in this section is written by two authors, Nevia Dolcini and Carlo Penco. Their contribution deals with some issues related to different forms of logical thinking. They compare Frege’s claim that “the concept horse is not a concept” with Gongsun Long’s famous thesis that a “white horse is not a horse”. The au- thors aim to show that, despite major differences in their historical and cultural backgrounds, both paradoxes can be seen as different manifestations of similar concerns about language and, in particular, about the difficulty of referring to concepts by means of language. The last section deals with hermeneutical problems in transcultural philosophy. It opens with Jana S. Rošker’s essay on the fusion of aesthetic realms (jingjie) as a new method aimed at resolving some inconsistencies in Gadamer’s idea of the fusion of horizons. This contribution is followed by Geir Sigurðsson’s arti- cle entitled “Commensurability and Difference: A Hermeneutic-Deconstructive Engagement with Chinese Philosophy”, in which the author argues that three prominent hermeneutic theories from Europe (i.e., those of Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Derrida) can offer meaningful and interesting parallels to classical Confucian interpretive approaches. The third contribution in this section is Téa Sernelj’s ar- ticle on the hermeneutics of Xu Fuguan. Finding in it many similarities with the theories of Schleiermacher and Gadamer, the author examines whether Xu’s her- meneutical system is truly original or built on the foundation of certain European ideas. This section (and also this special issue) concludes with the contribution of Jin Qian, who also undertakes a transcultural investigation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic model, which serves him as an inspiration for a new and creative interpretation of the Chinese Neo-Confucian concept of xing 性. Similar to the first part, the various contributions collected in this second part of our double special issue on “transcultural and postcomparative” problems do not stem from the traditionally prevailing methodological systems, but rather aim to offer readers different, fresh, and innovative views on philosophies that 10 Jana S. ROŠKER: Introduction have emerged in the developmental streams of different conceptual histories. What they have in common, however, is their desire to move beyond the tradi- tional framing of comparative intercultural philosophy within one-dimensional or biased contexts. In this sense, they can nourish our common hope of finding a way to live together in a world of global polylogies that can overcome di- vergent ideologies, autocratic social structures, devastating wars, and ecological disasters. If this volume has taken even a tiny step in that direction, it will have achieved its central goal. References Amarantidou, Dimitra, and Paul J. D’Ambrosio. 2022. “Philosophy Pizza: On the Possibility of Trans-Cultural Pizzas and/Or Philosophy.” Asian Studies 10 (3): 183–99. https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2022.10.3.183-199. Bartosch, David. 2022. “Transcultural Philosophy and Its Foundations in Im- plicate Logic.” Asian Studies 10 (3): 107–26. https://doi.org/10.4312/ as.2022.10.3.107-126. Carleo III, Robert A. 2022. “The Gongfu Approach to Teaching and Doing Chi- nese Philosophy across Cultures.” Asian Studies 10 (3): 13–38. https://doi. org/10.4312/as.2022.10.3.13-38. 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