7 Introduction Jana S. ROŠKER, Editor-in-Chief The present issue (Volume 10, Issue 3) of the journal Asian Studies is the first part of a double special issue on problems of transcultural (post)comparative phi- losophy. The two interconnected special issues deal with problems and devel- opments in the methodology of (post)comparative approaches in transcultural philosophical dialogues between Asia and Europe. This double special issue is entitled Transcultural (Post)Comparative Philosophy, Part 1 and Part 2, respectively. This first part of the double issue is subtitled Methods and Approaches. It focuses on methodological issues and innovative approaches and attempts to suggest new ways of engaging with transcultural philosophy. The volume addresses the rela- tionship between Asian and global philosophy, issues of language and thought in a transcultural perspective, and theories of transcultural and (post)comparative approaches. Starting from an awareness of the multiple and often very complex problems associated with traditional cross-cultural and comparative philosophy, the authors aim to create new methods and approaches to develop new, more co- herent and theoretically grounded models for the transmission of meanings and the exchange of knowledge and ideas between Asian and European philosophies. All these new methods and approaches are based on the awareness that we are dealing not only with different philosophical discourses, but also with structures and patterns of thought and language based on a different methodology and as- sociated with different theoretical concerns. In this sense, the first part of this double issue is divided into four parts. The first deals with issues related to Chinese and Global Philosophy, addressing in different ways the problems of the impact of globalization on the investigation, interpre- tation, and study of Chinese philosophy in the Western world. It contains four contributions and begins with Robert A. Carleo’s entitled “The Gongfu Approach to Teaching and Doing Chinese Philosophy across Cultures”. In this essay, a new method is proposed for studying and teaching East Asian philosophy, especially Chinese philosophy, transculturally. The method, which belongs to practice- and skill-based pedagogy, focuses on the practice, or gongfu, of studying and teach- ing philosophy with classical Chinese texts. The second article was written by Li Chenyang and deals with the current widespread ideas of “Chinese Philosophy as World Philosophy”. The author explains his views on the question of the re- lationship between this culturally specific way of thinking on the one hand, and DOI: 10.4312/as.2022.10.3.7-10 Azijske_studije_2022_3_FINAL.indd 7 23. 08. 2022 10:08:08 8 Jana S. ROŠKER: Introduction other, especially Western philosophies, on the other. Since Chinese philosophy is for him not merely Sinophone thought, but one that is also marked by numerous methodological peculiarities, the author shows why and how it is by no means sufficient to rely exclusively on methods connected with the intellectual history of China in its “globalization process”. Since there is an urgent need to make Chi- nese philosophy a world philosophy, we need to resort to conceptual approaches if we want to make real connections between the different philosophical discourses in the world today. In the next article, Vytis Silius argues for the use of transla- tion to achieve similar goals. His article is entitled “Translation as a Philosophi- cal Method: A Postcomparative Take on the Universality-Particularity Tension”, pointing to the need for a more culturally oriented academic philosophy. The au- thor suggests several advantages of using translation as a central methodological stance in intercultural postcomparative philosophy. A specific method of trans- lation, which she calls “the method of discursive translation”, is also introduced as an important tool for transcultural postcomparative philosophizing by Jana S. Rošker, the last author in this topic area. However, in her paper entitled “Sublat- ing Sinic Relationism: On a Winding Path from Transcultural to Global Ethics”, she also goes beyond the problems of translation and presents a new, dialectically defined method of so-called transcultural philosophical sublation. The second part, Language and Logic of Transculturality, consists of three articles, all dealing with different issues of language and the logic of transculturality. This content section begins with David Bartosch’s article on “Transcultural Philosophy and Its Foundations in Implicate Logic”. The article focuses on transcultural, or as the author himself puts it, “transversal” studies. He starts from epistemological issues and their interpretations in Europe and China, respectively. In connec- tion with the development of his new methodology, the author develops a new approach to transcultural (especially European and Asian) philosophy, which he tentatively calls a “meta-logical” approach. The next article in this part is Jaap van Brakel and Ma Lin’s essay “Manifest Quasi-Universals and Embedding Concep- tual Clusters: the Case of Qing 情”. It begins with a critical review of the con- cept of translation as developed in the past by one of the authors of the previous part of this issue, namely Vytis Silius. Van Brakel and Ma accuse his method of overlooking the fact that meaning and translation depend on the predominant language used. On this basis, the authors discuss various important problems en- countered in translating a Chinese text into modern English, focusing on the classical Chinese concept of qing 情. The third article in this part addresses the issue of language(s) in a completely different but also highly significant way. It is written by the internationally well-known scholar Bo Mou and is entitled “A Holistic Account of Adequacy Conditions for How to Look at Contraries: How Azijske_studije_2022_3_FINAL.indd 8 23. 08. 2022 10:08:08 9Asian Studies X (XXVI), 3 (2022), pp. 7–10 Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy is Possible”. Bo Mou’s essay offers readers yet another and different meta-philosophical and meta-methodological characterization of comparative philosophy: it seeks to explain the importance of a holistic account of the conditions necessary for maintaining adequate method- ological guiding principles when dealing with different approaches to the study and investigation of different philosophies. All of these rich and varied approaches are followed by the third (and final) part, which contains even more heterogeneous contributions, but all of which can be grouped under the title Comparative and Postcomparative Approaches, since they all deal in one way or another with different models of comparing philosophies or ideas from different cultures. In their essay “Philosophy Pizza: On the Possi- bility of Trans-Cultural Pizzas and/or Philosophy”, Dimitra Amarantidou and Paul D’Ambrosio confront their readers with a witty but critical look at how and why comparative philosophy was done (and is still done) as a method of approaching a supposedly objectively existing “truth”, especially in the field of analytic philosophy, which tends to read and dialectically contrast philosophical texts in order to arrive at an “ever clearer understanding” of them. In contrast to the prevailing models and norms in Western academic discourses, they propose a different way of thinking about transcultural philosophy: Indeed, we might create new ideas through what they call poeisis, in the sense of “going with” tradition and “listening” to texts, rather than incessantly and paternalistically criticising them or even “speaking for” them. This essay is followed by an equally inspiring article by Hans-Georg Moeller entitled “Before and After Comparative Philosophy”, in which the author starts from a critique of traditional intercultural philosophi- cal comparisons and aims to develop some innovative forms of postcomparative philosophy that—in dialogue with traditional comparative philosophy—should go beyond difference and sameness and engage in different philosophical in- teractions by using different traditional sources without constituting a specific field based on culturalist distinctions. Such a postcomparative philosophy does not start from the distinctions between differences and sameness, it is not lim- ited to a specific field, and it does not use a specific method as an authoritative guideline for investigating different ways of thinking or as a criterion for gain- ing new philosophical insights. The next contribution, entitled “The Problem of Ground in Comparative Philosophy. Quality, Quantity, Intensity” is by Margus Ott and deals with the philosophy of comparison in a different way. He applies a new distinction between qualitative, quantitative and intensive forms of philo- sophical comparison. On this basis, the author argues for exploring and creating new forms of philosophical comparison that allow differences between different philosophical traditions to develop in a renewed movement of thought in which Azijske_studije_2022_3_FINAL.indd 9 23. 08. 2022 10:08:09 10 Jana S. ROŠKER: Introduction these developments receive their justification only from their own innate logi- cal coherence, that is, from themselves. While the first three essays in this last scope of contents were concerned with the search for new forms of philosophical comparison, the last essay, entitled “Desire Versus Ego: On How Kaneko Fumiko Transcended Stirnean Egoism”, aims to introduce a new form of comparison by means of a concrete example. In this final essay the author, Sašo Dolinšek, aims to show how Max Stirner’s idea of egocentric individual anarchism was modified and transcended by Kaneko Fumiko, a female Japanese anarchist who lived on the threshold of the previous century. The first part of this double special issue concludes with a short editorial survey on previous publications from the field of intercultural methodology in the jour- nal Asian Studies itself. The fascinating and extremely diverse contributions gathered in this first part of our “transcultural and postcomparative” issue do not stem from the traditionally dominant methodological discourses, but, on the contrary, challenge them to a great extent by confronting them with different approaches and new, alternative ways of looking at philosophies that have emerged in the course of different intel- lectual traditions. They can all be seen as distinct building blocks that constitute a process of reinterpretation that involves the construction of networks linking new terminologies, semantic structures, conceptual ideas, and normative frameworks. In this way, they aim to go beyond the traditional embedding of comparative in- tercultural philosophy in one-sided or even biased methodological and axiological predispositions. Azijske_studije_2022_3_FINAL.indd 10 23. 08. 2022 10:08:09