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In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, The Fate of Place is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray.

Muslims were introduced to modern Western philosophy during the time of Western colonization, when they were not emotionally or mentally ready to absorb it and were generally skeptical of anything Western. This has caused an intellectual crisis, and some Muslims saw new ideas from the West as a direct threat to Islamic identity. The point here is why Muslim societies have always been skeptical of modern Western philosophy, even though Western societies accepted all new ideas without any trouble, and it does not stop the West from moving forward as a civilization. This study uses a comparative analytical method to look at how modern Western philosophy is received in Islamic societies, what it has caused, and where it might go in the future. It focuses on the issue of faith and reason as a talking point to show how Western and Islamic ways of knowing are different. Finally, the study makes important suggestions about how to deal with the effects of modern Western philosophy on Islamic societies.

The question at the centre of this paper is part of a larger debate. Though the more limited question is hardly ever asked in academic discussions, the larger question – how can knowledge - or more broadly and less helpfully- thought in the world outside the West can be decolonized is at the center of lively debates surrounding the ‘end’ of postcolonial theory. Even this question can be asked in two significantly separate forms: about decolonizing knowledge in these societies; or, alternative, knowledge about these societies, which would presumably include knowledge produced in the Western academia about these societies. The two propositions make a lot of difference. This essay, therefore, deals with that larger question of the humanistic and the historical sciences indirectly, because I believe that without becoming clear about this smaller question – what is Western about Western thought? - which might strike people as odd, we cannot make much progress. Indeed, my claim is that so much of uncertainty still attaches to the first discussion – whether we are making any progress at all or not – is precisely because the second question is not seen with clarity as being a precondition to making progress in the first.

Since early 2000s, scholars of international relations have been questioning the Western-centrism of their home discipline and, in a quest for pluralism, have been envisioning ways of conceptualizing the world beyond the West. At the same time, an intellectual movement known as modernity/coloniality research collective has been critically reflecting about modernity and its often-neglected counterpart, coloniality, to resist universalismand to decolonize knowledge. Engaging with the attempts to procure pluralism in the discourse of international relations, the purpose of this article is to question the different perspectives of non-Western international relations from a decolonial angle to identify intellectual projects that could lead to decolonizing the discipline. In its discussion of how decolonial non-Western IR theory is, the article argues that while some perspectives within the subfield openly reject or simply ignore the concerns raised by decolonial thought, others put forward intellectual projects where decolonial arguments resonate. Hence, rather than characterizing the subfield in general terms, the article distinguishes those perspectives that are attentive to the need of generating a true dialog among knowledges and, by so doing, it contributes to critical scholarship within international relations.

The Western approach to the natural world, considering “nature” as an object of scientific scrutiny and of exploitation for economic purposes, results in a separateness and subsequent alienation from nature. The overarching aim of this paper is to emphasize the limitations and consequences of this approach, including how nature is perceived, the value attributed to nature, and the substantial denial of cultural contributions from non-Western philosophical and scientific backgrounds. We also consider the Western attempt at balancing industrial and technological endeavors, aimed at preserving ecological equilibria. In this framework, we argue that the current ever-increasing concern about sustainability cannot be decoupled from the perception of nature and natural values, whether material, aesthetic, or spiritual. Therefore, modern sustainability challenges, mainly attributable to Western overexploitation of nature and natural resources, need to be considered in the context of the limited Western paradigms, which often leave the very definition of nature unanswered. We argue that efforts to ease the anthropogenic pressure on natural ecosystems, leading to their degradation, cannot be uniquely bounded by Western science and its technological appendices.

Study of human nature has been one of the most important questions to which man has come across. Right from the period when man started thinking rationally, because of his curious and enquiring nature, he meditated about Universe, existence and nature of Man and his ultimate reality. The religious tradition claims that when Man first came to earth, he knew the answer to these questions in the light of divine guidance. It declared “Man” as the crown of all the creations and all the other things are created to serve him. The civilizations that didn’t have the luxury of divine guidance developed mythological explanations. It were the Greeks who for the first time developed an intellectual discourse to answer the basic question about the reality of Man and the Universe. The medieval period was dominated by religious traditions. All these traditions, though different from one another, seem to agree to the point that Man is a special creation and the center of the Universe with some amount of divinity attributed to him. But after Renaissance, this view changed radically and the status of “Man” shrunk to an animal only who was thought-to-be guided by his own instincts and who was through and through a profane creation. This research aims at studying the concept of “Man” in different civilizations and explores the evolution of this concept from Greek to Modern times through analytical research method.

This article examines William James’s philosophy of science through his pragmatic response to epistemic fallibilism, emphasizing how actionability rather than evidential certainty underwrites both scientific and religious practices. While James explicitly drew comparisons between science and Abrahamic scriptures, my account highlights resonances with non-Western traditions, particularly Indigenous American and Asian epistemologies, also situating some of James’s philosophical motivations within his biography. James may have indirectly absorbed Asian religious and philosophical teachings from American Transcendentalists who engaged with them, and he may have encountered Amerindian perspectives through the cultural milieu of the United States or during his Amazonian expedition. In either case, threads within these global Indigenous traditions align with the weight that James’s work gives to contextual, agent-relative forms of knowing that are inseparable from action. I conclude by discussing how James’s ideas support an account of animism that integrates Amerindian thought with the extended mind thesis. I also detail how his pluralistic account of experience and reality creates conceptual space for the co-existence of science and spirituality, ironically by undermining the assumption that the two operate according to radically distinct epistemologies. Throughout the article, I connect James’s thought to more recent debates in religion and metaphysics.

The dynamic of nationalism’s theoretical position has facilitated the unfolding complexities throughout history; and it still triggers an intellectual debate among the contemporary scholars. Carved out as a formidable socio-political force, nationalism today stands out as a substantial brand of resistance that defies all odds. This study has employed the qualitative method of analysis to build a framework to explore the ideas and thoughts of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani pertaining to the concepts of Islam and nationalism. Furthermore, this study argued that Afghani’s conception of Islam and nationalism was an effective tool in balancing the principles of modernity. In similar vein, Afghani’s core ideas and its underlying values suggested some different trajectories of fundamental synthesis of the nationalism and Islam. To elucidate further, Islam is viewed as a dominant force that perpetuated the development of Afghani’s comprehension on nationalism. This study culminates that Afghani’s concept of nationalism is the fundamental source of social unity that has consolidated the backbone of Islamic movement within the framework of Pan-Islamism by emphasizing the concept of unity and ummah. Keywords: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Nationalism, Pan-Islamism, Social-unity, Western thought

A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first \"discovery\" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.

With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants--almost all of them ethnic Germans--were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland.Uprootedexamines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. In this pioneering work, Gregor Thum tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. Thum also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's \"amputated memory.\" Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. Uprootedtraces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.