This lecture concerns how philosophy in Japan, before World War II, abandoned its traditional indifference toward the contemporary world to assume a new vocation that would seek to address the question of the present and the historical crisis it posed. Japan’s most prominent philosophers formulated a strategy that required the implementation of a mission to establish what they called a new world historical configuration, constituting Asia, called the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which would rid the region of Western imperialism and colonialism under Japanese hegemony.
Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, Emeritus, in the University of Chicago, Adjunct Senior Research Professor, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Literature Program at Duke. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written widely on Japan’s intellectual and cultural history, postcolonialism and area studies.
This talk is co-sponsored by Duke’s Program in Literature and the Franklin Humanities Institute.
DATE: January 24, 2013
LOCATION: FHI Garage, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C105, Duke (Map and Directions)
TIME: 4:00-6:00pm
"Philosophy and Answerability: Historicism, the Question of the Present, and Japan's World Historical Mission" – Harry Harootunian, Duke
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