01.06.2010The Sense and Significance of Japanese Philosophy

On Tuesday, 1 June 2010, 18:15 - 20:00, Prof. John C. Maraldo will hold a lecture on "The Sense and Significance of Japanese Philosophy".

The lecture will take place in KO2 F-152, Universität Zürich Zentrum, Karl-Schmid-Strasse 4, 8006 Zürich.

John C. Maraldo is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of North Florida. He earned a Dr.phil. from the University of Munich with a dissertation on Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger (Karl Alber Verlag, 1974), and then spent several years in Japan studying Japanese philosophy and Zen Buddhism. He taught at Sophia University, Tokyo; Naropa University, Boulder Colorado; and the University of Southern Illinois, before going to Florida in 1980. He has been a guest professor at the University of Kyoto and the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, and last year held the Roche Chair in Interreligious Research at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. His interests include comparative philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and Japanese philosophy in general; and more particularly the thought of Dogen, Nishida, Nishitani, Kuki, and Watsuji; Buddhist notions of history and of practice, and the sense and significance of non-Western philosophy. In addition to numerous articles in these areas, he has published a translation and study of Heidegger: The Piety of Thinking (together with James G. Hart, 1976); Buddhism in the Modern World (co-edited with Heinrich Dumoulin, 1976); Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (co-edited with James W. Heisig, 1995), and several essays in the series Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy. Currently he is co-editing Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (with J. W. Heisig and T. P. Kasulis). The University of North Florida recently honored him by establishing the John C. Maraldo Annual Lecture in Comparative Philosophy, first delivered in 2009.