Wednesday, November 10, 2010

a symposium on Yasuo Yuasa

Next month, in the 20th conference of the Society for Mind-Body Science (December 11-12th), there is going to be held an academic symposium on Yasuo Yuasa.

December 11th, 2010
15:30-17:40
Rinri Bunka Center, Tokyo, JP
"Yasuo Yuasa's thought and mind-body science"
http://www.smbs.gr.jp/nenji2010.htm

Yasuo Yuasa (1925-2005) was one of the leading Japanese philosophers in the field of mind-body theory.

His thought encompasses traditional Buddhist thought, Japanese modern philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis. In his main work "The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory", he presented a new framework to understand the importance of Asian mind-body theory and meditation practice from modern perspective.

Kasulis, who edited "The Body", writes as follows in his editor's introduction;

[T]hrough Yuasa's discovery, we can better grasp the nondualism central to so many Asian traditions. In conceiving an integration of body and mind, the various Eastern philosophers undercut such Western dichotomies as spirit-matter, subjectivity-objectivity, and theory-praxis. The Asian philosophers are not merely posing an alternative metaphysics. In fact, they are not doing metaphysics at all in the traditional Western sense. Instead, their task is what Yuasa, following C. G. Jung, calls metapsychics, an approach examined in detail by this book.
[Yuasa, Y. (1987) The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory. State University of New York Press., p.2]