Center for Comparative, Historical, Hermeneutic, and Interpretive Philosophy (CCHHIP)

1. The Onto-Historical Account:

This ongoing project of the Center focusses on ontological philosophies, their concepts of temporality and history, and their relations to their own historical contexts.  Nodes of this project are Presocratic Greek thought, Sappho, Zen, Navajo and Tewa philosophy, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, and Vedic philosophy.

 

The work of Michel Foucault has been an important touchstone in a variety of fields in the last decades.  However, especially in the Anglo-American world, it has been subject to wild misinterpretations and uncareful readings which have sometimes occluded as much as clarified his work.  This project at the Center seeks to approach Foucault’s work through an interpretive and ontological lens that follows the development of key concepts, including influences on him and other thinkers he has, in turn, influenced.  Rather than practice the kind of blind fealty Foucault (together with Nietzsche) criticized, this study strives to exercise the care and detail which is evidenced in Foucault’s method.

Following work such as that by Joan Stambaugh, Graham Parkes, Enrique Dussel, and D.T. Suzuki, this initiative seeks to foster dialogue and interaction between philosophical forms traditionally seen as conceptually and disciplinarily separate from one another.  Emphasizing the role of migration and borrowing in early Greek sources, as well as the myriad points of support and contact between the ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ traditions, this initiative is aimed at developing the notion of a world philosophy that promotes the study of traditions and thinkers de-emphasized by the focus on the European canon of philosophy.  At the same time, the project also seeks to maintain those points of contact within the Western tradition that open onto an expanded conception of philosophy.