This brief paper has basically two aims. First, it intends to introduce object-oriented ontology (OOO), a branch of contemporary thought which regards everything as an individual “object” of equal standing, as a potentially effective theoretical framework to examine a literary text, especially in order to explore the complexity of interactions between/among both human and nonhuman objects on a horizontal plane. Second, it analyzes how the narrator of A Tour on the Prairies, one of the long-neglected texts of Washington Irving, gradually begins to question the naive human/object binary and broadens his horizons through an encounter with another object. Specifically, I examined a series of the contacts which the narrator makes with buffaloes, and then demonstrated how he, though taking a naïve, human-centered schema in the beginning, gradually attains the liberal perspective through the recognition that the object before him is a being that is ontologically equal with him. I concluded the argument by attesting that the text, albeit in a gentle manner, invited us to see the world and existences in it with a more liberal—i.e. object-oriented—perspective.
This study has three aims: the first is to illuminate the transformation in the minds of the Japanese people after the catastrophic earthquake in 2011-namely, the collective movement to reappraise the worth of bonds and connections between/among people. The second is to show that the ongoing spiritual change has a number of similarities with the worldview of the Melanesian folk which Marilyn Strathern analysed with the concept of "dividual". The third is to generalize diverse insights which the two cases suggest and thus to seek a fresh way to see people and those relations which bridge over them. The argument begins with a discussion to prove the point of the first aim, then the second, and, after referring to what is not dealt with for future research, concludes by demonstrating that of the third. The contribution which this study will make for interdisciplinary scholarship is that it attests a literary text and an anthropological study can be employed to derive a philosophical discourse.
This research note intends, first, to provide a clear exposition of“meaningless nonsense”, a philosophical concept propoundedby Japanese philosopher Masaya Chiba, and, second, to indicateits potential to broaden and deepen one’s perspective. Toachieve the aims, the discussion is conducted in the followingorder: after an introduction which succinctly reviews previousstudies of Chiba’s thought, the first part elucidates the precisecontext in which “meaningless nonsense” was invented, andclarifies that the neologism, as an uncountable, stands for beingunambiguously noninterpretable and, as a countable, means anobject as that which exists in such a state; thereupon, the secondpart presents a hypothesis that one could innovate one’sworldview by regarding everything as a “meaningless nonsense”because it enables one to deem an object as a triplex entity—as afinitely significant being, as a potentially infinitely polysemicexistence, and as an unambiguously noninterpretable body.
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