The 122^nd RIHN seminar

You are warmly invited to the upcoming RIHN Seminar:

Date:	October 29th, 2015 (Thursday) 15:00 - 17:00
Place:	Lecture hall, RIHN( → Access)
Lecturer:	Augustin Berque, born in 1942, Rabat, Morocco, is a French geographer, Orientalist and philosopher. He is professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS). His specialist field of interest is Japan. Berque has developed an extensive array of concepts in order to grasp the complex nature of relations between natural and physical objects and the way we conceive of nature.
Title:	On the relation of Imanishi’s “renatured science” (shizengaku 自然学) with mesology (in Japanese)
Contact:	Center for Research Promotion: Emmanuel MARES

Abstract:

Though Imanishi did not refer to Uexküll nor to Watsuji, what he eventually came to call “renatured science”(shizengaku 自然学) – as distinct from the natural sciences – shares with the former’s Umweltlehre and the latter’s fudoron a common crucial principle; that is, to pose first the selfhood of the concerned living being, which for that reason is endowed with a certain capacity of choice, and thus cannot be reduced to a mere mechanism determined by the general environment. Correlatively, though Imanishi did not refer to Watsuji’s ontological concept of fudosei, defined as the structural moment of human existence, he expressed a similar idea with his formula “environmentalization of the subject, subjectivation of the environment”. In other words, as does mesology, and as Heisenberg put it for physics itself, renatured science amounts to making the relation between observation and reality the very object of science, instead of considering nature as a mere object.