LAUSR

Comparative philosophy can take many forms. Insofar as they are practiced by Western scholars, they do tend to share at least one common feature: an openness to and engagement with non-Western philosophical ideas and approaches. It is often the case that no explicit comparison between, for example, continental European and East-Asian philosophies is required. Comparisons can be implicit, for example, as a tacit comparison between the explicit treatment of East-Asian sources and the implied continental European perspective of an author. The manifold asymmetries throughout the history of these philosophical encounters, which are always embedded in not only philosophical and cultural, but also social and political (for example, post-colonial) contexts, are well known. Nonetheless, none of these encounters are uni-directional. Comparisons afford different perspectives. Scholars from regions other than Europe and North America (which are still commonly referred to as “Western”) equally show an openness to and engagement with Western philosophical ideas and approaches. Their work too, explicitly or implicitly, can be understood to be comparative in nature. Despite this fact, for a long time, such contributions have remained little read or discussed in Western circles – one of the most obvious asymmetries of global philosophical discourse. Although many Chinese scholars engage in academic exchanges with Western scholars and institutions, especially at conferences and workshops, their books and papers on Western philosophy are still only rarely published in Western international journals and presses. The current issue of Comparative and Continental Philosophy is but one piece of evidence that this is changing. Its purpose is to bring greater visibility to current research on Husserl in Chinese academia, both in mainland China and in Hongkong and Taiwan. Phenomenology has had a particularly intensive reception in East Asia, first in Japan, then in Korea, and then in China. In his paper “Introduction to Phenomenology,” published in the journal The People’s Tocsin in 1929, Rengeng Yang first introduced Husserl and his phenomenology to Chinese readers. However, his paper did not arouse much attention at the time. In the decades of war and political events that were to follow, still little heed was paid to Husserl’s philosophy. It was not until the 1980s, with an increasing enthusiasm for existentialism and Western Marxism (especially the philosophies of Heidegger and Sartre), that Chinese academia started to redirect its interests