The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy

Abstract

The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy Gereon Kopf Welcome to the fourth issue of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. This will also be the last issue that I serve as editor-in-chief. Editing this journal over the past few years, I have come to realize not only that the journal could benefit from new creative minds but also that my own scholarship has slowly taken me away from Buddhist to global-critical philosophy. In the past years, SUNY Press has been a welcoming and generous home to the journal. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the journal and the discipline in this capacity and to meet and work with amazing people, authors, reviewers, and advisors in the field of Buddhist philosophy and in academic publishing. And it has been wonderful to work on the first academic journal in the field of Buddhist philosophy in the Anglophone world. It has now been slightly less than a decade since I recognized the need for a journal dedicated solely to Buddhist philosophy (in addition to the amazing journals in Buddhist studies or Asian philosophy) and conceived of the JBP, penned the proposal for the journal, found support among my colleagues, approached publishers to gauge their interest for a journal in our discipline, gathered an editorial and an advisory board, set up a website, and began the day-to-day operation including the call for papers, management of the blind review process, communication with the publisher, the reviewers, and the authors, as well as the editorial work on these volumes. While I had the title “editor-in-chief,” none of these four wonderful issues would have [End Page 1] been possible without my amazing colleagues. I would like to thank the late Nancy Ellegate at SUNY Press who believed in the importance of this project as well as her successors in the position of acquisition editor in our field at SUNY Press, Christopher Ahn and James Peltz. I would like to thank the members of the editorial and advisory boards who lent their support to this project and assisted as consultants and reviewers, my former assistant at Luther College, Hannah Lund, who designed the logo of the journal; Douglas Duckworth and Christian Coseru, who served as associate editors of the journal in the past; Tao Jiang, who served as review editor for two, and Pascale Hugon for all four issues; Marcus Bingenheimer, who maintained our website and solved its occasional glitches; and Agnieszka as well as Francesca Soans, who served as associate editors for the third and fourth issues. Without the help of these amazing people, none of the four issues would have seen the light of day. Starting with the subsequent, fifth issue, Jay Garfield and his editorial team will take over the journal. I am grateful for their willingness to continue this important work. We started the journal to give authors in Buddhist philosophy a venue to develop our field as an independent academic discipline and not just a subfield of Buddhist studies or comparative philosophy. The idea was to give equal space to essays and topics dealing with South and East Asian Buddhist philosophy to not only discuss Buddhist philosophy on its own terms (rather than on the terms of analytical and Continental philosophy) but also to develop an axiology of categories from scriptures and debates within the Buddhist traditions. In a second step, we hoped that these categories would then enter in a dialogue with philosophies from other traditions and contribute to philosophical discourses on current issues of global concern and with global appeal. To facilitate the space for scholars to develop Buddhist philosophy on its own terms and to identify the basic philosophical structures and foundational presuppositions—as well as a set of categories, questions, concerns, and genres—each issue provided papers that contributed to the discourse on a specific topic, peer-reviewed research papers, philosophical reflections on the status of the field, and book reviews. This issue also contains peer-reviewed essays on a variety of topics, philosophical reflections on humanistic Buddhism, the practice of decentering as philosophical strategy, as well as the topic of “suchness” (tathatā), not to mention reviews of recent...