The Hegelian logic of critical research: Understanding Professor Yoshinori Shiozawa Available to Purchase

The vast historical, cultural, linguistic, and geographical divides between East and West makes meaningful communication especially difficult. But these differences need not lead to total incommensurability – where no empathy or exchange of experience is possible. This paper shows that, within Professor Shiozawa’s keynote address, we find considerable overlap in the critical traditions of Japan and the West. Research in both cases is motivated first, by a focus on problems emanating from the instabilities and crises of capitalism, second, an appropriation of evidence that is distinct in its pursuit of greater “realism in process”, and third, a desire to reconstruct experience in a way that discerns the “self‐activating” mechanisms of material processes, and reflect them in our intelligibility. While differences will remain in the specific problematic junctures of capitalism that Japanese and Western researchers seek to investigate, the broad contours of our methodological procedures do provide us with ample grounds for a meaningful conversation.