Assistant Professor
Kyle Peters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in August 2021 and was awarded a Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University for 2022–2023. His research focuses on Japanese cultural criticism and media studies—especially modern Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and print culture as it intersects with Critical Theory.
His current book project, Kyoto School and Totality, combines the Critical Theory concept of totality with the media form of print to reconceptualize Kyoto School philosophy—widely considered the most important intellectual movement in modern Japan. Unlike its conventional interpretation as “school of modern Japanese Buddhist philosophy” that contributes to Western philosophy “from a distinctively Eastern perspective,” this work reveals the Kyoto School as a dynamic group of thinkers deeply involved with the pressing philosophical trends, social issues, and media forms of global modernity. In foregrounding totality, this work connects with political questions about totalitarianism, the unicity of the national body, and its right to self-determination, as well as about what form an “anti-fascist” response must take: vanguardism or council communism, avant-garde collectives or popular front coalitions? Its goal is to spotlight the ambivalent and polysemic connotations of totality for thinkers in this period—the ever-present possibility for any given writer to slip from revolutionary to reactionary understandings of totality, or to re-evaluate what revolutionary totality, in fact, looks like.
His second book project focuses on Nakai Masakazu, an understudied philosopher and media theorist in interwar and postwar Japan.
Educational Background
Ph.D. East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago (2021)
Contact
Email : kyleaustinpeters@cuhk.edu.hk
Research Interests
Modern Japanese Philosophy
Modern Japanese Print Culture
Modern Japanese Aesthetics
Media Studies
Critical Theory
Selected Publications
“Watsuji Tetsurō’s ‘Climate’ and its Kyoto School Critics,” in Philosophy East and West 74.4. October 2024 (Forthcoming).
“Artistic Production and the Making of the Artist: Applying Nishida Kitarō to Discussions of Authorship,” in Philosophy East and West 68.2. April 2018.
“Goddesses and Gods in Rancière and Heidegger: Dialogically Recontextualizing ‘Origin of the Work of Art,’” in Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (formerly the journal Aesthetic Pathways) 1.2. November 2014.
Website
https://cuhk.academia.edu/KylePeters