Rodney Ferreira holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Philosophy from the Philosophy Department of FFLCH-USP, where he is currently pursuing his doctoral research. He is also a Japanese-Portuguese Literature major in the Department of Oriental Literature at the same school.

Okakura Tenshin's Universalist Vocabulary

Our paper will present an attempt to reconstruct the epistemological and methodological foundations that support and cohere the vocabulary used by the Japanese intellectual Okakura Tenshin (1863-1913) to compose what we call a "universalist reversal." After this reconstruction, we will also attempt to expound the general meaning of Tenshin's proposal, which we believe aims to counter Western readings of Asia from both a philosophical and cultural (spatial) and a historiographical (temporal) perspective, developing some aspects of contemporary critical elaboration on the author.