Written with flair and imagination, Michael Murphy’s exciting and thoughtful book rethinks the relationship of self and other in critical conversation with Gerard Delanty’s cosmopolitanism and Walter Mignolo’s decolonial theory. By pollinating this engaging dialogue with Watsuji Tetsuro’ original concepts and perspectives, the book aspires to shed a new, valuable light on theorizations of temporal and spatial modalities of modernity.

Marianna Papastephanou, Department of Education, University of Cyprus

This book makes a significant contribution to critical cosmopolitanism. It brings together different traditions of cosmopolitan thought in and opens the field to Japanese philosophy. It is a thoughtful and insightful analysis.

Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, University of Sussex

Michael Murphy succeeds in an extraordinarily ambitious task: to radically rethink critical cosmopolitan social theory as developed by Gerard Delanty and Walter Mignolo through an application of the central ideas of Watsuji Tetsuro, one of Japan’s most significant modern philosophers and perhaps the world’s first truly global thinker. Highly recommended for scholars and students of contemporary social theory and/or comparative thought.

James Mark Shields, Professor of Comparative Humanities and Asian Thought, Bucknell University