Copy/culture

The West sees copying as inferior to originality. In Asia, it is an acknowledgment of tradition. The West valued the past and the collective less than the future and the individual. But its attitudes changed when Asia began displaying astonishing innovation. Oosterling will situate the phenomenon of copying in an intercultural perspective, approaching the tension between copy and original from a relational philosophical perspective. Henk Oosterling is an associate professor at the Center for Philosophy and Arts at Erasmus University Rotterdam.