{"id":439,"date":"2019-11-04T11:09:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T01:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/?p=439"},"modified":"2019-11-04T11:31:24","modified_gmt":"2019-11-04T01:31:24","slug":"non-western-philosophies-in-the-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2019\/11\/04\/non-western-philosophies-in-the-academy\/","title":{"rendered":"Non-Western Philosophies in the Academy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I listened to a Philosopher\u2019s Zone podcast (our ABC) ‘Philosophy in the Wake of Empire: The White Way to Think<\/a>‘ featuring B W van Norden (a famous student of Chinese philosophy \u2013 I\u2019m currently reading his \u2018Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy\u2019) talking about the failure of Western Philosophy to take seriously non-Western philosophy, explaining why that\u2019s a problem, and proposing ways to improve the situation. At least, that\u2019s what he could have been doing. No, what he was actually doing was accusing philosophers in the West of systematic racism, collaborating with racist systems of colonialist and imperialist subjugation, and so on. I have some comments.<\/span><\/p>\n

First. I doubt that the failure to take Chinese or Indian philosophy seriously has any relationship to imperialism or colonialism. The problem for this thesis is the same as that for Said\u2019s similar assertions in \u2018Orientalism\u2019 \u2013 quoted approvingly by vN \u2013 and that is that non-(relevantly-)imperial powers, such as Germany or Russia, were equally dismissive in the same period. Moreover, the scholars of the (relevantly-)imperial powers were clearly fascinated by the cultures of the peoples they were conquering. Some had low opinions of them, but they were hardly ill-informed. Some were \u2018racist\u2019 and \u2018euro-centric\u2019 and so on, but that\u2019s not a systematic failing, and no number of anecdotes about unfortunate opinions will make it so. We could at least entertain the idea that if they found little philosophically worthy in those alien traditions it was an honestly made judgement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second. It really is not a trivial question to determine that something does or does not count as philosophy (or, if it does, as *good* philosophy.) vN says that alien philosophies were diminished by putting them into the categories of \u2018wisdom literature\u2019 or \u2018religion\u2019 and so on \u2013 and the suggestion is that this is both unjust and malicious. Really. And yet it is one of the repeated caveats made by introductions to Chinese philosophy that we have to read it differently from the familiar Western philosophy because it seems to lack argument and conversational engagement with other philosophers in its own tradition, and seems also to lack argumentative development and defence of the ideas proposed. Of course, this is not universally true, and Mencius and Xunzi are consciously and explicitly reacting to others; but read Confucius or Laozi and any number of others and the difficulty will be quite clear. On the other hand the Indian philosophers are much more like our own; but they very much *are* in a religious tradition, and their philosophy is vitiated for the modern mind in precisely the way and to the degree that Mediaeval Scholastic and Islamic philosophy are: they all make assumptions that we are not prepared to grant and are concerned with problems we don\u2019t care about.<\/span><\/p>\n

Third. It is not the role of Philosophy to concern itself with questions of inclusiveness or diversity or any of the other buzzworthy notions. Philosophy sets its own goals, and they are (in its view anyway) to investigate the fundamental questions that are of interest to Mankind and which cannot be answered by Science (or to determine whether those questions are coherent.) Western, or should I simply say Modern, Philosophy has through long centuries developed a set of questions with which it concerns itself; it has explored and dismissed or adopted a set of answers to those question, or it has explored and dismissed or adopted a set of approaches to those questions. Alien philosophers and their ideas will be accepted into the Modern project if they can be found to answer to the needs of that project as defined by modern philosophers; but can we be sure that alien philosophies \u2013 even supposing they are identifiable \u2013 can be integrated into that project? The adoptions and dismissals and so on of modern philosophy are not independent of the processes by which the explorations were conducted: in fact the methods of modern philosophy are an essential part of the project. Alien philosophies have their own approaches, methods, etc. which it is not obvious must be compatible with the historically developed modern project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those who wish to make alien philosophies part of the modern project will need to demonstrate that it is possible and worthwhile. This is not a task that can be fairly imposed on those trained in modern philosophy. The investment in time and effort that is required to become passably familiar with the concepts, arguments, and other cultural background involved in another civilisation\u2019s philosophy is not trivial \u2013 and that\u2019s even before considering the necessity to become familiar with historical languages. The responsibility, should there be any, must fall on those who claim that it is worth doing, and have the background in the alien philosophies to make the case. In the meantime, those who are interested can continue their studies into alien philosophies with the same purpose and respectability as those who study Greek, Roman, or Mediaeval Western philosophy. Those studies too are independent of and mostly irrelevant to modern philosophy \u2013 and they too have clearly not been dismissed for the sorts of reasons vN was talking about.\u00a0They continue to have a place in philosophy departments (when they do) almost entirely because of tradition.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I listened to a Philosopher\u2019s Zone podcast (our ABC) ‘Philosophy in the Wake of Empire: The White Way to Think‘ featuring B W van Norden (a famous student of Chinese philosophy \u2013 I\u2019m currently reading his \u2018Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy\u2019) talking about the failure of Western Philosophy to take seriously non-Western philosophy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}