There is a piece today in 'The Stone' that motivates me to repeat, yet again, my position on the cluster of issues surrounding Eurocentrism in academic philosophy. This position is developed much more extensively in chapter 2 of my book The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, and will be developed more extensively still in A Global History of Philosophy, to 1750 (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
I agree entirely with Garfield and Van Norden. Academic philosophy at present is de facto a branch of Euro-American Studies. One complicating factor the authors do not address however is that in many cases there has been a long and contentious history surrounding the question whether the category of 'philosophy' is one that representatives of non-European intellectual traditions would even want, or would have wanted, to adopt as a description of what they are doing, or whether rather describing these traditions as philosophy does not already force them into a mould they did not grow up originally to fit.
(Investigation of this sort of question is significantly more advanced in history-of-science scholarship than it is among academic philosophers. Historians of science have long been engaged in serious reflection about what it means, for example, to say that science did or did not exist in Mesopotamia or in Pharaonic Egypt. They don't just assume at the outset that we know what science is and we can immediately recognise all occurrences of it.)
Some have argued, for example, that considerable violence had to be done to Chinese intellectual traditions in order to shape them into something recognisable on the 'world market' as philosophy (for example, they had to be divorced from what we can only identify, in a trivialising manner, as 'calligraphy'), that this only happened as a result of the pressures of nationalist modernisation campaigns late in the 19th century, and that the result was a mere fossil specimen, easily teachable in new western-modelled curricula, but only because it was by now no longer alive. See for example Anne Cheng, "Y-a-t-il une philosophie chinoise? : est-ce une bonne question?" in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 27 (2005). This sort of concern, about what exactly it means to belong to a culture that can claim to have its own philosophy, and how this meaning has changed over time as a result of broader historical processes that for the most part do not play out on the plane of ideas, is one to which, for better or worse, academic philosophers interested in promoting diversity will also need to turn their attention. The resistance to doing so exposes yet another deep bias, which is not only harmful to the dead people it ignores: the bias of presentism.
Today all right-thinking people believe it's good to recognise and to value every culture's 'philosophy'. Why? How did it come to this? What are some alternative approaches to conceptualising global connected intellectual history (to adapt the name of a subdiscipline pioneered by Sanjay Subrahmanyam; see for example his Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks of 2004)? How might these alternatives be more adequate to the study of the diversity of the world's intellectual traditions? Etc.
I too read this article with interest, and it took me back to my days as an undergraduate at Haverford College in 1975-77, when I read philosophy with Paul Desjardins. Paul was a brilliant, brilliant and eccentric man, a student of Paul Weiss’s at Yale, and probably the one who brought Richard Bernstein to Haverford after he was refused tenure at Yale (where they had been friends as graduate students, I suppose), making—along with others such as Tink Thompson, Aryeh Kosman, Ashok Gangadean, Diskin Clay, Joe Russo and visitors like Louis Mackey, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas—a truly great philosophical scene.
I took two year-long courses with Paul: Origins of Philosophy one year, and Philosophy East West the next.
Origins consisted of a first semester on the first eight lines of Homer’s Iliad; the second semester we did the rest of Bk 1 and the other 23 books. (We also read Hesiod at the beginning there.) This was all done in English translation
East West consisted of the first two chapters of the Shu Jing (the histories of Yao and Shun), followed by a week’s worth of Articles Criticizing Lin Piao, then the rest of semester one on the Da Hsueh, a Confucian classic (which we were expected to memorize and recite by heart in Chinese) recorded in the Li Chi, and then the second semester on The Analects of Confucius, mostly the first book. We used the Ezra Pound rendition of Confucius, a dubious translation perhaps but useful because it reproduces rubbings from the Stone Classics, the earliest publicly erected stele of the Confucian texts. (I had studied Chinese in the Army before then, so I had a little standing on that count.)
Paul was essentially a Platonist, but also a devout Catholic who had once written on Augustine (his only paper ever, I believe). Trained in Japanese at Yale during the second world war, he had been a naval officer commanding marines in the first wave at Iwo Jima, and was later a judge involved in the adjudication of the return of Chinese possessions in China from the Japanese after the war. He had a fantastic collection of Dogon masks (African philosophy?!) and had built a little stream that trickled through his second story apartment where he conducted classes. We would all take off our shoes upon entering, before crossing the little second story water garden. (He also had had a Fulbright at a Zen monastery in Kyoto sometime in the sixties.) His wife Rosemary, an Australian, taught Greek philosophy at Swarthmore after his death in 1991.
Paul was one for beginnings; in fact, he liked to undermine existing structures and give them new foundations.
In the intervening years I have spent a modest amount of time reading Heraclitus and Parmenides, as well as Chuang tzu. One salient point to make is that there is a fair amount of overlap between Heraclitus’ concept of the Logos and the Chinese idea of the Tao, enough to wonder if there wasn’t some sort of influence then, coming from the orient. In truth, I have found these three philosophers inexhaustible and sufficient, even though I have also looked into Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and some latter day French stuff over the years. I’m not sure I agree with the suggestion that we put Chinese thought in some sort of straight jacket, though. On the contrary, what is striking is the remarkable adequacy of Chinese thought (Confucian/Taoist) to come to terms with the wide range of philosophic thought so early and so completely. But perhaps because I studied Chinese before I studied philosophy has some effect here.
In his Book of Five Rings, the Japanese swordsman/calligraphic artist Miyamoto Musashi disparages reliance on the practice of “indoor strategy”, ridiculing dojos who fail to grasp the point of getting a jump on an adversary by dropping out of a tree.
I will skip over the ways conventional academic careerists misunderstood Paul.
Posted by: stefan | May 14, 2016 at 09:04 PM