If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory - and the concept of "cultural worth" would be equally out of place in any good institution of philosophy.
If you think an idea is worth teaching just because it came from a certain culture, you must not care if it's right. That mindset works well in the purely creative disciplines but should have no place outside.
"Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: We do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures."
"This is not to disparage the value of the works in the contemporary philosophical canon: Clearly, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with philosophy written by males of European descent; but philosophy has always become richer as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) recognized this when he followed his Muslim colleagues in reading the work of the pagan philosopher Aristotle, thereby broadening the philosophical curriculum of universities in his own era. We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the “Bhagavad Gita” as they do the “Republic,” that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926-2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931- ), Lame Deer (1903-1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon."
The point the article is making is that ancient Asian/MiddleEastern philosophy contains numerous theories and teachings that are just as profound as those found in ancient Greek philosophy. Hence why their diminished representation is a problem worth fixing. Do you feel otherwise? Do you think that philosophical theories such as Confucianism and the Bhagavad Gita are not worthy of being taught alongside ancient Greek philosophy?
Right or wrong, modern philosophers at top universities would claim that they teach history of philosophy for the same modest reason that physicists learn about Newton: so they can get some context about how various ideas developed and the reason for conventions. Analytical philosophers generally resist about having to teach history of philosophy.
> the list of topics that are discussed in the non-history topics are those that were discussed by the old European philosophers.
What topics discussed by non-European philosophers do you think are neglected?
Yes it's hard to imagine there isn't bias in topic selection, but then this needs to be addressed by convincing modern researchers that whatever non-European ideas are better on their merits, not by studying modern non-European philosophy as a separate topic.
I actually agree with you on this. It's fine to draw inspiration from historical theories, but I'd prefer if we could focus more on the ideas themselves, and less on the history behind those ideas. That said, this is orthogonal to what the article is about. Given that so much of philosophy classes revolves around "History of Philosophy," it makes sense to cover the full range of history, and not just one slice of it.
> "What topics discussed by non-European philosophers do you think are neglected? Yes it's hard to imagine there isn't bias in topic selection, but then this needs to be addressed by convincing modern researchers that whatever non-European ideas are better on their merits, not by studying modern non-European philosophy as a separate topic."
What you said is exactly what the author is arguing as well. He's expressly arguing against the segmentation of western/eastern philosophy into different topics, and in favor of integrating them into the mainstream of philosophy, based on their individual merits. He's also given specific examples of non-western philosophy that is unfairly neglected, and meriting integrated study. So far in this thread, numerous people have disagreed with the author, but I've yet to see any highly rated comment dispute the merit of the examples he's given.
That said, philosophy courses in university include a lot of historical survey because there's value in historically positioning schools of thoughts and their development across many philosophers who could be separated by culture and time, but nonetheless engage the same topic. Particularly in the Western tradition, it is fairly trivial to chronologically trace ideas through teachers and students, from one pivotal thinker to another, to the current state of Western thought. This at least helps students understand how we arrived to the present day, which I think is valuable.
Incorporating non-western philosophy would certainly make for a very positive increased coverage of human ideas, and could offer some interesting and challenging opportunities for philosophy students. There still needs to be a way to situate the information for students to grasp. Without including historical and cultural context, you could invite students to directly engage the texts and ideas alone, absent context, and produce their own comparative analysis of complementary and opposing arguments/conclusions. It could be interesting to present texts in a blind fashion, omitting identifying information about a philosopher, and see what students make of the texts without the bias of knowing where it came from historically and culturally.
While I agree it is beneficial to approach and study ideas based on their merits, and integrate non-western thought into philosophy courses that are centered on specific ideas, I think there is still value in some amount of segmentation to avoid overwhelming students. A survey of Middle Eastern and Eastern philosophy is just as valuable and informative as a survey of Western. They could all be required of philosophy majors, I think. We already have segmentation by topic, and could more easily integrate non-western thought that way.
Somewhat related, my own graduate experience led me to realize that professors and departments are very resistant to teaching, incorporating, or even approving research into anything that is outside their identified areas of expertise. This is, I think, a likely additive reason for why any given topic X doesn't make it into an academic department that is ostensibly focused on the field topic X fits into.
I think it would have been a much more effective piece if, for example, they'd presented a philosophical argument of Lame Deer's[1] or explained how the "Flying Man" thought experiment could inform our reading of Descartes[2].
History is fixed, and if we're making new history, I'd sooner do away with this kind of philosophical thought altogether. Academia may well study theology, it needn't produce it.
All Universities should seek to teach the truth. Therefor, the cultural backgrounds of the author is irrelevant, except to the extent it forms a background to understand the author's ideas.
Also, we already call it "Continental Philosophy" as opposed to "Analytical Philosophy." If she wants to call it "European Continental Philosophy," who cares?
It's flatly wrong, since as she rightly points out, Arab and Asian philosophy have had profound influences on Western thinkers throughout history.
Also, has she not taken a philosophy course lately? Aristotle through Kant is pretty much considered a given, or go back to the survey level. Every one of the concepts she mentioned will be in any survey course of global philosophy, as simply as if she plucked them from such a syllabus.
People really pushing the limits are digging deeply into the Muslim Great Age, in particular Ibn Khaldun and his school of thought (since the great works of Ancient Greece came back to Europe through their preservation in Muslim libraries and schools), or off attempting to create a precise definition of "utility."
Finally, I hate this type of nonsense PC battle about names.
It distracts from real honest to God issues of economic and social diversity: an overhaul of the unequal justice system, an end to police brutality, restrictions on the use and duration of criminal records, redistribution of capital from the the top 1%, equal pay for equal work, and immigration reform all come to mind.
A large part of it is that, in the non-dual Shaiva Tantra tradition, there is a extensive experiential component to it. Someone who merely believes in a philosophy has not yet embodied the philosophy. Philosophical investigation is a crucial stage towards embodying the philosophy.
There is a Western philosophy that is also experiential. It's called alchemy. Here, the truths that were developed are considered the second of three stages of transformation. The last stage is plunging those principles back into the messiness of life, until the philosopher is a living embodiment of the philosophy. This last stage is called the "red stage", where the philosophy is tested in life and further distilled over and over again until it becomes alive once again.
So I'm not sure I buy your argument on that distinction. It seems more to me what you are saying is insufficiently applying and practicing the principles and fruits of philosophical investigation.
Disclaimer: My view of philosophy has heavy western bias because of the three classes I took (they were all about western philosophers).
As a side, I thought alchemy was a pseudo-chemistry aimed at finding elixir of life (immortality juice) and philosopher's stone (turning things into gold). I believe Newton was an alchemist himself and he harmed himself in his fruitless pursuit. I never knew there was a philosophy of alchemy. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There are strains of alchemy that does concern itself with elixirs and transmutations of substances, but a discussion of that requires gnosis. (These strains, though, are interesting in that they are wildly proliferated in both Eastern and Western cultures).
Math is not as fundamental as people like to think it is :-D
As for non-dual Shiava Tantra, I can see why you would think it is a set of principles derived from religion. The View derives from empirical methods, reproducible, if not objective. (There is no such thing as a privileged objective view in a non-dual philosophy). Those truths form the a priori in which the rest of the View descends from. It happens to appear to be religious, but it is not religious that most people think it is. Christopher Wallis's book, Tantra Illuminated has several chapters on just the philosophical view, including how Indian philosophers have different ideas on what constitutes validity and proof. There is a section there where Wallis speaks about the non-dual Tantric View in terms of Western Philosophy.
I get that your view of philosophy has a heavy Western bias. It's for that reason that the authors of the original article is trying to champion greater diversity. Check out Wallis's book sometime, maybe just the chapters on the View.
I haven't thought through much of it, but it's interesting to me. Was this taught in the 3 semesters on philosophy? (What I'm really asking, was this something considered important enough to teach at an intro level to philosophy?)
They were pointed about what is taught is what you write about - and in a publish or perish environment, if you only teach western thought, you only publish thoughts based on western though.
In no way does what is published force advancement.
So if I wanted to see if the buddhist concept of Samudaya (the origination of Dukkha, which is translated as pain, but is much more encompassing than that) helps resolves the ongoing issues between Platonic Realism and Nominalism, I'm going to be sh*it out of luck in terms of readers and people to help me along if no one teaches about Samudaya.
Hence problematic
You underestimate postmodernist literary theorists.
Or are postmodernists just a bogeyman?
[0](For your convenience) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Hindu–Arabic_nu...
Europe most likely adopted them via al-Khwarizmi's On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals, naming them ‘Arabic’ after the perceived origin of the author (actually he was Persian) rather than ‘Hindu’ after the title.
What you say about philosophy being more like mathematics is true, and as far as I can see, going forward philosophy is just philosophy, and it would be silly to label it with nations and cultures.
But looking backwards, the path that brought different cultures to the table, that got them thinking about the nature of things, is quite different. Labeling those different paths according to the cultures that developed them makes sense, and might be a very interesting study. But that's not philosophy as such, it's a discussion about philosophy.
I am curious how the bias might affect topics like contemporary epistemology, logic, or the philosophy of science or of mathematics?
However, other people do have the same concerns, though they might package it differently. So logic is hard to escape and was studied everywhere, but whether it was studied alongside Grammar, Metaphysics or Mathematics -- well that could vary a bit.
PS: There is a great comedy about this stuff from the roman republic which has a great scene that roughly translates as: A: Yay communism! B: Who would work the fields? A: Why the slaves of course! Anyway, stripped from context it's really easy to misread many of their arguments.
The problem with looking at world philosophy is you find 'western' philosophy is an ecco chamber as far from math as literary criticism.
PS: Not to offend people, but a huge chunk of western philosophy was so closely tied to religious thinking it's actually painful to read. Though this stuff is often a footnote in most philosophy programs.
There is truth to this statement. Nothing wrong with saying that binary systems of logical proofs, based on things like "Self" is important to the history of philosophy in the west
The authors are professors of philosophy. I find it unlikely that they have "missed the point of philosophy entirely."
The first five:
* An examination of major figures in the history of Western philosophy
* An examination of attempts to reconcile the evils of this world with the existence of a perfectly good God, with special attention to proposed solutions to this problem that appeal to human free will in explaining why God allows evil.
* An introduction to formal logic.
* An introduction to ancient philosophy, beginning with the earliest pre-Socratics, concentrating on Plato and Aristotle, and including a brief foray into Hellenistic philosophy.
* An introduction to major figures in the history of modern philosophy, with critical reading of works by Descartes, Malabranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.
Of those, only formal logic is neutral. The rest has an obvious bias.
It's possible that, for better or worse, the ivy league mindest is to focus on the foundation of our own legal system. (A huge number of lawyers start in philosophy.) Still, history isn't the same as philosophy. At my university, Aristotle is actually mostly studied by the classics department.
http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofhumanitiesandscie...
Still, even at Stanford, the history of philosophy courses seem to be about Western philosophy entirely.
This does a lot to explain why so many highly-educated people believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes to philosophy: it's what was taught in their classes!
How many of these highly educated people who believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes to philosophy actually took >1 philosophy courses that helped them arrive at these ideas? I am willing to wager vanishingly few. More likely, they never engaged much philosophy at all, and certainly didn't learn anything about metaphysics, epistemology, etc. They're probably just basing these outmoded ideas on intuition, received beliefs from childhood, and various other sources.
The textbook (which he co-wrote) looks very good. This is the TOC for th first section, Ethics
Ethics
1 Ethics in the Philosophical Traditions of India
1.1 Karma and dharma in Hindu thought 1.1.1 From The Bhagavad Gita
1.2 The Bhakti Movement 1.2.1 Akka Mahadevi 1.2.2 Janabai 1.2.3 Lalla 1.2.4 Mirabai
1.3 Early Buddhism 1.3.1 The Buddha, from The First Sermon 1.3.2 From The Dhammapada
1.4 Songs of the Buddhist Nuns 1.4.1 From Psalms of the Sisters
1.5 Buddhist Virtues 1.5.1 From The Lankavatara Sutra
1.6 Jainism 1.6.1 From the Acaranga Sutra
1.7 The Skepticism and Materialism of Charvaka 1.7.1 From Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha
2 Chinese Ethics
2.1 The Virtue Ethics of Confucius 2.1.1 Confucius, from The Analects
2.2 The Intuitionism of Mencius 2.2.1 From Mencius
2.3 Xunzi’s Pessimistic View of Human Nature 2.3.1 Xunzi, from “That the Nature is Evil”
2.4 Confucian and Neo-Confucian Women Writers 2.4.1 Ban Zhao, from Precepts for My Daughters 2.4.2 Ban Zhao, “Traveling Eastward” 2.4.3 Li Qingzhao, from Hou hsu 2.4.4 Li Qingzhao, from Complete Poems
2.5 The Virtue Ethics of Daoism 2.5.1 Laozi, from Dao-de-Jing
2.6 Daoist Women Writers 2.6.1 Yu Xuanji, from Poems 2.6.2 Sun Bu-er, from Poems
3 Ancient Greek Ethics
3.1 Socrates on Virtue 3.1.1 Plato, from Laches
3.2 Plato’s Conception of Virtue 3.2.1 Plato, from the Republic
3.3 Aristotle on Virtue 3.3.1 Aristotle, from Nicomachean Ethics
4 Medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic Ethics
4.1 The Ethics of the Fathers 4.1.1 From the Babylonian Talmud
4.2 Augustine on Weakness of Will 4.2.1 Augustine, from Confessions 4.2.2 Augustine, from On the Trinity
4.3 Al-Farabi on Happiness 4.3.1 Al-Farabi, from The Attainment of Happiness
4.4 Maimonides on Happiness and Virtue 4.4.1 Moses Maimonides, from Guide of the Perplexed
4.5 Aquinas on Law and Virtue 4.5.1 St. Thomas Aquinas, from Summa Theologica
4.6 St. Catherine of Siena on the Paradoxes of Wisdom 4.6.1 Letter to Monna Alessa Dei Saracini 4.6.2 Letter to the venerable religious brother Antonio of Nizza, of the Order of the Hermit Brothers of St. Augustine at the wood of the lake
4.7 Christine de Pizan’s Feminism 4.7.1 Christine de Pizan, from The Treasury of the City of Ladies
4.8 Virtue in St. Teresa of Avila 4.8.1 St. Teresa of Avila, from The Ways of Perfection
5 Ethics in Modern Philosophy
5.1 Princess Elizabeth’s Critique of Reason in Ethics 5.1.1 Elizabeth to Descartes—The Hague, August 16, 1645 5.1.2 Elizabeth to Descartes—The Hague, September 13, 1645 5.1.3 Elizabeth to Descartes—Riswyck, September 30, 1645 5.1.4 Elizabeth to Descartes—The Hague, April 25, 1646
5.2 Hume’s Empiricist Ethics: From Is to Ought 5.2.1 David Hume, from A Treatise of Human Nature
5.3 Kant’s Deontology 5.3.1 Immanuel Kant, from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
5.4 Madame de Stael on the Passions 5.4.1 Madame de Stael, from Influence of the Passions upon the Happiness of Individuals and of Nations
5.5 Utilitarianism 5.5.1 John Stuart Mill, from Utilitarianism
6 African Ethics
6.1 The Ethiopian Enlightenment 6.1.1 Zera Yacob, from The Treatise of Zera Yacob
6.2 The Communitarian Utilitarianism of the Akan 6.2.1 Kwame Gyekye, from An Essay in African Philosophy: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
6.3 East African Islamic Ethics 6.3.1 Kai Kresse, from Philosophizing in Mombasa
http://bonevac.info/301/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Descripti...
I have to know if he is a friend of the philosophy ring bearer out to destroy philosophy sauron too.
(sorry, that line was funny)
I kinda want to take that course. And now I want the book. Where do I get the book for cheap?
There are strong cultural biases that show up in the history of mathematics. For instance the English mathematics community preferred Newton's notation over Leibniz due to a Anglocenteric bias in English mathematics community despite Newton's notation being clearly inferior. As wikipedia says:
>"The priority dispute had an effect of separating English-speaking mathematicians from those in the continental Europe for many years. Only in the 1820s, due to the efforts of the Analytical Society, did Leibnizian analytical calculus become accepted in England."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calculus#Leibniz
This change was brought about by the Analytical Society created by Babbage and others to defeat Anglocenteric notation in favor of the better Leibnizian Newton.
>If you think an idea is worth teaching just because it came from a certain culture, you must not care if it's right.
Consider two axiomatic systems with different starting axioms. They are both internally consistent but may differ widely. How do we choose which ones to teach? Is diversity and scope important to building an objective perspective?
Secondly, if biases exist, one need not argue for diversity in order to achieve it. Liebniz notation didn't win because someone argued that anglos were biased and diversity was needed, it won because mathematical arguments demonstrated it was better.
Unfortunately the authors of this piece don't actually make that latter argument.
If biases exist then a spectrum of ideas from cultures which hold a different of set bias can be a critical aid in the search for truth.
*I disagree with this assumption but it is a hard case to make in either direction and I recognize the value of your perspective.
I feel this is a poor analogy to cultural cross pollination: notation is not the same kind of 'idea' as those found in philosophical paper.
Newton had a variety of arguments in favor of why his calculus worked, only some based on infinitesimals. Liebniz just asserted without proof that infinitesimals were fine, used them, and got good results.
Additionally, there were a variety of religious arguments mixed into this, most of which are lost in the sands of uninteresting history. I.e., disputes over whether god (the perfect watchmaker) periodically wound his watch or whether he build a perfect watch that never needed winding. For instance, Liebniz believed in noninteracting dualism, but got set up the world so perfectly that the mind and body agreed. (I'm a mathematician and only minimally familiar with these - they have been discarded by history.)
These religious arguments did play a role in the debate over infinitesimals, and acceptance of divine coincidences like Liebniz notation - unjustified though it may be - working perfectly all the time.
I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(%CE%B5,_%CE%B4)-definition_of... and similar methods are used to show equivalence today. The subject seems more insulated from this kind of philosophy.
> Unfortunately the authors of this piece don't actually make that latter argument.
Is this to imply there is a more-correct philosophy? I have no formal training in philosophy but I feel that to claim one philosophy is objectively better than another is a bit much.
Many philosophical traditions simply don't measure up. That's not a crack at non-western traditions, most western traditions have also been discarded due to being nonsense. Quite a few more probably should be but are kept alive for non-intellectual reasons.
It is also judged by outcome matters, which is why the west still teaches Foucault and Dedirra, even though they are by far way less consistent than analytical philosophers (who are also taught)
One of the reasons that happened if that some correctly constructed Analytical Philosophical thought gets very non-intuitive results that seem to create exceptions, such as ethics of genocide, whereas classic continental philosophy, because of its room to breath, doesn't.
Hence why philosophy still has problems to solve to this day
Quality of thought as better. Internal consistency is but one measure of quality, given that you also want non-intuitive results (EG: Can't justify genocide accidentally with the way ethics is set up, even if all of the pieces of the argument are internally consistent.)
This topic overall reminds me I should write to an old friend with a phd in Philosophy and the son of a phd in Philosophy, a great mathematician (pity he didn't go for the phd in that) and a really excellent talmudist when he feels like it... he probably has thoughts on what they are saying.
Centuries of philosophical work are repeatedly refined, tested, contested, and expanded by subsequent thinkers. This interrogation of ideas leads to either strengthening or weakening certain schools. The effects can be seen in such topics as free will, materialism, dualism, ethics, political theory, epistemology, as well as the tracking of historical trends in what central ideas were under primary discussion, and when certain ideas were arguably considered "settled".
Within philosophy, it's often the case that accepting a certain argument as objectively better leads to digging deeper into the effects that ripple outward to other ideas an accepted better philosophy can inform and illuminate, often opening up new areas for philosophy to investigate that it hadn't before.
Also, worthy of consideration in the wider context of OP article is that both versions of calculus emerged from pretty much the same European cultural milieux - there was much exchange between English and German academia and both came up with it similarly because it was "what was happening at the time".
Which one leads to a richer vein of further research?
Which one makes better predictions?
Which one finds more applications?
Diversity and scope can be important only so far as they improve the systems in terms of scientific validity.
Your arguments are exactly the ones used by creationists for the purpose of making that internally consistent system seem as valid as the theory of evolution.
Science is different than Mathematics in that science must be both internally and externally consistent.
If a mathematical idea leads to the same results as another mathematical idea with no contradiction it is considered true and is celebrated. These ideas also need to avoid running afoul of fundamental axioms.
I don't know much about philosophy but it seems like ideas lead directly to irreconcilable contradictions should be either thrown out or isolated into their own system (if the resulting system is rich enough) and those that fit into a system and lead to new paths of insight should be included in that system. Contradictions between systems should be explored but it seems that expanding an already rich system should be preferred to forcing contradictions into a coherent system or weakening working ideas to make room for ideas that don't lead anywhere new.
Maybe that is what the author is advocating -- separate internally consistent systems and a relinquishing of the umbrella term Philosophy to make room for separate systems. But the title -- 'If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is' seems to suggest a preference for Philosophy to diversify, to throw everything under the same big tent, contradictions and all, which I really don't think is helpful.
What is the equivalent in philosophical cross-pollination? Are some philosophies going to be dropped in favour of better ones? This doesn't even happen withing a lot of western cliques.
The nearest equivalent to notational reform I can think of is terminology/lexical reform, maybe, though there are a lot of ambiguities that confound this (in contrast to mathematics). In fact, it might even imply that anglo-centrism is a good thing, due to the standard common language.
It seems to me that Newton's notation and terminology lost market share but wasn't completely dropped.
If we want to evaluate the axioms, you better teach both.
Internal consistency is just that - internal to that system. Metaphilosophy would want to judge both, but if you never teach both, how would you judge?
Philosophy students study study particular thinkers and the traditions in detail. And rightly so: theirs words are open to importantly varied interpretation. Students need to read read Plato because even today professors have non-trivial arguments about what he meant and how to apply the ideas.
So it is forgivably hard for philosophy to see beyond the western tradition it grew up in. But it is unforgivably dumb to try and justify the Euro-centrism by an by an false analogy to science.
I if a student is learning classical mechanics, she needn't read Principia Mathematica, and it doesn't matter what Newton was thinking when he wrote it. What matters is how you do physics today -- the various interpretations that physicists put on it can wait for some advanced course.
As someone with a postgraduate background in Philosophy I can say that, within at least the Western Analytic (mostly anglophone) tradition, that many do in fact think exactly that and I would tend to agree. Many Philosopher see their closest relations reside in Mathematics and to a lesser extent the hard sciences. They prize deductive reasoning and argument with truth as the aim.
They are not consciously engaged in a project of cultural preservation and would welcome say Indian or Chinese contributions, but the barrier to understanding their contributions are often very very high (conceptual and not just large linguistic barriers with lack of access to good translations) and so very few people bother to engage when grant applications need writing.
History of Philosophy, as the study of past traditions, thinkers, and arguments plays an outsized role in Philosophy 101 undergraduate courses, but in fact represents a minority of research activity. The majority of research philosophers are active in work relating to new work and living or recent figures such as David Chalmers, Saul Kripke, Ted Sider, David Lewis, Ruth Millikan, Dorothy Edgington, Timothy Williamson, David Parfit, and many many others. To demonstrate what I mean look at the citation network of the top journals in the subject:
Force graph visualisation: https://kieranhealy.org/philcites/
Blog post explainer: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/18/a-co-citati...
And you are right to do so, for the reasons I explained in my post above.
When you talk of current research, then sure, you talk of modern philosophers. But that's still studying a tradition: just the latest versions of it. When teaching students you reach further back in time (just as maths students learn ancient theorems rather than modern ones).
The conceptual barriers to entry that you say face Asian contributions are a consequenceof the whole discipline having learned more Aristotle than Kongzi in philosophy 101. Because the 101 class (in any field) is what sets the terminology and background assumptions behind even modern research.
"Causal theories of reference" looks interesting from an AI perspective. Do you know how it relates to the math discipline, causality (eg. Pearl)?
Philosophers working in metaphysics and especially causation are aware of Pearl, and the literature on causation in Philosophy is very large, old, and active. It is also clear that Pearl is also aware of the literature in Philosophy on causation and conditionals as he does cite people like Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis.
However, there is a slight difference in concerns on the topic of causation/causality. Philosophers are usually interested in providing a reductive account of causation by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for causation, as apposed to modelling known causal structures to predict what interventions might have on novel systems. That said I do know that L.A. Paul, Ned Hall, Hitchcock, and Menzies have done some work trying to incorporate the insights from the causal modelling approach done by Pearl and colleagues.
Some links in case you want to explore further. Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an amazing free resource if you want to look something up:
http://www.philosophybites.com/
Check out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free and edited by active research philosophers on pretty much every major topic and figure.
Naming and Necessity by Kripke is about reference and the causal theory of reference, but it assume a decent amount (in case that is what you were asking for specifically).
The Very Short Introductions series have some really good booklets if you want quick ways to jump into a topic.
A few other books:
B Russell The Problems of Philosophy. OUP (dated, but a classic general introduction)
Simon Blackburn Think. Oxford (nice general introduction)
Tim Crane The Mechanical Mind. Penguin (Nice introduction to phil of mind)
A J Ayer Language, Truth, and Logic. Penguin (dated, but a classic)
D Hume Enquiries
T Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Univ of Chicago Press
Plato/stanford is just overwhelming.
You mention one strand of western philosophy, "the Western Analytic (mostly anglophone) tradition" that believes its work is most closely related to math but then also point out that, while practitioners from that school are open to participation from non-westerners, they often face "conceptual and not just large linguistic barriers" at engaging with such contributions.
You seem to be saying that there may be value in these contributions but that we lack the cultural framework to understand and engage with them. If that is true, even though this is the portion of philosophy most consciously focused on mathematics-like deductive reasoning, doesn't that suggest an insufficiency in our current programs and perhaps argue that we need to expand our coverage if we are going to engage with practitioners in a global field?
I'm not going to pretend that there isn't some real problem with engagement with other cultures as you only need to look at the ongoing divide between the Analytic and continental traditions. That divide is partly artificial driven by politics and events in early 20th century Europe. At the same time, its is a misunderstanding of what philosophy is if you think its just about cultural preservation. Philosophy in the West is an active and living discipline that is not standing still. A philosophy wants to know what is true, not necessarily what Kant thought was true.
I've got no opinions either way, but it sounds like someone needs to define what is meant by "philosophy."
I've got no opinions either way, but it sounds like someone needs to define what is meant by "philosophy."
They only care if it's diverse, not if it's right.
I wouldn't argue about it, but there's actually lots of interesting ways to look at mathematics that do not come from Europe. For example, Chinese counting rods as expounded by Liu Hui or Seki Takakazu's theory of determinants. Sure, with some twisting around, you can show how the way they worked with polynomials or systems of equations is the same as how we teach it today in the west, but if you look at the way they thought of things, not how we translate them today, you get to appreciate a different mode of thought, just like reading Galois's original papers, badly written as they are, give you an insight into how he thought of polynomial equations, permutations, and substitutions.
Even Mayans' astronomical calculations (that is, calculations about the stars, not unimaginably big calculations) offer unique insights. You really do get a narrow view of mathematics if you only ever get it from one cultural tradition. Even within European mathematics there are lots of culturally different ways of doing things, such as differences in notation and nomenclature (e.g. "tan" or "tg", "[0,1)" or "[0,1[", "distribution" or "generalised function"). For example, Soviet mathematics has a very unique and distinct flavour, driven by the needs of engineering and analysis and the pressure to produce science that served the proletariat.
Mathematics, like philosophy, is a very human affair, rooted in the ways that humans think and communicate. It is thus also important to not separate the humans from the ideas that they produce. Ideas don't form in a Platonic void; they come from humans and the cultures they lived in.
And actual academic programs in philosophy often have a distinct Euro-American (with a dash of Middle Eastern, primarily attached to the Abrahamic faith traditions) cultural bias.
On the other hand, how diversified are philosophy departments in Chongqing, or Beijing? Should we push them to match the NYTs expectations?
We all start with seeing things from our own perspectives and understanding (as does the NYT itself) and when we get done with that if we have the desire we can delve into less exposed areas. Should we be pushed into it? I dunno. Maybe when were one big massive global culture which has destroyed local uniqueness.
I think much of what the article is dancing around the entire time is that most philosophers/philosophy departments do not think this other philosophy is good/worth teaching.
Philosophy departments do not teach the Bible, they do not teach Ayn Rand. Both have some barely tangential relation to philosophy but are not particularly deep so as to even be worth reading as far as philosophy goes. I think the authors are trying to force philosophy departments to make this tacit claim they have always made silently out loud -- that Confucius, say, is just not as deep as Kant or Hegel.
Also primarily the history of philosophy is a conversation. In order to understand Nietzsche/Kierkegaard, you need to put them in context as responses to Hegel. They use technical Hegelian terms to craft their theories and responses, which you need to spend time grokking before you can make sense of anything that follows. Why do we cover Descartes' cogito rather than the floating man? Well, partially because it is better (he wrote it second, after all). But more importantly because of the hundreds of years of conversation that follows it as a jumping off point, because of the hundreds of brilliant philosophers it allows you to read, now in-context.
And philosophy tends to define the framework that all intellectual activity in a culture takes place. If you're interested in new theories and ideas in psychology, look to philosophy about a century prior and you'll find every single one lined up and argued exhaustively. A lot of the work of philosophy is to understand and challenge the way our culture thinks about things. Mencius would be very relevant when you try to understand Chinese culture, not so much ours. So in this sense the authors are correct I think, that some part of philosophy has this end goal of understanding the history and future of western thought and culture, for which non-western thought is a tangential oddity.
Thinking that you can search for truth while ignoring how most of the world thinks about and addresses these issues is like thinking you can study urban planning without traveling to other towns. While there are some schools of thought that take such a tightly analytic view of philosophy those represent only a single strain of philosophy, and a highly Western continental one at that.
It is worth mentioning that Descarte thought he was doing just this kind of rational searching free of all philosophical conceptions but, for him, the proof of God's existence was obvious as a rational axiom using the same methods as his cogito. I think most of us in the more secular setting of hacker news would consider that portion of his rationalism to be the product of his cultural background.
Just as travel expands your understanding of where you are from, engaging with many traditions of thought is one of the only ways to actually become aware of the assumptions and biases inherent in your own.
The thing about philosophy is that each philosopher is an individual; philosophy is additive (in the sense that any philosopher is building on, or replying to their predecessors) but not cumulative. There is no set of settled propositions that are universally regarded as correct.
The point of the argument of the article is that modern, Western university philosophy departments will not, or can not, include Chinese or Indian philosophers (both have extensive traditions) for example, and so cannot either evaluate those philosophies or, more importantly, relate them in any way to western philosophy.
Or, would you prefer that western mathematicians had never adopted the zero because it came from another culture and therefore could not be correct?
Economists do not start with David Ricardo and add up from it. They start at the modern mainstream, and then, in a tangent, go back to Ricardo.
It's a different situation. I just don't know if different enough to be important.
The difference in Philosophy is the default is assumed to be European philosophy. A Chinese paper has to be exceptional to be included in an existing course, where most things are directly derived from European philosophy. It is not a fair playing field at all unlike STEM. The course designer is not fetching a list of all studies in the world done of a topic x, and then a panel is not debating on which of these studies has a most merit. The course creators are taking discussion on a topic X from whichever study is done in Europe. If this is how we start carrying out STEM research, we'd have a hard time to say the least.
Should we stop teaching Aristotle and Plato now because many of their ideas have been vastly improved upon? Of course not, because teaching about those philosophers has pedagogical value.
Philosophy is much more about building and de-constructing rational arguments than it is about learning some particular set of facts from some particular philosopher. As such it doesn't matter whether western philosophy is "more correct" than non-western philosophy: it still offers arguments from different perspectives that can be used as a basis for practising philosophy.
At my undergrad university, the philosophy department, in terms of courses taught and faculty research, was basically a cognitive science department in all but name. I know there are other programs that lean similarly toward math/logic, philosophy of science or epistemology.
In such programs, the Western philosophers the article is complaining about warrant at most a course of two in the history of philosophy (ironically called "History of Western Philosophy" in many universities for many years).
This sounds more like some kind of ideological/political battle that the authors may be fighting in their departments more than any kind of overriding statement about how philosophy is taught in most schools.
Attributing philosophy of mind as "western" is the problem the article is speaking to--our Philosophy departments are so ignorant of thousands of years of work that they often duplicate already solved problems or ignore perspective changing constructs.
If people are actually curious, even beginning to engage with Nagarjuna or Candrakirti is fascinating.
The scientific method is a way of approaching reality that has lead to extremely useful discoveries--but, in my opinion, the hard problem of consciousness cannot be solved via the scientific method because consciousness, the experience of qualia, is not externally observable.
Nagarjuna and Candrakirti were both experts in the observation of qualia, and their philosophies stem from that expertise. It's possible to even call their philosophical method 'scientific' if that is the materialist's sole judgement of the value of an idea.
Then why are you arguing about the choices of a nominally scientific institution? If you want to practice mysticism, you're free to do so, but it's strange to argue that academic institutions (which are, ideally, based in fact) should do the same.
> consciousness, the experience of qualia, is not externally observable.
Unless you believe in otherworldly mystical forces producing consciousness, we have neuroscience. There's no reason, in principle, that the behavior of the brain should not be entirely observable.
Then, if you wished to be able to understand the two papers, you would have to trace back to previous arguments etc., and most certainly the understanding of the second would come after being able to absorb the first one. This in itself is of course not a unique thing at all, but I think what with philosophers not purely relying on formal logic, the terms constructed/used become very specific and numerous; these terms are words in a language and so a specific linguistic framework is heavily relied upon (this is the crucial point).. if that makes sense.
An eclectic parallel could be Mochizuki's (Japanese mathematician) (proposed) proof of the abc conjecture[1]. It's quite massive, with multiple papers of his establishing a specific theory[2] used for the proof. The proof has been presented in 2012 and it's still being evaluated. His way was very custom, and this poses a practical problem.
What I meant to say is that it's probably not at all easy to present some new ideas in (say) analytic philosophy which employ a number of new notions (or just notions under new names). This is of course not ideal at all, but it's a tricky thing. [edit expanded some words]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...
I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that what CMU's philosophy department _actually_ teaches is logic, and philosophy of scientific research and math, and that the majority of professors in the department are jointly appointed at other departments within the university.
I told him I think we just need to ditch the name "philosophy", and he said "you know, my department offers five majors... only one of them is called philosophy."
What surprised me was, as it seems for you, that they basically only studied philosophy from the last fifty or hundred years. It's not really about Plato or Aristotle.
I wonder about the difference between the history of philosophy and philosophy. Few philosophers operate in a complete vacuum, so it isn't useful to have an overview of philosophical thought that had an impact on your particular area of study?
1. Ideas on particular "universal" topics, like politics, ethics, metaphysics, and so on. We can call this "philosophy."
2. What certain people thought about said ideas. We can call this "history of thought."
Should there be a wider variety of cultures in #2? Of course. But it's also very important to realize that philosophy, that is, the activity of ruminating on ideas, is largely a process that happens within specific culture in reaction and in conversation to other members of a culture. So while Confucian thought on the family is no doubt very robust and worth exploring, it is simply out-of-place and lacking context when placed next to 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy, for example. Wittgenstein was writing in response to western philosophers that came before him. One cannot really understand W. without understanding the centuries of western thought that led to him.
Personally, I'd like to see more of a clear distinction between "philosophy" and "history of thought". This would allow for more inclusion of non-western thought while also recognizing that viewpoints on certain subjects are not equally as valid simply because they are from a different culture.
Source: philosophy-degree-holder currently working on a philosophy startup.
That sounds like a very different kind of startup.
I'll be launching it this July. Stay tuned.
All the advantages they presume to exist by doing so will surely accrue to them, and others will follow suit in time.
I rather see this as advocacy. If you strongly feel the need for change, you have to do that in addition to simply doing what they themselves can do.
People do it all the time. Take a look at open source advocacy for example.
Imagine this piece does its job and convinces a lot of people. "Indeed! We need more multicultural philosophy departments!" Now it's a policy debate. Which departments? Which coursework? Do we need to hire and fire to make this change? The question becomes: HOW WILL WE ALLOCATE RESOURCES DIFFERENTLY TO MAKE THIS CHANGE HAPPEN? Do we need to cut government funding from public schools that don't meet some percentage curriculum requirement?
The logical endpoint WOULD BE a dictate even if the op-ed is "just advocacy" right now.
That's the quote the article ends with. Seems like a threat and, frankly, out of place -- and, stronger, than 'advocacy'.
They are not passing a law or advocating passing a law. so there is no 'dictation.
>hen why don't they just simply teach non-Western philosophy.
They do. Go to their homepages and look at the courses they teach. (eg: http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/110syllabus.pdf)
Similarly, Plato is the father of a philosophical tradition that to this day is recognizable as the foundation of how we develop questions about philosophical problems and analyze them. There were schools of thinking that came to various _conclusions_ with some similarity to Greek (and some later Roman) traditions, and there were certainly Greek philosophers who were steeped in mythical, religious, or simply very time and place specific thinking and no longer considered of much interest today, but as per the article's example, the "Bhagavad Gita" is a deeply religious text - its wisdom is received from a god figure, not puzzled out or reasoned by man.
The Confucius one got to me in college as I learned about him in a world religion class instead of philosophy. I mean, here's a guy or group whose writings were so profound that they can lead you to business success or happiness in 2016. Gets almost no attention outside of jokes that make him look like an idiot. I like messing with people in the South by talking about how the "Good Book" says (insert Confucius quote). They'll correct me about what Jesus really said only to have me point out I was talking about a different author that came before him and was doing it for non-religious reasons. Blows their minds. Instead of him, my philosophy class taught me a mix of stuff that's practical (eg Empiricism, Skepticism) and stuff I'd have to use PCP to benefit from. Hmmm.
I find the Flying Man experiment interesting, too, given I've done the same one. At least the initial thoughts. I did it after I had fallen from a high place. It felt so peaceful as if I was suspended in air with a light breeze with the world moving past me. The ground interrupted the peace. Aside from that, I do recall introspecting on how it looked and felt from my perspective vs what actually happened. I knew there were psychological lessons or something to learn from the experience. Turns out, a Persian my philosophy class didn't know about thought up the same thing before 1,000AD. Probably fell off a building or something, too. ;)
> Instead, we ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness.
> We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”
In my view, up until this point, a very rational proposal, in line with the change from "Computer Science" to (for instance) "Information Technology" in courses that skip the whole mathematical foundation to focus exclusively on the applied technological disciplines.
However, the follow up of the reasoning sounded too judgmental with an unnecessary passive aggressive tone:
> This simple change would make the domain and mission of these departments clear, and would signal their true intellectual commitments to students and colleagues.
"Jay L. Garfield is - - the author of “Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy.” Bryan W. Van Norden is -- the author of “Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy.”"
"Give us more money. We like money."
But if you are expert of your own field and wish to promote it, you should be able to present extremely well thought out argument in favor. The article is such hand waving that I would forgive it to independent reporter, not these guys.
It's possible that the argument is so long you practically would have to write a book about it. Just like Jay L. Garfield did. But now I have no chance of knowing if his argument is good without giving him money. Except trusting some other source rating his book.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22826414-engaging-buddhis...
Now I'm intrigued. Sounds like it might be worth reading.
So it's hard turn up at the philosophy department and insist they start teaching Indian philosophy because no one there will really know about it. It's not the intellectual project the staff at the department have elected to study. You could, and I think should, nudge them to broaden their cultural horizons where possible. Links with other cultures should absolutely be explored. (This is a lovely short podcast on Hume and this possibility he was responding to Buddhist thought - http://philosophybites.com/2013/09/alison-gopnik-on-hume-and...)
At the same time, philosophy departments have a problem because - at least for analytic philosophy - it's a huge hierarchy of interlocking thoughts that you can only access by learning a large body of fundamentals. So any attempt to broaden the curriculum will necessarily prevent students getting to many of the most interesting ideas within the discipline. Especially because such a wide variety of though is colloquially designated philosophy. What is the connection between the Bhagavad Gita and Russell and Whitehead? Students would end up knowing virtually nothing about everything.
As for gender equality in philosophy departments - that's a whole other issue. Of course they should strive for gender equality. But they can't stop teaching the thoughts of dead white men to achieve it any more than the physics department ought to stop teaching Newton to increase diversity. You can't ask a whole subject area to radically shift it's focus to ensure balanced demographics in the students taking it. That's not fair to anyone.
Science is also very euro-centric, yet most of us here would argue that science is among the most objective disciplines out there.
In contract, there are Chinese physicists and Chinese mathematicians, but they're doing math and physics the same way that Europeans and Americans do it.
Edit: made this non-snarky. Sorry for that.
Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: We do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.
-----
Point being, their argument is not a very strong response to the critique it purports to address.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/wiredu/
Indeed, terms such as reflective integration and due reflection offer the critical spaces for the theoretical articulation of something whose existence has not yet been concretely conceived.
...
This reading gives an entirely different perspective on acts and themes of resistance as panoptical surveillance in the age of global neoliberalism becomes more totalitarian in nature at specific moments.
...
Another crucial, if distressing, feature of decolonization as advanced by Wiredu is that it always has to measure itself up with the colonizing Other, that is, it finds it almost impossible to create its own image so to speak by the employment of autochthonous strategies.
I know there are Western philosophical traditions that embrace this kind of language (Derrida is mentioned frequently in the above-linked piece, and I also think of Foucault and Baudrillard), but I didn't study those in my MIT philosophy program either! Conversely, there are plenty of non-Western philosophers who embrace a clarifying analytical style over this kind of semiotic obscurity. Not that the latter isn't potentially insightful and fun: We're humans, after all, not computers.
I'm working on my PhD now, and deliberately avoid citing papers with this style. I haven't got the time or energy to wade through pages of bullshit obscurity searching for nuggets of insight.
I realise it's a fashion amongst academics, designed to separate them from the ignorant masses. It's working, but I don't think that's a good thing.
Multiculturalism is a wonderful thing, but not the brand that these frauds sell.
You can read a pretty devastating critique of these pseudo-scholars in the book Fashionable Nonsense, which describes how two physicists made up a completely bullshit paper, full of utter nonsense, had it accepted for publication in one of the leading postmodernist journals of the time, and confronted a fierce but intellectually empty counterattack by postmodernism's supporters(this was in the 90s) [1].
1. http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-Nonsense-Postmodern-Intell...
That said, I find this is more the case with lit crit, than philosophy. Perhaps in Academic Feminism?
I suppose we could, but this leaves a pretty thin curriculum.
That would be very nice, actually. If your philosophizing requires the supernatural to make sense, it's not very good.
The scientific method itself is a product of Western Philosophy. The very fact that you know these philosophers were wrong about many things is thanks to the very tradition they were upholding.
My brief exposure to "Eastern Philosophy" in college was interesting as it did not really feel like philosophy. It seemed to be nuggets of so-called wisdom presented without argument. It very much reminded me of some books in the old testament and even some pre-Socratic philosophy. It came across basically as religious/mystic dogma.
> nuggets of so-called wisdom presented without argument
I think P-1 is half right in that Augustine and Aquinas are similar to the Eastern philosophy described by P.
These great catholic philosophers were of a scholastic [0] tradition, relying on syllogistic reasoning alone - deriving from certain axioms similar to the "nuggets" of eastern wisdom.
I don't think it's necessarily fair to lump Descartes and Kant into this category as they were far more of the inductive tradition. The former was writing at a time when to write about such a thing could be considered heresy, so he had to work around some of these "axioms". The latter wasn't so much religious as informed by his cultural context.
These authors conveniently cite a stat that says how many professors are not teachers of "non-Western philosophy" (i.e. the History of Philosophy, a subject that students should know quite well before they even enter college, and very few professors should have to waste their time with). Unfortunately for any semblance of an argument worth publishing, that stat is horribly misleading in the context of knowing all of the other philosophical specialties that exist, which could be called not-non-Western. I wish the NYT would stop giving conservatives such effective fuel with which to characterize progressives as illogical shills.
If you are already in the mindset of the Western Philosophical tradition, I have to concur that this article seems silly, as many have already pointed out. However, for those of us that while studying philosophy don't live on Europe or North America (the Anglo-European Philosophical Studies perspective mentioned on the article) and who already feel like second class citizens of the philosophical world, the article is spot-on.
Living in South America and studying philosophy (I am a graduate student in Brazil), the whole notion that the only true philosophical tradition is the Eurocentric one has other and more profound meanings and implications (even though, as I believe, most are unintentional side-effects of history). It is as if the old view of 'we enlightened [Christian] Europeans' vs. 'you poor wretched uneducated savages' comes back to haunts us once again (this is just a rough sketch just to give an idea — things are far more complex than this, obviously). That being said, the authors' point, from this perspective, seems much more valid — and even liberating.
To respect diversity, I think you really do have to respect each tradition as distinct. I think mixing different philosophical traditions would end up failing to respect any of them. It'd be like having a dinner party meant to celebrate cultural diversity but throwing all the chinese, indian, and thai food together with burgers and ketchup and calling it 'diverse'. Western philosophy is it's own thing, as are other traditions. It doesn't need to let everyone in to respect them -- perhaps the contrary.
Also I really don't like the way this article ends: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”. The tone is threatening and has no place in a discussion of this nature.
What many of the comments here are missing by trying to separate "history of thought" from a more abstract conception of "philosophy" is that people do not develop their views of the world in a vacuum. Philosophy classes are not meditation sessions where students try and summon knowledge from the void, they involve reading the works of great thinkers in the field, analyzing their reasoning and engaging with their ideas.
The philosophers you read provide both the content and the tools you learn for use in your own thinking. As such, only presenting philosophers from a particular tradition biases the experiences of your students whether that bias is cultural as the article points out or even towards a particular school of thought within a culture, like the shift from pragmatics to highly analytic philosophy that took place in American schools during the second half of the twentieth century.
When I asked my department head why we did not, for instance, mention Confucius in our Moral Philosophy class, she explained that it is at least partially a bootstrapping issue. Because none of the faculty at my university had training in non-western traditions or spoke any non-western languages, they did not teach them nor did they feel comfortable advising graduate students doing their research on those traditions and in those languages.
Take a look at the graduate program requirements for the Ivy League philosophy programs and you will see that they all require students to know a second language, but the languages they are told to choose from are: French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, or Dutch if you are really into Kierkegaard. You might also be able to get approval for Russian. The result is an echo chamber where we only teach western so we only hire western so we only teach western.
I doubt the article's suggestion of renaming departments will do much to change this situation but I agree that it would be a more honest representation of the materials taught and sympathize with the frustration behind their argument.
It seems like the authors are confusing the terms theology, culture, and philosophy. Yes, there are major problems with the way that philosophy is taught in the modern university. This attack, however, is unwarranted.
Ye gods, there's a whole section of philosophy devoted to pragmatism, which by it's very definition could care less where stuff came from.
I know that there's no way somebody received an advanced degree in philosophy and is now making a case that the historical roots of one thought system or another is more important than how useful it is. This has to be a troll.
You measure systems, whatever they are, by how well they achieve the goals you have set them up to address. Philosophy, especially, is a field of endeavor where you move between toolsets depending on the situation and context. That's because philosophy is not a science, it's a set of tools.
It's also not a preschool art project, and observing the field from a distance and noting that there's not enough blue, or too many mountains, is the height of reductionist idiocy.
I'm sorry for the vehemence. This article makes me sad. These folks should know better.
I am reminded of the old saying: if you do not know why you are doing something, stop doing it.
It's ironic that the Rectification of Names is central to the philosophy of Confucius.
I would simply like to register the fact that, among current graduate students and (typically young) professors at the departments with which I am familiar (basically the Leiter top 30), this is generally an issue of grave concern. I know many people who work very hard to combat this. There are many collaborative efforts to construct alternative syllabi for mainstay classes (e.g. epistemology, ethics), to open real lines of dialogue with scholars who have historically been seen as "peripheral" to the enterprise of analytic philosophy (e.g. people who work on Buddhist philosophy, or Islamic philosophy), and to identify and redress the reasons that philosophy tends to overwhelmingly draw white males.
I don't mean to excuse the status quo. There is a lot of work still to be done. I simply want to point out that the advice of the authors of this article has not gone totally unheeded.
How important is it to have a specialist as part of "regular" faculty? Is there no other way to teach the information that via a "regular," "specialist" ?
Good philosophy... is whatever other philosophers decide is good. No external arbiter of quality. Lots of disagreement about foundational assumptions (certainly nothing like the agreement we have in math).
This looks like a very clear-cut case of rent-seeking by an insular cultural institution.
This is on the surface, reasonable. But why don't we try reversing the names, which should be allowed under their pretense of fairness and equality, like so: "European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within Non-European philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the Non-European traditions, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Non-European philosophy."
Now it sounds at best sloppy (Which non-European traditions?), and at worst chauvinistic against the background noise that makes up the bulk of what really drives their point, which is the "apologize for imperialism" theme. So at one level below the surface, they are suggesting we abandon evaluating ideas based on their relevance to us as westerners, and subordinate that principle to saying sorry for imperialism. At two levels below, they are just talking their own book, as white male professors of Chinese philosophy.
The point of the article is the primacy of Western philosophical traditions in their departments. The context of the discussion in reality is what makes it relevant. Your permutation is incongruous with the context they're making their argument in.
No comparable offer has emerged elsewhere.
“And on the internet too Jimmy, how unusual.”
By the way, Aristotle covered this type of discourse in "On Trolling": http://crookedtimber.org/2016/05/07/aristotle-on-trolling/