It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic.
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.
The author addresses your exact point in the article.
"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?
>Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory.
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."
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?
I think there are a number of things going on here:
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.
> Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory
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.
Is the author perhaps thinking of something more like "history of philosophy"?
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.
* 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.
Somehow I feel like if philosophy departments took Confucianism to heart, the NYT would start rolling around uncomfortably.
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.
"Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth)"
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.
If that is the case, then why are Aristotle and Plato taught in modern philosophy classes? Why waste time with the ancients when you could go straight to the ideas of more modern, more correct thinkers like Santayana and Kirkegaard?
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?
When you study undergraduate philosophy you aren't instantly bombarded with the current state-of-the-art in philosophical thought. On the contrary you spend a lot of time studying the musings of ancient philosophical ideas that have since been improved upon.
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.
The author thinks that the Chinese philosophical paper is not being evaluated on its merits and if philosophy departments aren't going to do that they should at least cop to the fact.
When I was in college I got the impression that professional (i.e. US academic) philosophy had standards of rigor, such that areas more generally considered philosophy -- French existentialism, for example -- weren't so in their domain. It seemed that some wanted to make a distinction between philosophy, psychology, and literary theory/critique.
I've got no opinions either way, but it sounds like someone needs to define what is meant by "philosophy."
This push toward "multicultural" philosophy feels oddly out of place in a time when most philosophy departments are moving/have moved firmly toward logic, philosophy of science, and/or cognitive science.
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.
Both India and China have extremely rich philosophical logic traditions, along with extremely well developed philosophies of mind and epistemology.
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.
Coincidentally, I recently had lunch with the department chair of CMU's Philosophy department. Like many people, I assumed philosophy was all about (in his words) "the dead white men". What I was calling philosophy was really the "history of philosophy".
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."
At my university philosophy was only offered joint with another topic, such as Maths and Philosophy or Politics and Philosophy. The idea being, I think, to make sure the thinking had an object to study.
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.
The underlying problem (which wasn't mentioned at all in this essay) is that contemporary philosophical education is a confusing mix of two things:
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.
Why do people feel the need to dictate to others what they should do? The authors of this piece are professors of philosophy. If they feel that teaching non-Western philosophy is crucially important and offers substantial advantages that cannot be obtained by studying only Western philosophy, then why don't they just simply teach non-Western philosophy.
All the advantages they presume to exist by doing so will surely accrue to them, and others will follow suit in time.
I admit I'm not a philosopher, but this sounds like claiming that we're inappropriately teaching a narrowed perspective of math because we don't teach Vedic multiplication algorithms or Mayan counting bases. These are interesting topics in their own right, but they do not constitute the (relatively) unbroken chain of mathematics as a _discipline in and of itself_ in a progressional manner with a working epistemology, namely, the formal proof. The Greeks gets that prize, by virtue of Euclid (and a few others tangentially, e.g. Eudoxus or Nicomedes or Hero), not by virtue of being Greek, e.g. Eratosthenes or Aristarchus, who gave us good results and application, but did not build on or advance the process of _how_ we do math (as far as we have record).
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.
I agree with the author given the author has cited specific works that sometimes predate the European works and some that they themselves probably discussed.
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. ;)
The article's quote that explain the title cliffhanger is:
> 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.
They wish to include non-European traditions of philosophy into academic philosophy.
"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.”"
This is akin to saying that when E.O. Wilson argues fervently that natural selection is real, he is not to be trusted because he is employed as a biologist.
I'm inclined to think that university departments are really sets of social norms: agreements about what the canonical texts are, ideas about what methods and tools should be used, and, of course, the kinds of phenomena they study. Among other things.
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.
It's addressed in the article. They specifically address this point, and argue that philosophy is different, because there are distinctive traditions and approaches in non-western philosophy that nonetheless are recognizably doing philosophy in the same sense as European and American philosophers.
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.
Speak for yourself. I think the sciences are just as subjective as any other field. There are some semi-objective moments, but the bulk of the work is just cultural traditions playing out without any sort of introspection. Scientists tend to discourage any kind of meta-awareness which arguably makes it less objective than other practices. The fiction of objectivity inhibits study of the origins of knowledge.
Childish article. Should the Confucians also be forced to read plato? Philosophy (itself a greek word) is being taught as a certain tradition that builds upon its past. People from all races have contributed, but it will always remain a western-born tradition. To say that other disciplines should be included uncritically is childish. I realize the authors may be frustrated that their subfields don't gain more tractions, but even the fact that they both work in western philosophy departments, kind of nullifies their point.
I highly doubt that philosophy and thinking logically is a western-born tradition. What is Confucianism if not a philosophy? Or is this rhetoric implying that philosophy is inherently exclusive to western cultures?
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 totally object to this deliberately obscure style of academic writing. Having to re-read a sentence five times to decipher it doesn't make the author sound intelligent, it makes me suspect the author has nothing substantial to say.
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.
So by this logic are we also removing Augustine, Aquinus, Decartes, Kant and the dozens of other canonical western philosophers whose arguments were substantially religious in nature?
I suppose we could, but this leaves a pretty thin curriculum.
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.
By reading the comments, I had the feeling (maybe I am wrong, my apologies if I am) that most don't get the gist of the argument here.
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.
There is an interesting conundrum here actually. So-called 'Western Philosophy' through most of its history has been largely concerned with the discovery of (perhaps just the discussion of) so-called 'transcendental' or 'absolute' truth -- truths that by definition are supposed to transcend culture. From a certain perspective, this is just a bias of this particular tradition of philosophy. However, to call it anything else but 'philosophy' -- say 'western philosophy' -- would be to, in an important sense, admit defeat.
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.
Having gone through an undergraduate philosophy major and taken many classes on non-western thought, all offered by other departments, I strongly support the article's position. To have a class called "Ethics" that covers only the historical Western positions deprives students of the majority of the world's thinking on the topic.
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.
[+] [-] whatshisface|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whack|10 years ago|reply
"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?
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wfo|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jordigh|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Scarblac|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackeyed|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcguire|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] mbizzle88|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Avshalom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scelerat|10 years ago|reply
I've got no opinions either way, but it sounds like someone needs to define what is meant by "philosophy."
[+] [-] tokai|10 years ago|reply
You underestimate postmodernist literary theorists.
[+] [-] Coincoin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnbiche|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jmagoon|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aroman|10 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] thomasahle|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] programmer1234|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] keiferski|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
That sounds like a very different kind of startup.
[+] [-] imgabe|10 years ago|reply
All the advantages they presume to exist by doing so will surely accrue to them, and others will follow suit in time.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
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. ;)
[+] [-] luso_brazilian|10 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] vlehto|10 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] sundarurfriend|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cholantesh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmytidey|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bnegreve|10 years ago|reply
Science is also very euro-centric, yet most of us here would argue that science is among the most objective disciplines out there.
[+] [-] hyperpape|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SolaceQuantum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twoodfin|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physicalist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relaxatorium|10 years ago|reply
I suppose we could, but this leaves a pretty thin curriculum.
[+] [-] orkoden|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy
[+] [-] kolbe|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] henriquemaia|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] methehack|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackeyed|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhi3|10 years ago|reply