As I was going through the New York Times at lunch I came across this article titled “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”. The authors(jay Garfield and Brian Van Norden) lead off with this paragraph:
I find it disturbing that, when they confront their colleagues about this discrepancy, they get this response:
Do you think this is a deficiency, or is the status quo satisfactory?
I think it’s a problem, and I think the real reason it’s not being changed is more laziness/lack of demand than anything else.
Relatedly, I remember in high school my AP Lit class at one point complained that we discussed American Literature, and British Literature, but nothing from the other 195 countries in the world, and surely they had interesting literature too. Our lit teacher was quite taken aback - apparently we were the first class to ask for something extra to be added to the curriculum in 20 years. To her credit, she scheduled a unit (after the AP test, she had a test average to maintain) on Indian poetry, which I found fascinating. (I think she justified it to the administration by pointing out that India had been part of the British Empire, and the class was on British Literature).
I do think it would be worthwhile to not only offer but require intro courses in the philosophical schools mentioned in your first quote. I imagine the first backlash will be “what will we cut to make room for that”, which is not a bad objection, but I think the real reason it’s going to be a while happening is that it would cost money to hire specialists in non-Western philosophy.
If modern philosophy, worldwide, is descended from Western thinkers, then I don’t see a problem. I believe that I’ve heard that they’re moving to a more critical model of axioms and mathematical logic, which would certainly be a completely Western approach and the only variant of philosophy that could be said to be more than some dude talking out of his butt.
Philosophy, as far as the departments in universities go, is a field which examines the meaning of formal logic, especially as applied to reality as we know it. That’s directly based in the Greek tradition.
That’s nice and all, but that’s not all that philosophy encompasses. I think dismissing Eastern/Indian/African/American philosophy because they aren’t what is currently taught in universities is the point of the damn thread.
But non-logical philosophies are just things that people said, rather than science. It runs into the same vein as saying that Christianity should be taught in science class, as an alternate theory. Or, more closely, like expecting a medical school to teach Chinese medicine when training doctors.
If someone wants to know Chinese philosophy, it would rightly fall in the same vein as Chinese mysticism, Chinese Medicine, Chinese literature, etc. It would be education about the history of China, rather than education about a scientific practice.
Philosophy isn’t science, and it isn’t supposed to be.
There’s a difference between dismissing the subject, and saying that it’s simply a different topic. It is, in fact, a very different topic.
[QUOTE=Larry Borgia]
Philosophy isn’t science, and it isn’t supposed to be.
[/quote]
Well, modern Analytical Philosophy is a science: specifically, the science of pure logic.
Are we arbitrarily labelling pure logic as a science here? Because, you know, it’s not a science in the conventional (and I think now dominant) sense of the natural sciences, knowledge obtained by making deductions from emiprical observation of material realities.
Of course, it is a science in the rather wider (and older) sense of a particular area of knowledge or study; a recognized branch of learning. But in that sense other philosophies are equally sciences, as are theology, mathematics, lit crit, etc, etc.
That’s more math than science, and is only a tiny part of philosophy. I suppose you will dismiss the rest as “guys talking out of their ass” or whatever. But as a certain philosopher said, “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Well, Chinese philosophy is hardly philosophy at all in the Western sense; it’s all either entirely too religious and mystical (Buddhism and Taoism), or entirely confined to manners and unexamined culture-bound ethics (Confucianism). Indian philosophy comes closer, and might indeed have been the root source of Western philosophy, but it reached a dead end long before Socrates was born. Islamic philosophy is perhaps comparable but was never really very creative the way Greek philosophy was, the Islamic world’s contribution to philosophy was mainly in preserving Classical texts after the West had lost them (Islam did make some original contributions to mathematics and science). And nothing indigenous to ancient Egypt or Persia or Mesopotamia or sub-Saharan Africa or the pre-Columbian New World really counts as philosophy at all, AFAIK.
When I was in college I did take a logic class which was taught by a professor in the philosophy department. Most of the classes that the philosophy department offered, however, were not about pure logic. Instead they focused on European philosophers, starting with Socrates and Plato and moving up to modern philosophers like Kant and Sartre. From what I remember there isn’t anything that would make Kant, Camus, Sartre, etc. any more “scientific” than philosophers from other cultures. On the other hand, I think the lack of classes in philosophy of non Western cultures is probably due to not having enough professors educated in those philosophies, and not due to overt racism.
They really are just Western Philosophy classes, and it’s a matter of mislabeling.
The class I took in college that covered these was called Chinese Religious Thought and was taught by a professor in the Religion department; but for this subject matter, the line between religion and philosophy is blurry: much of what we studied doesn’t perfectly fit under “religion” or “philosophy” as we commonly use those categories in the West.
I like your use of the word “unexamined” here. My layman’s understanding is that philosophy, as an academic discipline, is characterized by logical argument the way science is characterized by the scientific method. If a theory can’t, in principle, be falsified, it’s not a scientific theory; if a theory can’t, in principle, be logically disproved or argued against, it’s not a philosophical theory (?).
So by that standard, one of three things is true; but I’m not familiar enough with non-Eurocentric philosophy to know which it is:
There is, AIUI, some philosophy of this sort in the medieval Islamic tradition. It was always hampered somewhat by the faith’s faith in the infallibility and completeness of the Koran, compared to which the most extreme Christian biblical literalist regards the Bible as no more than a set of helpful hints.
Long ago I read historian Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage (the first volume of his 11-volume “Story of Civilization” series), and I recall that there was at least the beginnings of this kind of philosophical inquiry in ancient India (in fact, IIRC, Durant regarded philosophy as such as having been invented in India, taking different forms as it was transmitted east to China and west to Europe). But it never developed the way philosophy did in Greece.
Well, aren’t music courses? Art courses? Literature courses?
Art and science that rich white people enjoy (like operas and Picasso) are often subsidized by government and enshrined as “legitimate” and “culturally important” by the universities. While things like graffiti and hip-hop are derided as “classless” and “low brow”.
Philosophy is just continuing the same pattern.
I don’t think that’s really relevant to the current discussion, which is about Eurocentric vs. non-Eurocentric philosophy, not about classical vs. modern or higbrow vs. lowbrow. I didn’t get the impression that the philosophies that the writers of the linked article thought were getting short shrift were either more contemporary or more populist than those that currently are studied.
(And, “science that rich white people enjoy” ??)
Right, and I’m talking about Eurocentric art/music versus non-Eurocentric art and music.
And as for science, look at expenditures on astronomical research versus research into malaria. Or the number of tech companies focused on apps that deliver advertising versus tech companies focusing on bringing clean water to the third world. Or pills that give old white dudes boners versus a cure for ebola, etc.
As it is theirs. Non-provable philosophy will almost certainly continue to diminish as time goes on and the remainder will fall under the same heading as Freud and self-help books, i.e. stuff which sounds good to a lot of people, but is fundamentally just platitudes and personal opinions. And not taught in school. We may not be at that point yet, but the direction of any study is towards provability and rigor.