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.
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
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?)
"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?