@e_flux wrote:
In his recent book Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, Bryan W. Van Norden—an expert in Chinese philosophy who teaches at Wuhan University in China, Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and Vassar College in the US—asks why most philosophy departments in Europe and the US continue to teach exclusively Western philosophy. Despite the rich philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures, Euro-American philosophy department act as if these traditions aren't worth studying, thus implying that only white Westerners have anything important to say about the biggest questions of human existence. In an excerpt from his book featured at Public Seminar, Van Norden demonstrates that Western philosophers weren't always this Eurocentric; it was the cult of Kant that narrowed their viewpoint. Here's a snippet from the excerpt:
As Park convincingly argues, Africa and Asia were excluded from the philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.
On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematized views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy. So the exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous.
Image of Kant via investingintheclassics.com.
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