"Cosmopolitan Philosophy in a Polycentric World"

I want to do my (modest) bit for publicity for this pitch from Jonardon Ganeri, a philosopher teaching at NYU and King's College, London. It is a learned, well-documented and very timely call for asking for philosophers to take seriously the cosmopolitan ideal. It is also imminently philosophical itself, in that it is a call for committed encounter -- not a pointless and going-nowhere "discussion" where everyone shares their story and nothing happens, but a proposal for action -- it is philosophy engagée, but it is very much philosophy.

Ganeri is a well-known scholar of Indian philosophy, and his proposal -- a blueprint for an “Institute for Cosmopolitan Philosophy in a Culturally Polycentric World” -- is informed by a formidable historical expertise. It is also all the more urgent in the wake of a great deal of discussion of Eugene Park's recent Huffington Post article on the way he thinks university philosophy departments, and philosophical assumptions at work in those departments, remain caught in a moribund patriarchal monoculture even as other humanities have successfully moved into a promising multicultural future.

Philosophy of mind does not typically engage at all with Indian, East Asian, African, or Native American ideas about the nature of mind. It’s as if non-Western thinkers had nothing to say about the matter. Similarly, those who work in the history of philosophy work almost exclusively on the history of Western philosophy — e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc.
So why don’t Anglo-American philosophers engage with non-Western philosophical traditions? In my experience, professional philosophers today often perceive non-Western thinkers as inferior. Of course, few would say this explicitly. Rather, philosophers often point to non-Western philosophy’s unusual and unfamiliar methodology as the primary reason for the disconnect....[But] The excuses for excluding non-Western thinkers from the philosophical canon are sometimes more obviously derogatory. For instance, philosophers often claim that non-Western thought lacks "rigor" and "precision," essential characteristics of serious philosophy. As a result, many philosophers simply dismiss non-Western intellectual culture as (mere) religion, speculative thought, or literature.

Brian Leiter, who's made a nuisance and menace of himself in more than a few ways lately, acted like he had explained the whole thing thus:

My own impression, from having talked to a lot more philosophers than Mr. Park and for a much longer period of time, is that most Anglophone philosophers have no opinion at all about non-Western philosophy because they are simply ignorant of it. Some regret the ignorance, others think it is excusable since there are so many philosophical traditions in the world and one can only master so many, and others just don’t think about it at all because it is possible to pursue an academic career in philosophy ignorant of a lot of things, including large swaths of the history of European philosophy (and the further back in the past we go, the more the boundary lines of "what’s European, what’s not" get harder to draw).

Leiter's modest proposal is that, well, sure,

more study of non-Western philosophical traditions would be salutary and illuminating; ... that some parts of so-called "feminist" philosophy are as illuminating as their so-called "Marxist" predecessors; and... that race -- like class and gender -- benefits from philosophical attention, and that critical theory approaches to social-political philosophy are at least as important as the kind of work done by bourgeois liberals, whose work dominates the Anglophone curriculum. What I still do not believe is that we should add Asian philosophers, or African-American philosophers, to the curriculum in order to “encourage” (on some misguided theory) minorities to enroll in philosophy courses.

Leiter is not a guy I an used to agreeing with (well, to be fair, I'm not used to paying attention; sometimes I regret the ignorance, but mostly I think it is pretty damn excusable). So it is with reluctance that I even give the appearance of condoning, however tangentially, any part of his position. I find his tone condescending and I suspect that his posting on the topic at all is an act of grandstanding which distracts from his other woes at present. (I'm not even going to mention, though I will link to, the silliness that is his silly treatment of this guy "Terrence".) Nonetheless, I'd bet he's right that many or most academic philosophers don't have a thought in their heads about Mohism or Mīmāṃsā; and I mostly concur with the gist of his remark that the motivation for expanding the philosophy curriculum should be, well, philosophical. While I doubt is that Leiter has much interest in this, I could be wrong. But I'd also argue that there is -- obviously -- a genuine philosophical gain to be made in expanding philosophical attention beyond the usual railroad with its Plato - Augustine - Descartes - Hume - Russell - Husserl stations. That this should have to be argued for is just astounding. Does anyone really dispute that Platonism and, say, Confucianism are at least comparably robust and rich philosophical traditions? Leiter faults Eugene Park for never explaining or "even affirm[ing] the merits of these thinkers" from Asia and Africa and South America. Neither, of course, does Leiter defend or even mention the merits of Aristotle, Kant, or Quine. Their merits are self-evident to him. This is exactly the question, though: what is it that will go without saying?

Ganeri's proposal (which I first read about on Amod Lele's indispensible blog Love of All Wisdom, still one of the only online spots that really practices the kind of philosophy I am talking about in this post) suggests an autonomous institute, separate from academia's usual disciplinary boundaries ("Asian studies," "Philosophy of Mind"), which would be geographically spread out in multiple locations, structured as a linked network.

In his blueprint, Ganeri asks after the cross- and multi-cultural aspirations of philosophy, and speculates on the kind of institution that would best serve and embody them. As Lele underlines, Ganeri is frankly asking for input and discussion either by email -- he includes his email address on the blueprint -- or on blogs or other online forums. I don't know Ganeri personally, but it is obvious that something like his proposal needs to be taken seriously for Western philosophy to really face alterity, or for that matter, for philosophy per se to really aspire to universality, instead of a picture of "the universal" that looks the spit'n' image of something very parochial. It is shockingly clear that this is what philosophy should be doing -- not swaddling the love of wisdom in in a bundle of relativistic politeness, but really aspiring to genuine catholicity. And it seems more and more clear that it isn't going to happen in academe as it stands.

I am a strong proponent of the idea of "the canon"; as the twelve people who read this blog can attest, my shorthand for my position is "platonist," and it's all too plausible that I suffer from less than my share of white liberal affluent (by many standards) guilt -- i.e., that I reflect less often than I could on just how good I have it compared to so many (and that I act on this reflection even less). Point is, I'm not motivated here by standard-issue political correctness. I'm not sure anyone is, anymore. But the blinders on western philosophy have got to come off. I find it impossible to imagine Plato, or Diogenes-"citizen of the world"-the-Cynic, (or Leibniz or Spinoza for that matter) being threatened or annoyed by the suggestion that we might be able to seriously profit from really listening to people who have thought about the same things for going on three or four thousand years.