Taking Back Philosophy by Van Norden Bryan W

Author:Van Norden, Bryan W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

JERICHO

Demagogues like Trump are explicit about wishing to build walls to separate races and religions; earlier politicians have made similar promises using coded language. Chinese nationalists like President Xi Jinping want to boost support for Confucius as a symbol of Chinese culture, to preserve a Chinese racial identity distinct from the West. Some intellectual US conservatives want to separate what they see as the individualistic, rational philosophy of the West from its decadent counterparts in the rest of the world.

Many Western philosophers have similarly built a wall between “real” philosophy and some “other.” As we saw in chapter 1, this is sometimes done by claiming that “real” philosophy has the same kind of rigor that is characteristic of the natural sciences, while everything else is poetry or nonsense. Of course, the philosophers who assert this do not actually bother to read non-Western or other less commonly taught philosophies to see whether they are rigorous. Other times, the wall-building is done by stipulating that both philosophy and the overcoming of philosophy must be historical descendants of the Greek philosophia. This argument treats philosophy as if it is a hermetically sealed dialogue with one particular set of ancient canonical texts, and thereby both ignores and precludes the diversity and creativeness of philosophy. These sorts of shallow arguments are found among both analytic and Continental philosophers. Almost all philosophers would categorically reject explicit racism. But I ask my fellow philosophers to recognize whom you are implicitly aligning yourself with when you reject—without genuinely investigating—philosophy from outside the Anglo-European tradition. You are helping those who build and maintain walls: walls between races, walls between religions, walls between civilizations. These walls need to come down. Let us take inspiration from the Bible:

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