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    Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It

    Guest post by Christian Coseru

    One may be forgiven for thinking, on reading Brian Leiter's diatribe against identity politics and the danger it poses for academic philosophy, that there is a swell in 'consumer demand' for expanding the philosophy curriculum in questionable directions and for the wrong reasons. To clarify: the 'consumer' in this case is graduate students dissatisfied with the lack on engagement on the part of Anglo-American philosophers with non-Western philosophical traditions. Or so the story goes.

    So Leiter asks: "should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right?"

    The reality is that there is no such large-scale demand, certainly not in top graduate programs, because one could not have gotten in by announcing one's intention of working in Indian or Chinese philosophy. That is not to deny that there hasn't been talk of opening up the discipline to non-Western traditions and perspectives (more on this below). But even the advocates don't think it can be that easily accomplished (not, at least, through curricular reform alone). Rather, the sense is that some change in the demographics of philosophy departments would have to take place for cross-cultural philosophical reflection to become the norm. Alas, we are a long way from that.

    This recent ruckus comes from a former PhD student in philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington, Eugene Park. In a piece for the Huffington Post, Park blamed his departure from academic philosophy on the lack of representation for non-Western philosophy in the curriculum and the expectation that, in order to have a chance at a career, one must write a dissertation "in one of the 'core areas' of philosophy" (where 'philosophy' here stands exclusively for Western philosophy). This charge of parochialism leveled against academic philosophy is hardly news (see Justin Smith in the NYT, the recent inteviews with Jay Garfield and Jonardon Ganeri at 3AM, an early discussion here at New APPS spurred by David Chalmers, and the occasional APA Newsletter). Nor is there any secret that members of the profession, whether individually or as a group, have very strong views about what counts as real philosophy, who does and does not belong in the canon, and which areas and topics one ought to work on in order to have a chance at a career in the discipline.

    What then makes this particular complaint stand out? The allegation that lack of engagement with non-Western philosophy is not just a case of ignorance, unfamiliarity, or the unfortunate outcome of the need to cover the core. Rather, as our former PhD student puts it, the real reason is willful ignorance: "professional philosophers today often perceive non-Western thinkers as inferior" even though, as he adds, "few would say this explicitly."

    I think the notion that professional philosophers have any view whatsoever about things outside their specific purview is very charitable. Leiter is probably right that when it comes to non-Western philosophy, plain old ignorance is the norm. But he is wrong to think that anyone is terribly upset about it. My own impression is that few regret their ignorance. And even those few, when pressed, find it excusable: one can only master so much, the argument goes, and it is always easier to go with what one knows best.

    As for the question whether Asian philosophers should be part of the core if found to be interesting and important, one cannot but ask: by whom? Who is to decide? The APA already has a committee for Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies. But, as we all know, non-Western philosophy ranks dismally on the PGR, just above Feminist Philosophy and Philosophy of Race, and that too only includes Chinese philosophy. No rankings, for instance, for Indian or Buddhist philosophy.

    What can be done about it? Expand the category of non-Western philosophy and rank it higher on the PGR? That might be one way, though inevitably as a category, "non-Western" ends up being treated as fundamentally "the other". A better proposal takes into account the fact that so many of those who work in Indian, Chinese, or Buddhist philosophy already have as their AOS metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, or value theory. So, in that case, one way to proceed is by changing the language in the ads. You want to hire in metaphysics or philosophy of mind, and would like to broaden the curriculum a little? Mention in your ad that you would prefer a candidate who also has expertise in a non-Western philosophical tradition. Of course, there is the problem of being able to assess work in an area one has no knowledge of, but there are enough reliable metrics to make up for that: letters of reference, publications in top journals, pedigree, etc.

    Of course, one would want these candidates to come from top programs, and those typically lack the requisite expertise in non-Western philosophy to guarantee adequate supervision. But we must start somewhere, and engaging with those philosophers that are already accomplished scholars of Indian, Chinese, or Buddhist philosophy might be a first step.

     

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    69 responses to “Philosophy’s Western Bias and What Can Be Done About It”

    1. r Avatar
      r

      I realize, in retrospect, that the way I ended my last comment could imply that I think no good work is being done in the salient way. I want to explicitly disavow that! The important point is just the parallel–I’m also sure that there is good work being done by Wittgenstineans, X-phi-ers, etc. etc.; and maybe as a result, one day we’ll all be X-phi-ers. So too, maybe one day we’ll all be converts to some ideas only currently represented in the community of scholars working on non-western traditions.

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    2. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      For those curious about the relevant literature (in this case, books only, in English) on Indic philosophy, I have a basic bibliography here: https://www.academia.edu/5645257/Indic_or_Indian_Philosophy_A_Basic_Bibliography In the future I hope to categorize it by “schools” (at least where that’s possible), but it may still prove useful until such time. As the list is not exhaustive, I apologize to any authors inexplicably excluded (send me a note to rectify).
      On my academia.edu page I also have a compilation for classical Chinese worldviews chock full of titles for Chinese philosophy although the list includes works outside philosophy proper as well. In my compilation for Islamic Studies, I have works for Islamic philosophy. These two bibliographies have not been recently updated but I should be getting around to that anon.

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    3. Paul R. Goldin Avatar
      Paul R. Goldin

      When philosophers start working in laboratories, I’ll take more seriously the apology that philosophy should be compared to physics or chemistry rather than art or literature. Comparing one’s work to natural science is a convenient way to pretend that it operates independently of tradition, culture, and so on, but I’m really not on board with the idea that someone’s ideas of “mind,” “morality,” etc. are in the same category as, say, “electron” or “dark matter.”
      Nor can I accept the suggestion (if I am interpreting the post correctly) that modern philosophical problems are all derived from the ancient Greek tradition. That’s a self-perpetuating myth. What did the ancient Greeks have to say about race in society? (It’s a topic that happens to be on my mind right now because of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critical analysis of W.E.B. DuBois in Lines of Descent. That stuff is philosophy too.) Or ecology? For that matter, name a great ancient Greek economic philosopher.
      Philosophy in any time and place is inevitably going to address the problems that people face in that time and place. We’re on our own–we’ve always been on our own–and it’s yet another mode of shooting oneself in the foot to insist that the ancient Greeks were the only ones who left behind resources that can help us today.

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    4. p Avatar
      p

      It perhaps would be helpful to have some actual arguments why studying Indian or Chinese philosophy would be of the kind of interest to philosophers that most people in the thread seem to think it is. To give an example: there is a lot of discussion about will and free will in contemporary philosophy. At least some of the features of this discussion might be helpfully illuminated by looking at the history of the concept of will and free will since, when one looks at that history, one discovers that what might be taken as a fact – that we have a will (understood as a certain psychic or mental faculty)- has not always been a fact but that the concept of that faculty “will” enters the philosophical scene as a theoretical construct aimed at solving a particular theoretical problem in Stoicism and that this gets a further development once that theoretical construct gets incorporated into late Ancient philosophies (gnosticism, platonism, and christian theology), esp. Christianity. The problems that this “synthesis” gives rise to then tend to occupy philosophers for some time to come and they tend to look intractable – partly because it is forgotten what the original problem was to which will was an answer and will is taken as a fact. Of course, this story gets a few new spins in the late 19th and then 20th century. This is at least a schematic example of how one might (though, of course, one might also not!) find history useful and why somebody might be even willing to look at the details of that history and arguments (since the actual force and usefulness of philosophical theories and arguments is chiefly proved there). So one would expect something of the sort for non-western philosophies – some argument or reasons why it would be really useful to study them for a philosopher. I take it that no reasons need to be given for people interested in history of philosophy – Indian or Chinese or Gree – since studying them is presumably rewarding for its own sake for historians.

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    5. p Avatar
      p

      Well, I did compare philosophy to linguistics more than to physics. I take it that a philosopher of mind nowadays is not investigating “soul” of the sort that is present in the christian tradition from about 3 AD, but, rather, something like the sort of cognitive and conative processes that are investigated by contemporary psychology,cognitive science or neuroscience. So I would need to hear more why you think that, in this respect, you’re not on board with the idea that mind, as understood by contemporary philosophers of mind, is not of the same sort as, say, dark matter.
      I did not say that Ancient Greek tradition is responsible for all modern philosophical problems. That is, of course, non-sense that nobody holds. I did say that philosophy in the west can be traced back to Greece where some people thought of themselves as having invented a certain way of looking at problems – a certain methodology if you will – which they called philosophy. Some of their problems are of perennial interest, many are not. But the core ideas of that methodology – giving arguments, reasons, definitions, interest in the nature of explanation, and so on – are with us still. I also remarked that in some other culture, like India or China, similar ways of looking at things and thinking about problems were invented too.
      Nowhere did I say what you say in the last paragraph. However, if it is true that philosophy inevitably addresses the problems of its time and place, we need all the more know why studying ancient Greek or Indian philosopher who addresses her or his problems of the day, is still useful even as we face quite different problems.

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    6. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      p, in reply to?

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    7. p Avatar
      p

      That was a reply to Paul R. Goldin not to Patrick S. O’Donnell. My apologies.

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    8. Matthew Avatar
      Matthew

      p: incidentally, the very sort of argument you bring up as an example was made by Jay Garfield (who is, with Christian one of the leading lights in Buddhist philosophy), in a recent volume on Agency in Indian philosophy that I co-edited. In short, he argues that looking at Buddhism and Buddhist thought provides a helpful contrast to which allows us to see some of of the presumptions that lead to the “problem of free will” in the west are parochial and contingent to a particular historical tradition.
      If curious, the book is here: (http://global.oup.com/academic/product/free-will-agency-and-selfhood-in-indian-philosophy-9780199922758?cc=us&lang=en&tab=author) Just note that many chapters are not comparative and are meant to explore the Indian traditions on their own terms.

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    9. p Avatar
      p

      Matthew: I would actually expect that something of the sort would be the case. However, I take it that looking at Buddhism does not help us to see why or how the problem of free will in the Western philosophy came to be nor what it is connected to and, hence, what getting rid of it or solivng for us might mean. In the west it rests on a rather complicated history which starts somewhere with thinking about, on the one hand, human agency in Hellenistic philosophy and, on the other hand, about the possibility and origins of evil vis-a-vis certain assumptions about the nature of universe in late Antiquity. That some other philosophies do not have the notion of will or free will or do not think about things in such a way that the problem of free will arises, does not by itself show that it is not a real problem or, at least, not a problem for us once we think that the assumptions that lead to it are justified. So one would also have to show that those set of assumptions – about human agency or the nature of the universe – are not justified. But at this point, the game becomes intractable I think. (there are, of course, general points – I have nothing to say about the particular literature you refer to and I should go and read it!).
      I want to clarify something – I do not doubt at all the value of studying Indian or Chinese philosophy as histories of philosophy in their own right at all. In fact, I strongly believe it should be done – but done properly, not just as a lip service to identity politics, as Leiter puts it. What I want to resist is, on the one hand, presenting it as something readily available without including all the complexities that doing history of philosophy properly requires (e.g., we have historians of Greek, medieval, early modern, 18th century an so on, and many subdivisions of these – nobody is just a historian of the whole western philosophy anymore – I take it something similar, perhaps even more complex would have to be true of those other traditions) and, on the other hand, the rather fashionable but overly optimistic claim – which often lacks proper argument – that studying those other traditions is somehow immediately relevant for contemporary philosophy. I think, myself, that the case should be made to make these histories of philosophy part of our study of history of philosophy and that we should make that study attractive in its own right, without perhaps making the dubious connection to contemporary stuff. Surely, it will perhaps be accidentally useful for that too (as looking at Augustine was useful to Wittgenstein), but that’s not, I think, the main argument in their favor.

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    10. Christy Mag Uidhir Avatar
      Christy Mag Uidhir

      The language issue I think is especially important when the discussion concerns the presence of Non-Western Philosophy in the PGR. The PGR ostensibly measures research prestige of departmental faculty not its teaching competencies. Presumably Non-Western Philosophy (Islamic, Buddhist, Indian, etc.) is much like the History of Western Philosophy (Ancient Greek, Medieval, Early Modern, etc.) in that anyone wishing to conduct the sorts of serious, in-depth, sustained, systematic scholarship of the sort expected of those for whom it’s a primary AOS must have competency in the relevant languages (Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, French, German). Without proper language support, the mere addition of Non-Western philosophy scholar(s) to a PGR program strikes me as a commitment to Non-Western Philosophy not as research specialty in which to train graduate students but instead as little more than the odd dalliance for the curious but temporary dabbler.

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    11. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      While it is introductory in nature and not a work, strictly speaking, of analytical philosophy, but more or less intended for “students” (used in the broadest sense), a book by my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart, World Philosophies, Oliver Leaman, ed. (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008; 1st ed., 1999), gives due if not ample recognition to the philosophical dimension of worldviews around the globe. Among the chapters: South Asian philosophies, Chinese philosophies, Korean philosophies, Japanese philosophies, philosophies of Greece, Rome, and the Near East, Islamic philosophies, Jewish philosophies, African philosophies…. As Ninian states in the first edition, “I wrote this work so that general readers could have a clear guide to the philosophies of the world.” He further notes his use of “philosophies” in the plural because a number of Western philosophers use the singular only to refer to a particular kind of Western philosophy.” Oliver Leaman’s* introduction to the second edition reminds us that when it was first published, the book was “variously described as ‘a masterpiece of lucid description, analysis, and interpretation,’ and ‘an encyclopedia of wonders, a treasure store complete with accounts of philosophy and religion from around the world.’ Leaman, not given to hyperbole, concludes that “It is all of these things and more.”
      I think this would make a fine title for any undergraduate survey, introductory, or historical course on “Philosophy(ies).”
      * For those of you who may not know, Leaman is one of our foremost scholars of Islamic philosophy, among other accolades.

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    12. Jonardon Ganeri Avatar
      Jonardon Ganeri

      Someone who is contemplating graduate work in non-Western philosophy with a view to a teaching career will prefer to do their graduate work in a well-ranked research university. PhD granting programmes in these universities have an ingrained conservativism, which is due to their concern (as Owen rightly notes @5) with “replicating the profession”. They will make hires in non-Western philosophy only in response to curricular pressure. It is certainly the case that the faculty who would be hired in response to pressure to cover an expanded curriculum, and who will then be in a position to supervise a new cohort of PhD students, will be expected to be extremely good researchers with all the required research skills including language skills. What is objectionable is the use of the language requirement to put an unfair burden on students wanting to develop an interest in non-Western philosophy as a tactic to block curricular expansion.

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    13. Owen Flanagan Avatar
      Owen Flanagan

      John Protevi has a good discussion on this topic over on his Facebook page. On the language expertise topic I wrote this: I always believed that my interests in mind, self, consciousness and morals would be parochial if I didn’t pay attention, when I could, to the wisdom of other traditions. Then there was luck. In the “it takes a village” department, I was fortunate to have colleagues, Ifeanyi Menkiti, David Wong, Kwasi Wiredu, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michelle Moody Adams, who were mutually encouraging about developing comparative interests. That helps a lot. But as for the “you need the languages argument. ” It depends. My first publications in Chinese philosophy came this way. I showed a deep interest in learning. I showed up at every evening APA session I could. Excellent specialists, often translators, like P.J. ivanhoe, would ask me what I thought about the claims about human nature in, eg, Mozi or Mencius or Xunzi. I’d say what I thought. We’d talk, etc. There is epistemic dependency. If the translations are not good, then what I say is off. But if they are on, then I make a wee contribution to the discussion. My work in Indian philosophy required me to trust the translations of great scholars, including translations and translations of wise philosophical souls like Mark Siderits and Jay Garfied. Again epistemic dependence. Addendum: we academics are supposed to be good at learning, doing research, being curious. Does that stop when you are “trained”? What is this training thing, anyway?

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    14. Paul R. Goldin Avatar
      Paul R. Goldin

      P asks me to clarify why I don’t agree that someone’s ideas of “mind” or “morality” are in the same category as “electron” or “dark matter.” There are several reasons.
      Let’s start with this appetizer: “electron” and “dark matter” have mass; “mind” and “morality” do not. (“Brains” have mass; “minds” do not.) Most of what natural scientists study has mass. It wouldn’t make a fuss if that were all there is to it, but it is enough to start suspecting that we’re talking about very different kinds of things.
      More importantly: “electron” and “dark matter” are cross-culturally identical; “mind” and “morality” most certainly are not. An electron in Philadelphia is pretty much the same thing as an electron in New Guinea. (Actually, there are people who doubt this–in all seriousness–but I’ll assume that I’m conversing here with people who don’t. P’s own argument, after all, relies on the premise that electrons are pretty much the same everywhere; that’s why we don’t have Greek electrons, Chinese electrons, etc.) You can’t say the same thing for “mind” and “morality” in New Guinea. In fact, I’d wager that “New Guinea” isn’t even specific enough: you’d have to state where in New Guinea you’re talking about, because some New Guineans’ conception of “mind” is probably very different from others’.
      Now maybe the idea is that since we’re all members of the same species, we must, for biological reasons, share some fundamentally identical conception of “mind”–but if that’s the idea, it’s a bad idea. Do people all share the same conception of “God”? “Ghosts”? “Beauty”? Are some people right about those things, and others wrong? At this point, it’s up to P to explain why “mind” and “morality” are any less subjective than something like “beauty.” (I’m reminded here of studies showing that people’s intuitions about even very basic moral problems vary from culture to culture.)
      Lastly, I think I have to point out that with “electron” and “dark matter” (whatever dark matter may turn out to be), we are getting close to natural kinds. In my limited experience, people have often flipped out when I have used the phrase “natural kind,” so I’ll state the point in a different way: if extraterrestrials were to land on Earth today, there is every reason to believe that they’d know what an electron is. They might laugh at our woefully primitive understanding of electrons, but they’d know what we mean. They wouldn’t, by contrast, have even the foggiest notion of what we mean by “mind” or “morality.” They couldn’t possibly. They would have to learn a lot more about us in order to understand what comforting fairy tales we teach ourselves under the names “mind” and “morality.” Then they’d land somewhere else on the planet, and have to learn it all over again.

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    15. Teresa Avatar
      Teresa

      I agree completely with Paul (#61) above. In fact, I chose to go into science because an electron is an electron is an electron, regardless of where or when you’re talking about.
      A few more thoughts on how science and philosophy are unlike each other-
      Science has as close to a universal language as one can get. I have never heard or perceived the need for a discussion about how to truly understand the Principia. Who needs the Latin? We have the equations. Once you invest the time to learn calculus, linear algebra, and a smidge of differential equations, you can unambiguously express observations about the world to others. This enables intelligible ‘conversations’ about the state of reality in a way that regular language doesn’t. There is no such equivalent for philosophy, a fact that is clearly reflected in the discussion above. Hard science is (ideally) a state function; philosophy is a path integral.
      Then there’s empiricism and Popper. What generally acceptable evidence can one muster for or against a particular philosophy? Regardless of the philosophy of science or epistemology discussions, it is de facto the case that the person who can predict the outcomes of experiments correctly is the person who gets listened to in both science and engineering. The person who predicts the best, if several people are more or less predicting outcomes, is the one that gets listened to in the long run. (Excepting, of course, discrimination of various sorts – but it is interesting to note that in those cases, it is typically the authorship that is distorted or downplayed – not the result.) Perhaps I am not as versed in the philosophy of science as many people here – but we do say things like “The steady-state theory is wrong” as statements of generally accepted truth, but not things like “Existentialism is wrong” in the same matter-of-fact way. On/regarding what could philosophy make predictions in order to determine who’s (more) right? I can (and have) prove a colleague outright, flat-out wrong – can you?
      Interest in empiricism in philosophy always brings me back to Buddhism, incidentally. Buddhism makes testable predictions in a way that I have not heard Western philosophers make (i e “If you meditate on a regular basis, you will experience these nine stages of experience, more often than not in this order but sometimes jumping around some between adjacent stages” or “This particular meditation technique will do this to your mind more than this other one”). While Buddhism doesn’t have an equivalent of mathematics either, there is most certainly an empirical component to the whole thing, no matter what you mean by ‘mind’ exactly. (Apparently, Tibetan has at least three words for different kinds of mind, going back to cultural context. But if what Buddhism says is true then I can validate the predictions whether I understand the three Tibetan words for mind or not.) In my opinion, all the more reason to study Buddhist philosophy, and not just Nagarjuna. But then again, I did choose to become a scientist.

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    16. Jonardon Ganeri Avatar
      Jonardon Ganeri

      Chike says rightly: ” The idea, as I understood it, would thus be that expertise in the non-Western tradition would be sought neither as a specialization distinct from others nor as a side interest but rather as an integral aspect of the topically (rather than geographically) defined specialisation.” One way to take this a step further would be to argue that considering an issue first from one encultured perspective and then switching to another, different, encultured point of view, is a distinctive philosophical skill, a skill that enables one to see more deeply into the problem, just as binocular vision enables one to see more deeply (literally!) than monocular sight. The recent winner of the Fields Medal, Manjul Bhargava, said in an interview that switching between looking at a rubric’s cube and thinking about Brahmagupta’s mathematical treatise helped him to a reformulation of Gauss’s law. Likewise the thought is that there are distinctive kinds of philosophical creativity that plurally encultured attention makes possible. I’m calling this the “cosmopolitan skill” in a Blueprint about new ways to foster philosophical innovation http://www.academia.edu/8434737/. My hope is that the climate in philosophy will diversify through a recognition that there are encultured cosmopolitan philosophical skills of this sort.

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    17. jim maffie Avatar
      jim maffie

      well, they were responses to two different people, but we could combine them, I reckon. Thanks.

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    18. Jonardon Ganeri Avatar
      Jonardon Ganeri

      The Eugene Park case and Leiter, further discussion: http://read.hipporeads.com/eugene-park-was-right-academic-philosophy-is-failing-its-cosmopolitan-values/

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    19. Eric Schwitzgebel Avatar
      Eric Schwitzgebel

      Sorry about the slow approval of the comments, folks! Some got lost in the spam folder, others got lost in the flood of comments on other posts! I welcome continuing discussion. If you don’t see your comment approved within a day, please feel free to email me and I’ll push it through.

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