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J.E. Smith Questions the Very Idea of "Non-Western Philosophy"
This isn’t the typical kind of subject matter for my website, but I found myself saying “yes” too many times while reading this post that I felt obliged to mention it here. In it, Justin E. Smith explains his misgivings with the idea of non-western philosophy:
I believe there is a serious problem when we set out from an implicit definition of ‘philosophy’ according to the cultural and historical peculiarities of the European tradition, and then try to see if we can find anything in other parts of the world that approximates to this tradition.
This does not imply that western minds are somehow superior to or more profound than non-western minds:
The minds of non-literate pastoral peoples are exactly the same as those of seminarians mastering Thomistic doctrine; the difference is that the pastoral people’s minds have different prostheses to support and to mirror their thoughts.
Smith makes the observation that philosophy, as it is understood in the West, has not spread throughout other cultures the way that technological improvements have (wheels, plows, telephones), not because non-western cultures lack the capacity to grasp its usefulness, but because its usefulness is inextricably bound up in the culture that produced it, a culture that has a particular relationship to rules, language, and especially the written word. The place of philosophy in the West is more akin to an artistic tradition than a technical discovery.
The view I am defending places philosophy squarely on the side of unicorn motifs rather than on the side of wagons or gunpowder, and in this way absolves us of the need to explain why it does not diffuse in the same way as other universally useful innovations.
Smith posts stuff like this all the time. Almost makes me wish I was back in my undergrad philosophy days in Illinois.
