A MANIFESTO FOR MULTICULTURAL PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.
—Immanuel Kant
We’re going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Philosophy has been a favorite whipping boy in the culture wars since 399 BCE, when an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death. However, philosophers nowadays are seldom accused of “corrupting the youth.” Instead, a surprisingly wide range of pundits—from celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson (majoring in philosophy “can really mess you up”) to Senator Marco Rubio (“Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers”)—assert that philosophy is pointless or impractical.1 Tyson’s comment is ironic, since he is a PhD, a doctor of philosophy, reflecting the historical fact that natural science developed out of the field he denigrates. Moreover, truly great scientists recognize the continuing importance of philosophy. Einstein even remarked that the “independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.” Rubio’s claim is simply inaccurate. Not only do philosophy majors earn more than welders, but they also earn more on average than political science majors like Rubio. In addition, those who study philosophy score at or near the top in admission tests for law school, medical school, and even business school. One businessperson who majored in philosophy was even on the stage when Rubio made his dismissive comment: former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina majored in philosophy.2
Although the critics of academic philosophy are mistaken about where the problem is, departments are failing their students in a crucial way: they are not teaching the profound, fascinating, and increasingly relevant philosophy that is outside the traditional Anglo-European canon.
Among the top fifty philosophy departments in the United States that grant a PhD,3 only six have a member of their regular faculty who teaches Chinese philosophy.4 There are only three additional doctoral programs in the United States outside the top fifty that have strong faculty in Chinese philosophy.5 I am focusing here (and in the remainder of this book) on Chinese philosophy, because it is my own area of expertise. However, Chinese philosophy is only one of a substantial number of less commonly taught philosophies (LCTP) that fall outside the Anglo-European mainstream. For example, only six doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States have specialists on Indian philosophy, and only two of those departments are ranked among the top fifty.6 Only two US doctoral programs in philosophy regularly teach the philosophies of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.7 Most US philosophy departments have no regular faculty who teach courses on African philosophy.8 Even some major forms of philosophy deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman philosophical traditions are largely ignored by US philosophy departments, including African American, Christian, Continental, feminist, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, and LGBTQ philosophy.
What are these departments teaching instead? Every one of the top fifty schools has at least one (and often more than one) faculty member who can lecture competently on the ancient Greek Parmenides. There is only one surviving work by Parmenides. It is a philosophical poem, and includes gems like “It is right both to say and to think that what-is is: for it can be, / but nothing is not: these things I bid you ponder.”9 If we turn to contemporary philosophy, we find that almost every leading US philosophy department has a specialist in the philosophy of language, someone prepared to heatedly debate whether the sentence “The present king of France is bald” is false (as the Bertrand Russell camp claims) or neither true nor false (as the Peter Strawson wing asserts).10 It appears that contemporary philosophers are more likely to be accused of boring the youth to death with their sentences than they are of being sentenced to death for corrupting the youth!
In order to appreciate why the narrowness of philosophy departments is so problematic, let’s consider one example of a less commonly taught philosophy (LCTP). Chinese philosophy deserves greater coverage by US universities for at least three reasons. First, China is an increasingly important world power, both economically and geopolitically—and traditional philosophy is of continuing relevance. Chinese businessmen pay for lessons from Buddhist monks, Daoism appeals both to peasants (for whom it is part of tradition) and to many intellectuals (who look to it for a less authoritarian approach to government), and China’s current President, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly praised Confucius.11
What should we make of the Chinese government’s support of Confucius? At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese modernizers of the May Fourth Movement claimed that Confucianism was authoritarian and dogmatic at its core, so that China must “overturn the shop of Confucius” in order to become a strong, democratic nation. Many contemporary Chinese intellectuals agree. (One Chinese professor told me that the US NBA is more relevant to the lives of contemporary Chinese than Confucianism.) In response to this critique, “New Confucians” claim that Confucianism can and should be made compatible with Western democracy, but can also contribute to Western philosophy insights about communitarian modes of political organization and the cultivation of individual virtues. Other commentators suggest that Confucian meritocracy is actually superior to the mob rule of Western democracy. (After watching the last US election, it is tempting to agree with them.) Still others would argue that President Xi’s invocation of Confucius is simply a tool in the service of a chauvinistic nationalism.12
Having an informed opinion about issues like the preceding is important for understanding China’s present and future. How will the next generation of diplomats, senators, representatives, and presidents (not to mention informed citizens) learn about Confucius and his role in Chinese thought if philosophers refuse to teach him? Some of my philosophical colleagues would reply that students can learn about Confucianism from religious studies or area studies departments. I would remind them how vociferously they would complain if their dean told them they don’t need to hire a Kant specialist, because the German department can teach him, and they don’t need to hire a political philosopher, because the political science department has someone who covers “that sort of thing.” Philosophers ask certain questions of texts and use certain methods for discussing them that are not necessarily practiced in other humanities or social science disciplines. Other disciplines have equally valuable methodologies, but there is no substitute for reading a text philosophically.13
A second reason that Chinese philosophy should be studied in US philosophy departments is that it simply has much to offer as philosophy. Consider the revelations in just a few of the seminal works about Chinese philosophy in the English-speaking world. Lee H. Yearley started a minor revolution in comparative philosophy with his book Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage, which shows how the concepts of Western virtue ethics can be applied to the study of Confucianism.14 Yearley argues that the two traditions are similar enough for comparisons to be legitimate, but different enough for both traditions to learn from each other. For example, both the Thomistic tradition and the Confucian tradition have lists of “cardinal virtues” (the major virtues that encompass all the lesser ones); however, the lists overlap only partially. The Confucian cardinal virtues are benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom, while the Thomistic list of natural virtues is wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Thinking about different conceptions of the cardinal virtues gives us a broader range of possible answers to the question: What is it to live well?15
Many philosophers are doing fascinating work on other aspects of Confucian philosophy: comparing Confucian and Western conceptions of justice,16 discussing how Confucian views of filial piety and childhood education can inform specific public policy recommendations,17 bringing seminal Western philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau into productive dialogue with Mengzi and Xunzi,18 examining the similarities and differences between Christian and Confucian views of ethical cultivation,19 and combining insights from Chinese philosophy with contemporary psychology and metaethics to formulate powerful alternatives to conventional Western ethics.20 Some leading mainstream philosophers have also been open-minded enough to engage in dialogue with Confucian thought, including Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum.21
Asian philosophy can also make important contributions to the philosophy of language and logic. For example, most Western philosophers (going back to Aristotle) have argued that no contradiction can be true. However, there are a surprisingly large number of statements that seem to be both true and false. Some are sentences in ordinary language (like the Liar Paradox, “This sentence is false,” which is false if it is true, and true if it is false), while others are generated by formal logico-mathematical systems (like Russell’s Paradox, “There is a set that has as a member every set that is not a member of itself,” which both does and does not have itself as a member). Asian philosophers have been more willing to entertain the possibility that some statements might be both true and false. Consequently, some contemporary philosophers are attempting to synthesize Buddhist and Daoist insights about paradoxes with “paraconsistent logic” to defend dialetheism, the claim that some contradictions are true.22 This is not the only technical topic on which Asian philosophy anticipates Western philosophy by millennia: the ancient Mohist philosophers recognized that “opaque contexts” block the substitutivity of coreferential terms, something not fully appreciated in the West until the twentieth century.23
The third reason that it is important to add Chinese philosophy to the curriculum has to do with the fact that philosophy faces a serious diversity problem. As researchers Myisha Cherry and Eric Schwitzgebel pointed out recently,
Women still receive only about 28% of philosophy PhDs in the United States, and are still only about 20% of full professors of philosophy—numbers that have hardly budged since the 1990s. And among U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving philosophy PhDs in this country, 86% are non-Hispanic white. The only comparably-sized disciplines that are more white are the ones that explicitly focus on the European tradition, such as English literature. Black people are especially difficult to find in academic philosophy. Black people or African Americans constitute 13% of the U.S. population, 7% of PhD recipients across all fields, 2% of PhD recipients in philosophy, and less than 0.5% of authors in the most prominent philosophy journals.24
Least well represented among PhDs in philosophy are Native Americans, of whom there are estimated to be twenty individuals, in total, working in higher education.25 Both my own experience and that of many of my colleagues suggest that part of the reason for homogeneity among philosophers is that students of color are confronted with a curriculum that is almost monolithically white. As Cherry and Schwitzgebel note, white male students “see faces like their own in front of the classroom and hear voices like their own coming from professors’ mouths. In the philosophy classroom, they see almost exclusively white men as examples of great philosophers. They think ‘that’s me’ and they step into it.” Students of philosophy are ill served by a narrow, ethnocentric education. Fixing the problem of philosophy’s homogeneity is a matter of justice, but it is also about the very survival of philosophy as an academic discipline. Women and students of color are an increasing percentage of college students, and by 2045 whites will be a minority in the United States. Philosophy must diversify or die.
For all the geopolitical, philosophical, and demographic reasons I have given, philosophy departments in the United States need to increase offerings in not just Chinese philosophy, but other LCTP. So how is philosophy doing in the process of diversifying the curriculum? A decade ago, among the top fifty doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States, four offered courses in Chinese philosophy.26 We are now up to eight, if we include departments that cross-list courses by faculty in other departments. It would be a mistake to infer from this that we will continue to see slow but regular growth in coverage of Chinese philosophy. Some departments that previously had faculty specializing in Chinese philosophy lost them. In addition, some departments that currently have faculty in this area are not committed to replacing them when they retire. Can’t we do better than this?
At the “Minorities and Philosophy” conference on non-Western philosophical traditions at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, my colleague Jay Garfield (an analytically trained philosopher who has become a leading expert on Buddhism) suggested, half-jokingly, that any philosophy department that does not teach any Africana, Arab, Chinese, or Indian philosophy should be forced to change its name to “department of Anglo-European philosophy.” I was taken with the idea, and suggested that we cowrite an editorial on this topic. It appeared in The Stone, the philosophy blog of the New York Times:
We ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness. We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself, “Department of European and American Philosophy.” This simple change would make the domain and mission of these departments clear, and would signal their true intellectual commitments to students and colleagues. We see no justification for resisting this minor rebranding,… particularly for those who endorse, implicitly or explicitly, this Eurocentric orientation.
Some of our colleagues defend this orientation on the grounds that non-European philosophy belongs only in “area studies” departments, like Asian Studies, African Studies, or Latin American Studies. We ask that those who hold this view be consistent, and locate their own departments in “area studies” as well, in this case, Anglo-European Philosophical Studies.
Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: we do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.
Of course, we believe that renaming departments would not be nearly as valuable as actually broadening the philosophical curriculum and retaining the name “philosophy.” … We hope that American philosophy departments will someday teach Confucius as routinely as they now teach Kant, that philosophy students will eventually have as many opportunities to study the Bhagavad Gita as they do The Republic, that the Flying Man thought experiment of the Persian philosopher Avicenna (980–1037) will be as well-known as the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment of Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), that the ancient Indian scholar Candrakirti’s critical examination of the concept of the self will be as well-studied as David Hume’s, that Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Kwazi Wiredu (1931–), Lame Deer (1903–1976) and Maria Lugones will be as familiar to our students as their equally profound colleagues in the contemporary philosophical canon. But, until then, let’s be honest, face reality and call departments of European-American Philosophy what they really are.27
The editorial produced a storm of controversy. The previous five essays in The Stone averaged 277 comments per article. Our piece received 797 comments before replies were closed twelve hours later, and over thirty websites commented or hosted discussions. (My own college-age children were most impressed by the fact that we earned a thread on Reddit.)28 The replies were inordinately passionate for what is essentially a discussion of academic curriculum. Some regarded the movement toward multiculturalism in philosophy as an obvious step. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, remarked:
The venerable canon of the liberal arts is largely built upon the hegemony of western, European, and British writing, art, culture and perspectives. Many faculties, including ours at Trinity in Washington, have done great work over the years transforming courses and curricula to include many more voices and contributions from a remarkably broad range of cultures and traditions. These changes have strengthened and enriched the entire liberal arts curriculum, making it more open and accessible to a significantly more diverse generation of students. Let’s face facts: there’s a Muslim Mayor in London, signifying the fact that even those who revere All Things British need to catch up with the now-settled reality of great diversity in contemporary life. The canon of learning should reflect that, including Philosophy.29
However, many responses were quite negative:
Sure, name the departments in a way that accurately reflects the content and teach global thought traditions but, for better or worse, there is a particular school of thought that caught fire, broke cultural boundaries, and laid the foundation of modern science (Does anyone want to fly in a plane built with non-western math?) and our least oppressive governmental systems. This makes one particular school of thought an appropriate foundation for the study of other schools.30
(Personally, I will only fly in a plane built with non-Western math. After all, the numeral zero is an Indian innovation, our word “algebra” comes from Arabic, and the ancient Egyptians invented quadratic equations.)31 Another reader of our editorial was even more dismissive: “Please preserve us from your political correctness. There is much that is of historical interest and value in non-European philosophy, but come on, there’s a reason that Europe leaped ahead of the rest of the world. I do not believe that we should sacrifice that merely because of an ooshy gooshy need to pretend that all cultures are equally advanced.”32
These critical comments suggest that non-European thought somehow isn’t as good as European philosophy. Most contemporary Western intellectuals gingerly dance around this issue. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was an exception, saying in print what many people actually think, or whisper to like-minded colleagues over drinks at the club. In the majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage across the United States, Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy quoted both Confucius and the Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 BCE) on the “centrality of marriage to the human condition.”33 In his dissenting opinion, Scalia chided Kennedy for daring to invoke the Chinese sage: “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”34 He echoes this sentiment in the conclusion of his dissent: “The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop-philosophy; it demands them in the law. The stuff contained in today’s opinion has to diminish this Court’s reputation for clear thinking and sober analysis.”35 Notice that Scalia said nothing that might be interpreted as an aspersion upon Cicero; only Confucius earned his contempt. Ironically, Confucius is featured on the East Pediment of the Supreme Court Building, along with Moses and Solon, as representing three of the great legal and moral traditions of the world.36
It is not only right-wing jurists who impugn non-European philosophy. Many philosophers, including ones who might describe themselves as politically progressive, are also dismissive of it. Massimo Pigliucci, an analytic philosopher of science, wrote an essay, “On the Pseudo-Profundity of Some Eastern Philosophy.”37 (He says “some,” but there is no indication in the body of his essay that he sees any limitations to his claims.) Pigliucci concludes that “there is no such thing as Eastern philosophy” based on his exhaustive research—which he admits consisted of reading some kōans and one Wikipedia article on the topic. Philosophy, Pigliucci explains, is inquiry “conducted by the use of logical reasoning, where possible informed by empirical science.” (A philosophy graduate student who casually threw around terms such as “logical reasoning” and “empirical” as if they were unambiguous and uncontroversial would be given a remedial reading list including the works of Pierre Duhem, Gaston Bachelard, Thomas Kuhn, Jean-François Lyotard, Paul Feyerabend, Michel Foucault, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty, for starters.) Pigliucci continues that “Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and so forth” are not “philosophical in nature because they do not attempt to argue for a position by using logic and evidence.” (Italics mine: “and so forth” is, of course, a well-known logical operator, used to make precise generalizations based on empirical evidence.) Finally, Pigliucci explains that, in addition to its logical and empirical basis, actual (that is, Western) philosophy “won’t require decades of meditation staring at a wall.”
I would ask Pigliucci (or the ghost of Scalia) why he thinks that the Mohist state-of-nature argument to justify government authority is not philosophy.38 What does he make of Mengzi’s reductio ad absurdum against the claim that human nature is reducible to desires for food and sex?39 Why does he dismiss Zhuangzi’s version of the infinite regress argument for skepticism?40 What is his opinion of Hanfeizi’s argument that political institutions must be designed so that they do not depend upon the virtue of political agents?41 What does he think of Zongmi’s argument that reality must fundamentally be mental, because it is inexplicable how consciousness could arise from matter that was nonconscious?42 Why does he regard the Platonic dialogues as philosophical, yet dismiss Fazang’s dialogue in which he argues for and responds to objections against the claim that individuals are defined by their relationships to others?43 What is his opinion of Wang Yangming’s arguments for the claim that it is impossible to know what is good yet fail to do what is good?44 Does he find convincing Dai Zhen’s effort to produce a naturalistic foundation for ethics in the universalizability of our natural motivations?45 What does he make of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Kant,46 or Liu Shaoqi’s argument that Marxism is incoherent unless supplemented with a theory of individual ethical transformation?47 Does he prefer the formulation of the argument for the equality of women given in the Vimalakirti Sutra, or the one given by the Neo-Confucian Li Zhi, or the one given by the Marxist Li Dazhao?48
Of course, the answer to each question is that those who suggest that Chinese philosophy is irrational have never heard of any of these arguments because they do not bother to read Chinese philosophy and simply dismiss it in ignorance. Frankly, such comments remind me of the sort of undergraduate who doesn’t complete the assigned readings, but thinks he has some “really cool ideas” about the topic anyway, and that the whole class would benefit greatly from hearing them. My grade would be “D-. See me!”
If you are offended when someone says you are wrong, you have no business claiming to be any kind of intellectual. But there is a great difference between a sincerely reasoned argument and an unargued dismissal. As English clergyman William Paley (1743–1805) lamented, “Who can refute a sneer?” After all, “such attacks do their execution without inquiry.” Much more of philosophy than we like to admit is simply argumentum per supercilia, “argument by raised eyebrows.” The great economist John Maynard Keynes gave a wonderful description of how this technique was practiced by one of the founders of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore (1873–1958):
Moore was a great master of this method—greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. “Oh!” he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.49
It should come as no surprise that Moore treated non-Western philosophy with nothing but contempt. After Indian philosopher Surama Dasgupta read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London, Moore’s only comment was, “I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.” The audience of British philosophers in attendance roared with laughter at the devastating “argument” Moore had leveled against Vedanta.50 This is the level of pseudo-argumentation that is typically used to dismiss philosophy that is outside the Anglo-European canon. When people assert that non-Western philosophy is not really philosophy or at least is not good philosophy, it is never because they have carefully studied it and have an informed and coherent opinion. I know this because anyone who bothers to learn about it with an open mind does recognize it as both philosophical and important.
Another argument against multicultural philosophy appeared in the conservative journal The Weekly Standard, in a response to Garfield’s and my editorial. D. Kyle Peone argued that, because “philosophy” is a word of Greek origin, it refers only to the tradition that grows out of the ancient Greek thinkers.51 A similar line of argument was given in Aeon magazine by Nicholas Tampio, who pronounced that “Philosophy originates in Plato’s Republic.”52 (Bad news for those who teach pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides!) In other words, the essence of philosophy is to be a part of one specific Western intellectual lineage. This kind of essentialist argument against the existence of non-Western philosophy fails for two major reasons: one conceptual and one historical.
First, the conceptual problem with essentialism: Whether people are engaging in the same kind of inquiry—for example, whether it is philosophical or scientific—cannot depend merely on accidents of history. Consider a parallel case. The Pythagorean Theorem states that for any right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. Although the discovery of the theorem is conventionally attributed to Pythagoras, it is Euclid who gives the first surviving Western proof of this theorem in his Elements. As it turns out, the Pythagorean Theorem was also known in China. The earliest occurrence of it is in the ancient Zhoubi Suanjing.53 The Zhoubi Suanjing gives a proof of the theorem that meets the most rigorous mathematical standards, and is arguably more elegant than the proof in the Elements. Are we to say that the Zhoubi Suanjing is not about “mathematics” because it is not part of the mathematical tradition that grows out of the Pythagoreans and Euclid? This seems patently absurd. If the Pythagorean Theorem were unknown in the West, the proof of it from the Zhoubi Suanjing could be translated into English and pass the standards of any top academic journal of mathematics in the United States.
There are also clear historical examples of intellectual traditions accepting and being broadened by alien systems of thought. When Buddhism was brought to China by missionaries from India in the first century CE, there already existed a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition, including Confucianism and Daoism (each of which had a variety of competing interpretations). Buddhism was a completely alien system of thought that challenged many of the fundamental ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the classic Chinese thinkers. However, Chinese philosophers studied Buddhist works, translated them into their own language, learned a new technical vocabulary, and engaged with Buddhist arguments. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition was permanently deepened. Even if one refuses to bestow the label of “philosophy” upon any of these systems of thought, the fact that Confucianism and Daoism were able to adapt to and incorporate Buddhist ideas dispels the illusion that intellectual traditions have an unchanging essence that makes them hermetically sealed.
A very similar transformation actually occurred in Western philosophy not too long ago. When a major European university began to teach the ideas of a particular noncanonical thinker, mainstream philosophers on the faculty objected that the new philosophy was not part of “our tradition,” and that it was watering down the curriculum in the name of a misguided fad. Because the new philosophy was inconsistent with many widely held positions, some philosophers resorted to a flaccid relativism, arguing that there were “two truths” on these matters. This sort of approach only convinced the mainstream philosophers that the new philosophy was nonsense. However, a brilliant philosopher argued that the best way to discover the truth is through a pluralistic dialogue with all the major world philosophies. This philosophical genius was Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others encouraged students and colleagues (who had previously only learned a form of Platonized Christianity) to expand the canon and learn not just from the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle (only recently rediscovered in Western Europe), but also from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. The result was to reinvigorate and deepen the Western philosophical tradition. (Siger of Brabant, the infamous “Latin Averroist,” was the one who advocated the “two truths” doctrine. Interestingly, there are competing accounts of how Siger died,54 but I suppose each of them is true, in its own way.) The case of Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle is just one of many examples that illustrate that the Western philosophical canon is not, and never was, a closed system. Philosophy only becomes richer and approximates the truth more closely as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.
THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL ETHNOCENTRISM
The second reason that essentialist arguments against multiculturalism fail is that the definition of philosophy as a self-contained dialogue that begins with the Greeks is a recent, historically contingent, and controversial view. As Peter K. J. Park notes in his book Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, the view that “philosophy’s origins are Greek was, in the eighteenth century, the opinion of an extreme minority of historians.”55 The only options taken seriously by most scholars during this era were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.56
Furthermore, when European philosophers first learned about Chinese thought in the seventeenth century, they immediately recognized it as philosophy. The first major translation into a European language of the Analects, the saying of Confucius (551–479 BCE), was done by Jesuits with extensive training in Western philosophy. They titled their translation Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius the Chinese Philosopher, 1687). One of the major Western philosophers who read with fascination Jesuit accounts of Chinese philosophy was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). He was stunned by the apparent correspondence between binary arithmetic (which he invented and which became the mathematical basis for all computers) and the Changes, the Chinese classic that symbolically represents the structure of the universe via sets of broken and unbroken lines, essentially 0s and 1s.57 Leibniz also famously said that, while the West has the advantage of having received Christian revelation, and is superior to China in the natural sciences, “certainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and the use of mortals.”58
In 1721, the influential philosopher Christian Wolff echoed Leibniz in the title of his public lecture Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia Practica (Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese). Wolff argued that Confucius showed that it was possible to have a system of morality without basing it on either divine revelation or natural religion. Because it proposed that ethics can be completely separated from belief in God, the lecture caused a scandal among conservative Christians, who had Wolff relieved of his duties and exiled from Prussia. However, his lecture made him a hero of the German Enlightenment, and he immediately obtained a prestigious position elsewhere. In 1730, he delivered a second public lecture, De Rege Philosophante et Philosopho Regnante (On the Philosopher King and the Ruling Philosopher), which praised the Chinese for consulting “philosophers” like Confucius and his later follower Mengzi (fourth century BCE) about important matters of state.59
Chinese philosophy was also taken very seriously in France. One of the leading reformers at the court of Louis XV was François Quesnay (1694–1774). He praised Chinese governmental institutions and philosophy so lavishly in his work Despotisme de la China (1767) that he became known as “the Confucius of Europe.”60 Quesnay was one of the originators of the concept of laissez-faire economics, and he saw a model for this in the sage-king Shun, who was known for governing by wúwéi (noninterference in natural processes).61 The connection between the ideology of laissez-faire economics and wúwéi continues to the present day. In his State of the Union Address in 1988, Ronald Reagan quoted a line describing wúwéi from the Daodejing, which he interpreted as a warning against government regulation of business.62 (Well, I didn’t say that every Chinese philosophical idea was a good idea.)
So through most of the eighteenth century, it was not taken for granted in Europe that philosophy began in Greece, and it was taken for granted that Chinese philosophy was philosophy. What changed? 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 Immanuel Kant’s philosophy 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.63 (As Edward Said points out, the Orientalist aspect of this racism was correlated with the rise of European imperialism, including the adventures of the East India Company in South Asia and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.)64 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 unscientific and morally heinous.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) himself was notoriously racist. In his lectures on anthropology, Kant treats race as a scientific category (which it is not), and grades the races hierarchically, with whites at the apex:
1. “The race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.”65
2. “The Hindus … have a strong degree of calm, and all look like philosophers. That notwithstanding, they are much inclined to anger and love. They thus are educable in the highest degree, but only to the arts and not to the sciences. They will never achieve abstract concepts.”
3. “The race of Negroes … [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the education of servants, i.e., they can be trained.” (In another context, Kant dismissed a comment someone makes on the grounds that “this scoundrel was completely black from head to foot, a distinct proof that what he said was stupid.”)66
4. “The [Indigenous] American people are uneducable; for they lack affect and passion. They are not amorous, and so are not fertile. They speak hardly at all,… care for nothing and are lazy.”
Kant ranks the Chinese with East Indians, and claims that they are “static … for their history books show that they do not know more now than they have long known.”67 So Kant, who is one of the most influential philosophers in the Western tradition, asserted that Chinese, Indians, Africans, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are congenitally incapable of philosophy. And contemporary philosophers take it for granted that there is no Chinese, Indian, African, or Native American philosophy. If this is a coincidence, it is a stunning one.
Because of Kant’s racism, it is difficult to believe that his judgments on Confucianism in his lectures on Physical Geography are based on a rational assessment of the evidence: “Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.… Their teacher Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for the princes … and offers examples of former Chinese princes.… But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese.”68 Kant also breezily comments: “In China everybody has the freedom to throw away children who become a burden, through hanging or drowning.”69 However, as historian David E. Mungello notes, “the horror felt by Europeans” about the Chinese practice of infanticide “was fed by a chauvinistic hypocrisy that blinded them to the massive infant abandonments that were even then occurring across Europe.”70 Many classic European myths reflect this reality: Rome was supposedly founded by Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a wolf after being abandoned as infants; the story of Hansel and Gretel is about children being left to starve in the woods. Abandonment of infants became so common in the United Kingdom that in 1872 Parliament had to pass the Infant Life Protection Act, which required registration of all infants.71 In China, infanticide was hardly treated as a casual matter: Buddhists and Confucians both condemned the practice when it did occur, and funded foundling homes for abandoned children.72 I am not denying that infanticide is horrific: it is. Nor am I denying that there is something especially abhorrent about the Chinese preference for female infanticide (and the contemporary trend of selective abortion of female fetuses): there is. What I object to is the rhetorical use of infanticide to portray the West as morally superior to China.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was one of Kant’s most insightful critics, but he shared Kant’s casual dismissal of Chinese thought:
We have conversations between Confucius and his followers in which there is nothing definite further than a commonplace moral put in the form of good, sound doctrine, which may be found as well expressed and better, in every place and amongst every people. Cicero gives us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius. He is hence only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom—one with whom there is no speculative philosophy. We may conclude from his original works that for their reputation it would have been better had they never been translated.73
Elsewhere, Hegel opines: “In the principal work of Confucius … are found correct moral sayings; but there is a circumlocution, a reflex character, and circuitousness in the thought, which prevents it from rising above mediocrity.”74 Ironically, many people dismiss Hegel’s own philosophical writings for the same stylistic flaws of “circumlocution” and “circuitousness.”
Note that Hegel is like Scalia in giving Cicero privileged treatment compared to Confucius. Speaking as someone who has actually read both of them, I find Confucius considerably more interesting than Cicero. Cicero reminds me of the uncle who buttonholes you at Thanksgiving to lecture you interminably about fly-fishing. Many others share my opinion. No less an authority than classicist and Nobel Laureate Theodor Mommsen said that “the dreadful barrenness of thought in the Ciceronian orations must revolt every reader of feeling and judgment.”75 In a similar vein, Alston Hurd Chase, a beloved teacher of Greek and Roman literature at Phillips Academy Andover, admitted that “the windy, egotistic orations of Cicero” caused generations of students to abandon the study of Latin.76 In contrast, Herbert Fingarette, who was originally trained as a mainstream analytic philosopher, said that, when he actually read Confucius carefully, he found him to be “a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man equal in its grandeur to any I know.”77
Essentialist arguments against multiculturalism have continued into the twentieth century. Martin Heidegger claimed that “The often heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature;… the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.”78 Similarly, on a visit to China in 2001, Jacques Derrida stunned his hosts (who teach in Chinese philosophy departments) by announcing that “China does not have any philosophy, only thought.” In response to the obvious shock of his audience, Derrida insisted that “Philosophy is related to some sort of particular history, some languages, and some ancient Greek invention.… It is something of European form.”79 The statements of Derrida and Heidegger might have the appearance of complimenting non-Western philosophy for avoiding the entanglements of Western metaphysics. In actuality, their comments are as condescending as talk of “noble savages,” who are untainted by the corrupting influences of the West, but are for that very reason barred from participation in higher culture. Postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak, who translated Derrida’s Of Grammatology into English, acknowledges that “almost by a reverse ethnocentrism, Derrida insists that logocentrism is a property of the West.… Although something of the Chinese prejudice of the West is discussed in Part I, the East is never seriously studied or deconstructed in the Derridean text. Why then must it remain, recalling Hegel and Nietzsche in their most cartological humors, as the name of the limits of the text’s knowledge?”80
Sometimes the narrow-mindedness characteristic of contemporary philosophers is amusingly baffling. I vividly remember many of my early experiences being interviewed for a job as an assistant professor. The writing sample I submitted as part of my application packet discussed Daoist critiques of Confucian ethics. Part of the Daoist argument is that those who self-consciously advocate virtue (like the Confucians) are the first to “role up their sleeves and resort to force” (as Daodejing 38 puts it) when things don’t go their way. It is not an implausible argument that a conscious effort to be virtuous is self-defeating because one can easily slide into hypocritical self-righteousness. Confucians typically reply that emphasizing deference and humility as virtues will make self-righteousness less likely. I was looking forward to discussing this debate between Daoists and Confucians with other philosophers. However, in one interview, a leading analytic epistemologist had only one question for me: “You mention that thing about rolling up their sleeves. In all the pictures I’ve seen of Chinese philosophers, they’re wearing robes. Did those guys even have sleeves?” He seemed fascinated to discover that they did.
During another interview, a philosopher asked me a long, rambling question that I barely understood at the time and most of which I could not reproduce to save my life. However, I will always remember his conclusion: “So, I guess what I’m saying is, it seems like Chinese philosophers are playing the intellectual equivalent of minor league baseball, whereas Western philosophers are playing major league baseball. Wouldn’t you agree?” I did not, nor did I get that job.
The ethnocentrism of professional philosophers is sometimes too offensive to laugh at. Former philosophy doctoral student Eugene Park speaks movingly about his failed efforts to encourage a more diverse approach to philosophy:
I found myself repeatedly confounded by ignorance and, at times, thinly veiled racism. To various faculty, I suggested the possibility of hiring someone who, say, specializes in Chinese philosophy or feminist philosophy or the philosophy of race. I complained about the Eurocentric nature of undergraduate and graduate curricula. Without exception, my comments and suggestions were met with the same rationalizations for why philosophy is the way it is and why it should remain that way. To paraphrase one member of my department, “This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.”
The pressure to accept and conform to a narrow conception of philosophy was pervasive. When I tried to introduce non-Western and other noncanonical philosophy into my dissertation, a professor in my department suggested that I transfer to the Religious Studies Department or some other department where “ethnic studies” would be more welcome.81
Park eventually dropped out of his doctoral program. How many other students—particularly students who might have brought greater diversity to philosophy—have been turned off from the beginning or have dropped out along the way because philosophy seems like nothing but a temple to the achievement of white males?
The sad reality is that comments like those by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, Scalia, Pigliucci, and the professors Park encountered are manifestations of what Edward Said labeled “Orientalism”: the view that everything from Egypt to Japan is essentially the same, and is the polar opposite of the West: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal.’ ”82 Those under the influence of Orientalism do not need to really read Chinese (or other non-European) texts or take their arguments seriously, because they come preinterpreted: “ ‘Orientals’ for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence, which any Orientalist (or ruler of Orientals) might examine, understand, and expose.”83 And this essence guarantees that what Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, or other non-European thinkers have to say is at best quaint, at worst fatuous.
While racism is undeniably part of the problem, it is also true that most US philosophers simply don’t know anything about Chinese philosophy. As philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel laments: “Ignorance thus apparently justifies ignorance: Because we don’t know their work, they have little impact on our philosophy; because they have little impact on our philosophy, we are justified in remaining ignorant about their work.”84 If US philosophers do have any familiarity with Chinese thought (perhaps through a nonphilosophical Asian literature survey course they took as an undergraduate), it is probably from the Analects of Confucius, the Daodejing, or the Changes. In my opinion, of all the ancient classics, these three works are the least accessible to contemporary philosophers. As Joel Kupperman explained,
If educated Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese (along with a small number of Western scholars) think that they understand The Analects of Confucius, it is because they have read it all, probably more than once. The pithy sayings take on meaning in the larger context. For the Western reader who is not a specialist The Analects of Confucius initially will seem like one of those amorphous blots used in Rorschach tests.85
The same could be said about the Daodejing and the Changes: without a great deal of effort and assistance in understanding their background and influence, it would be easy to walk away from these works thinking that Chinese philosophy is nothing but shallow platitudes or simply word salad. Ironically, beginning the study of Chinese philosophy with the Analects, Daodejing, or Changes is a bit like starting to learn about Western philosophy with the pre-Socratics. The fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, like the heterogeneous sayings recorded in the Analects and Daodejing, are crucial background to understanding what comes later, and they do present interesting philosophical and textual issues for those equipped to handle them. However, the beginner needs a lot of help in understanding what is philosophically important about them, and you will get a misleading impression if all you know about their respective traditions is these works.86
However, as Schwitzgebel argues, “even by the strictest criteria,” the ancient consequentialist Mozi and the Confucian virtue ethicist Xunzi “are plainly philosophers.”87 Schwitzgebel, a highly respected analytic philosopher of mind, goes on to note that the moral realist Mengzi and his antirealist nemesis Zhuangzi are comparable in style to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in that they offer strong prima facie arguments even though they do not write in the essay format favored by contemporary philosophers. I would add the Legalists Hanfeizi and Shen Dao to the list of ancient Chinese thinkers who are plainly philosophers.88 There are also many interesting and powerful philosophers in the later Chinese tradition, particularly in the Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, and New Confucian traditions.89
AVOIDING INTELLECTUAL IMPERIALISM
So far, I have replied to those who would deny the title of “philosophy” to non-Western thinkers on the grounds that they don’t engage in anything recognizable as competent philosophy (an assertion that can be falsified by simply reading the thinkers in question), and I’ve challenged the essentialist ethnocentrism that defines philosophy as grounded in a particular historical tradition (a view that is both conceptually confused and historically dubious). However, some argue that characterizing non-Western thought as “philosophy” is itself a kind of intellectual imperialism, since it takes for granted the Western category. I certainly agree that we have to be careful to understand how doctrines and practices of argumentation are situated in their particular cultures. These doctrines and practices will normally not overlap perfectly with our own. However, it is equally important to avoid the misconception that philosophy in the West is monolithic. As Justin E. H. Smith elegantly illustrates in his recent work, “philosophy has in fact been many things in the 2,500 years or so since the term was first used,”90 and “philosophy’s motion throughout history from one self-conception to the next has been at best a sort of random stumbling.”91 In general, I suggest that we should agree to stop using the word “the” in intellectual history. “The Western conception of philosophy,” “the Chinese view of the sage,” “the Indian view of liberation”: these and similar definite descriptions are all nonreferring, because “the” suggests uniqueness. Plato, Kant, and Russell do not share one understanding of what philosophy is. Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians do not agree about what makes someone a sage, nor do they even agree about who is a sage. Indian philosophers do not hold the same doctrines about what you need to be liberated from, or how you get liberated from it, or what you are liberated into. Consequently, the danger is not that we might mistakenly impose the unique Western conception of the philosopher onto (for example) the unique Chinese conception of the sage. Rather, the temptation to avoid is the assumption that what one Western philosopher does is definitive of all philosophy, and must be what philosophers in other cultures are doing (if they are doing philosophy at all). For example, if we compare the ancient Confucian Mengzi (fourth century BCE) with René Descartes (1596–1650), the founder of modern Western philosophy, they seem to be engaged in activities that are completely unrelated. However, Mengzi does seem to be exploring the same fundamental question as the ancient Stoic Epictetus (fl. 200 BCE)—what is the best way to live—even though they offer answers that are different in interesting and informative ways. A more appropriate Asian philosopher to bring into dialogue with Descartes would be the Buddhist thinker Dharmakīrti (fl. 600 CE), who provides alternative conclusions and arguments regarding the same kinds of issues in epistemology and metaphysics that vex Cartesians. In chapter 5, I discuss in more depth the issue of what philosophy is, why we should use a broad characterization of philosophy, and why some kinds of non-Western thought are clearly philosophy. However, I hope the preceding considerations will encourage those who are worried about the danger of intellectual imperialism to keep reading until then.
As the Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi notes, ethical knowledge comes first in time, but appropriate action is what is most important. Consequently, I offer the following concrete recommendations. To my fellow academic colleagues: the next time you are authorized to hire a new philosopher, consider whether it is really best for the long-term health of your department, for the education of your students, and even for the survival of philosophy as an academic discipline to hire yet another person who specializes solely in mainstream Anglo-European philosophy.
One bad argument I sometimes hear against diversifying the curriculum is “What would you have us cut? We can barely cover Western philosophy as it is!” You’re right. You can’t cover all of Anglo-European philosophy. But guess what? You were never close to covering all of Western philosophy and you never will be! There are more than a dozen distinct “topical” subjects in Western philosophy (including aesthetics, applied ethics, epistemology, logic, metaethics, metaphysics, normative ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and political philosophy, among others) and at least eight distinct historical subjects in Western philosophy (ancient Western philosophy, Hellenistic philosophy, medieval Western philosophy, early modern Western philosophy, nineteenth-century Continental philosophy, twentieth-century Continental philosophy, history of analytic philosophy, and history of pragmatism). So, if you want to have comprehensive coverage of Western philosophy, you will need a minimum of twenty philosophers in your department. In reality, even large departments in the United States do not try to have comprehensive coverage, but instead have philosophers with overlapping areas of competence. One top philosophy department has nineteen faculty members, seven of whom list philosophy of mind as an area of expertise. (To its credit, this department also has one specialist in Chinese philosophy and one on Africana philosophy.) So, yes, if you are going to add non-Western philosophy or some other LCTP to your curriculum, you will have less coverage in some area. But you are already making compromises about coverage all the time. Furthermore, scholars who teach some kind of LCTP almost invariably also teach and do research in some “mainstream” area. Chinese philosophy pairs well with ethics; Indian philosophy easily meshes with analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language; many other LCTP are directly relevant to political philosophy.
I once approached a leading philosopher for advice about how to increase diversity in the curriculum of US philosophy departments. I deeply admire her and her work, which includes extensive activism as a progressive public intellectual, so I was hopeful that she would be supportive. She replied that, given how few scholars know classical Chinese or Sanskrit well enough to supervise doctoral students, and how few students come into graduate school with any background in these languages, we can’t change things without “cutting corners.” I concede that part of the reason for the glacial rate of change in philosophy is a pipeline problem. In a vicious circle, few institutions teach philosophy outside the Anglo-European mainstream, so there are few recent PhDs in these areas for institutions to hire, so the number of institutions that teach these kinds of philosophy does not increase.
Although the pipeline problem is real, it is not an excuse for failure to diversity the curriculum. First, the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, which is probably the largest professional organization devoted to the study of non-Western philosophy, has over six hundred members.92 Consequently, there are enough strong scholars currently doing research that we could double the number of top institutions teaching Asian philosophy overnight if there were the will to do so. Second, many understudied areas in philosophy do not require expertise in what the US Foreign Service Institute describes as “Category III” languages (the most difficult ones for English-speakers to learn). Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi wrote in English; Simone de Beauvoir, the seminal feminist existentialist, wrote in French; Enrique Dussel, a foundational figure in Latin American philosophy of liberation, writes in Spanish. Third, philosophers have both “areas of specialization” (the subjects they publish on and supervise dissertations about) and “areas of competence” (topics they can teach an undergraduate survey course on). Even if you cannot find someone qualified to do research in one of the LCTP, you can at least hire someone who can teach the topic to undergraduates.
What you should absolutely not do is go to someone already in your department who teaches Anglo-European philosophy but happens to be of non-European descent and say, “We’re getting pressure about teaching Asian/African/Islamic philosophy. Why don’t you work up a course on it?” Yes, this really does happen. This is deeply racist. (It’s as bad as telling me that I’m of Polish descent, so I must love Kielbasa and Pierogis. I mean, I am and I do, but that’s beside the point.) Furthermore, untenured faculty will often have to swallow their pride and accept your request out of fear of losing their job by being “uncollegial.”
Finally, some advice to students: Both as individuals and when organized, you have considerable power to encourage the faculty and administration of colleges and universities to teach philosophy outside the Anglo-European mainstream. As a start, form a local chapter of Minorities in Philosophy (MAP) and connect with chapters at other schools.93 MAP is a student organization devoted to increasing diversity in the field of philosophy in all ways: among students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, among faculty, and in courses offered. Local MAP chapters sometimes organize reading groups or invite speakers to campus to discuss understudied philosophers. Another simple method to effect change is to vote with your add form. When courses on Chinese, Indian, or other LCTP are offered, sign up for them. If no courses are offered in these areas, you can request to do independent studies on them. If no one seems receptive, it is time to request changes by talking to professors, chairs, deans, and your college or university president. If requests don’t work, turn to petitions. If petitions, don’t work, it’s time to organize protests.
If getting your philosophy department to change its curriculum encounters too much resistance at first, follow Garfield’s suggestion and fight for the second-best result: demand that philosophy departments change their names to “departments of Anglo-European philosophy” to reflect their actual curriculum. There is really no legitimate way they can reject a demand to admit what they teach. This might seem like giving up. However, I believe that, if this change were enforced, it would be at most a decade before philosophy departments become multicultural. Currently, departments can hide behind the name “philosophy,” which represents a topic with cosmopolitan significance, to disguise the fact that their approach is indefensibly parochial. If their shame were exposed to their colleagues and students, the pressure for change would become insurmountable.
I have been warned that linking the call to study non-Western philosophy to issues of diversity and identity politics will politicize it in ways that may lead to outcomes I would not prefer.94 I agree. As a professor, I jealously guard my right to conduct my own research and teach my own classes as I see fit. This is not arrogance or stubbornness. I have spent years developing expertise in my areas of specialization, and figuring out how best to communicate to my students what I have learned and most importantly my love for philosophy. I am always interested in feedback, positive or negative, and I take it into account in making long-term adjustments. However, in terms of the fundamentals, no one with at most four years of undergraduate education knows better than I do after thirty years of experience in teaching and research. Consequently, in an ideal world, philosophy departments should make their own decisions about their curricula internally.
Sadly, we are not in an ideal world. I and many others have been fighting with rational arguments for decades to try to get greater acceptance of non-Western philosophy into the curriculum. I have appealed to my colleagues in philosophy to make moderate changes on their own terms in response to the realities of a changing world. However, I increasingly think that the only way to effect change in philosophy is by appealing to students to mobilize and demand changes. If and when curricular change is forced upon philosophy departments, it will not be moderate, and it will not be guided by a deep understanding of what philosophy is about or what its intellectual standards are. This is why Garfield and I ended our editorial with this warning:
We offer one last piece of advice to philosophy departments that have not already embraced curricular diversity. For demographic, political and historical reasons, the change to a more multicultural conception of philosophy in the United States seems inevitable. Heed the Stoic adage: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”95
It is one thing to suggest that greater pluralism can make philosophy richer and better approximate the truth. It is another thing to show it. Consequently, in chapter 2, “Traditions in Dialogue,” I will provide several examples to illustrate how Western and Asian philosophy can be brought into a constructive conversation. Not all beliefs are held for reasons that are conscious or rational, though, so in chapter 3, “Trump’s Philosophers,” I will argue that the heated opposition we see to multiculturalism in philosophy is motivated, in large part, by the same chauvinistic instincts that inflame nationalism, racism, and other kinds of ethnocentrism. Some people don’t see the value of any kind of philosophy. In chapter 4, “Welders and Philosophers,” I explain the vocational benefits of a philosophical education, the contributions of philosophy to Western civilization, and the value of philosophy in producing citizens committed to rational, civil discourse. Finally, in chapter 5, “The Way of Confucius and Socrates,” I will argue that contemporary philosophers are partially responsible for their own marginalization in society and discuss how they can change that by returning to the exalted aspirations that have always motivated great philosophical work, regardless of its civilization of origin.