Jay Garfield and I did not anticipate the storm of controversy that would result when we published “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is” in The Stone column of the New York Times blog (May 11, 2016). Perhaps we should have: after all, we were calling upon ethnocentric philosophy departments to rename themselves “departments of Anglo-European philosophy” to reflect their intentional disregard of everything outside the mainstream philosophical canon. However, it immediately became obvious that our challenge to the chauvinism of US philosophy departments had struck a nerve. This book is an effort to develop in detail the case for a multicultural approach to philosophy.
Like the original editorial, this book is polemical and intentionally provocative in the hope that it will incite discussion and raise awareness. This work is also intended to be interesting and accessible to general readers. Since the point is to get nonspecialists excited about the issues so they will want to read more and gain a deeper understanding, my argumentation is less guarded and less detailed than I would produce in a work intended solely for my fellow scholars. In addition, my editor specifically asked for a work that is “cheeky,” so I tried to deliver that tone, and have not shied away from being openly partisan in my presentation, and sometimes sardonic in a manner I would eschew in the classroom or in a scholarly publication.
To assist those who want to learn more about philosophy outside the Anglo-European canon, I maintain a bibliography, “Readings on the Less Commonly Taught Philosophies,” at http://bryanvannorden.com. I am grateful to James Maffie and Sean Robin for suggestions of some titles to include related to Native American thought, and to Travis W. Holloway for advice about readings in Continental thought.
I owe thanks to Jay Garfield for many things: for providing an inspiring example of how to engage in multicultural philosophy, for the initial suggestion about renaming ethnocentric philosophy departments, and for writing the generous foreword to this book. (Unfortunately, his numerous other commitments made it impossible for him to be a coauthor.) I am indebted to Wendy Lochner, my editor at Columbia University Press, for suggesting a book developing in more detail themes from the editorial Jay and I wrote. Wendy has also provided much helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this book, as did Erin Cline, Benjamin Huff, Jeffrey Seidman, Victor Mair, David E. Mungello, Matthew Walker, and two anonymous referees. My copyeditor, Robert Demke, did a thorough job of correcting a number of careless mistakes in my original manuscript. I am also thankful to Lewis Gordon, Charles Goodman, and Kyle Whyte for advice about doctoral programs in Africana, Indian, and Indigenous philosophy, respectively. William Levitan helped me to avoid a mistaken attribution to the learned abbess Héloïse. I offer prospective thanks to Professor Wu Wanwei of the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, who is already at work on the Chinese translation of this book. Of course, I owe an especially great debt to Barbara, Charles, and Melissa Van Norden, both for feedback on the manuscript and for putting up with my busy schedule of naps, watching zombie movies, playing zombie video games, and more naps.
The editorial that inspired this book was intended to have a list of cosignatories from the “Minorities and Philosophy” conference at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Their names could not be included because of the editorial policy of the New York Times, but Jay and I are very grateful for the support of Nalini Bhushan, department of philosophy, Smith College; Aditi Chaturvedi, department of philosophy, Ashoka University; Alan Fox, department of philosophy, University of Delaware; Alexander Guerrero, department of philosophy, University of Pennsylvania; Nabeel Hamid, doctoral student in philosophy, University of Pennsylvania; Jennie Innes, philosophy major, Brooklyn College; Julie R. Klein, department of philosophy, Villanova University; James Maffie, department of philosophy, University of Maryland; Deven Patel, South Asian studies, University of Pennsylvania; Jessica Taylor (Treijs), philosophy major, Brooklyn College; Christina Weinbaum, philosophy major, Brooklyn College; and Kathleen Wright, department of philosophy, Haverford College. (None of them should be blamed for anything I say in this book, nor should Jay.)
Parts of this book appeared previously in Skye Cleary, “Chinese Philosophy in the English-Speaking World: Interview with Bryan Van Norden,” Blog of the APA, May 17, 2016, http://blog.apaonline.org/2016/05/17/chinese-philosophy-in-the-english-speaking-world-interview-with-bryan-van-norden/; Jay Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is,” The Stone, blog, New York Times, May 11, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html; and my articles “Chinese Philosophy Is Missing from U.S. Philosophy Departments: Should We Care?” Conversation, May 18, 2016, https://theconversation.com/chinese-philosophy-is-missing-from-u-s-philosophy-departments-should-we-care-56550; “Confucius on Gay Marriage,” Diplomat, July 13, 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/confucius-on-gay-marriage/; “Problems and Prospects for the Study of Chinese Philosophy in the English-Speaking World,” APA Newsletter on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2016): http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/2EAF6689–4B0D-4CCB-9DC6-FB926D8FF530/AsianV15n2.pdf; “Three Questions About the Crisis in Chinese Philosophy,” APA Newsletter on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 8, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 3–6, https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/2EAF6689-4B0D-4CCB-9DC6-FB926D8FF530/v08n1Asian.pdf; “What Happened to the Party of Lincoln?” Hippo Reads, http://read.hipporeads.com/what-happened-to-the-party-of-lincoln/. The penultimate paragraph of this book includes a paraphrase of a line from the poem “Dion” by William Wordsworth: “And what pure homage then did wait / On Dion’s virtues, while the lunar beam / Of Plato’s genius, from its lofty sphere, / Fell round him in the grove of Academe.”