It begins with the cheekiest chapter worthy of the most gasps since The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. The main point of both these books is, don't be Eurocentric. But that's where their similarity ends.

In a mere 150 pages, Norden takes us on a journey starting with the very, very basics of Asian culture. He basically starts us off with, yes, they use chopsticks. He breaks down the study of philosophy & calls it by what is commonly studied over here "Anglo-Euro Philosophy" His arguments to support this are what make this book very relative.

I firmly believe that Eastern Philosophy is every bit as rich, complex & worthy of respectable study as Western Philosophy. So I found Norden's early arguments laugh out loud comical. I had no idea a prominent Anglo-Euro Philosopher didn't know Confucius had sleeves but would loudly proclaim Confucianism unworthy of philosophical study and that it belongs in the World Religions Department, not a Philosophy one. Norden clearly says to claim Chinese Philosophy inferior based on barely reading the Chinese equivalent of Socrates to be, well, foolish & nearsighted. He spends pages basically listing the History of Chinese Philosophers for us & their key topics in bite sized fortune cookie bits for our easy readability.

Am I oversimplifying what this book set out to accomplish? Yes, because that's only the 1st 10 pages of the 1st chapter. The rest is less comical, he gets down to business and stops poking fun at us.

As a whole, his arguments are clear with plenty of endnotes for our convenience. And he concludes with the very worthy arguments that liberal arts are crucial & need us today more than ever, philosophy as a whole can benefit from conversing across traditions and there's even more schools of philosophy that he hasn't mentioned including: Africana, Native American and those that largely emerged from the Anglo-European ones -- Feminist, LGBTQ, Continental, Islamic, Jewish, Christian & Latin American.

This is just a lengthy summary of the book's arguments so there is plenty more to discover in these mere 150 pages of arguments & almost 50 pages of endnotes. I recommend it for current students at colleges & universities, high schoolers hoping to attend higher education and welders who share a fabulous chapter with philosophers.

A link to an article that's responsible for this book's publication. Apparently there's a reddit too because well, philosophers will talk.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html

This is an excellent book of importance to current academic philosophy, because it exposes the emperor's nakedness quite definitively.

It's made up of 5 chapters, with the 1st, 2nd, and 5th being excellent and I agree with just about everything argued for there. Unfortunately, I think chapter 3 raises a serious objection that Van Norden doesn't quite address, and chapter 4 should never have been published in this volume. I deal with all of this in detail below.


I. Why this book is great

I think the book succeeds in arguing for its central thesis in Chapters 1 and 2- that as long as philosophy departments see themselves as engaged in the pursuit of universally applicable truths, the exclusion of non-Western traditions is indefensible by their own lights.

He offers three arguments for this.

1. Many texts from other intellectual traditions fall squarely within the kinds of definitions offered for "philosophy". After all, the ancient Chinese philosophers engaged in subtle argumentation and theory construction just as much as any of the ancient Greeks, so it isn't clear why only the Greeks are considered special.

2. Even if we think that philosophy as is understood today originated in ancient Greece, the kinds of questions that arose and are still discussed today are seen as important by themselves at this point. And there are many actual debates within Chinese philosophy that have direct bearing on their Western counterparts, so there's not just an abstract possibility of relevance but a real relationship that should be explored.

3. the exclusion of non-Western texts isolates and alienated those who don't come a Western background, keeping away talented non-Western kids from philosophy.

Reason #2 is especially important and Van Norden does an admirable job of pointing out real debates in contemporary Western philosophy that could benefit from input from Chinese philosophers, and gives arguments from metaphysics, political philosophy, and ethics to showcase this. He points out that Western metaphysics and political philosophy both start off by assuming the primary unit of salience is the individual, and consequently spend an inordinate amount of time on puzzles about how bigger wholes made up of discreet individuals come and stay together, with regard to both metaphysical "substances" and political communities. In contrast, Chinese philosophers start with a picture of human beings where connections to others are important aspects of who a person is. Therefore it isn't considered particularly mysterious how communities of multiple individuals adhere, since it is seen as commonsensical that there is both an individual and collective aspect of identity.

If anything Van Norden under-emphasizes how ingrained these assumptions are to Western philosophy. While its true that Hobbes theorizes about how selfish individuals come together, these basic assumptions find their way into the theorizing of modern theorists like Rawls too (who justifies it on the grounds that minimal assumptions make the theory more plausible). And then Martha Nussbaum will argue against Rawls in 'Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership' that the people "signing" the social contract don't have to be that same as those whom the social contract "protects". In an incredibly circuitous route, the assumptions of the Chinese philosophers make an appearance again.

In additions, the stance that others form a constitutive part of our selves, and that therefore we shouldn't assume atomistic individualism as basic is argued for by Michael Sandel in his 'Liberalism and the Limits of Justice', Charles Taylor is celebrated for pointing out that we need others to build our sense of self, and Mary Midgley will insist that "understanding is fitting into context".

I take these examples to support both the idea that the West can learn from Eastern traditions, and that there is massive overlap in the themes explored in multiple traditions.

On a personal note, as someone who grew up in India and studied in Singapore, although I always found Western political philosophy more interesting in its relevance to modern institutions, I always found its assumption of atomistic individualism deeply implausible regarding my own experiences. I completely see why others of similar backgrounds may turn away from such philosophizing, if they see nothing that speaks to them.


II. An unanswered objection

One place that Van Norden doesn't quite respond to an objection adequately is regarding Allan Bloom's argument from his 'The Closing of the American Mind'. According to this, it is important not just to provide young people with classics to read, but that a person first be tutored in a particular intellectual tradition for them to cultivate an identity rooted in specific particularities of their own, before they can engage meaningfully with others. Interestingly, Van Norden repeatedly points out positively that the current Chinese president Xi Jinping is trying to get China excited about Confucianism (even if it sometimes involves a superficial reading of the classic texts). Bloom might endorse Xi Jinping as participating in a philosophical project like his own, where a specific tradition is first taught, and only then students exposed to other texts.

I think this objection is important because for the most part Van Norden assumes that philosophy is right to consider itself as some general activity of the mind seeking universal truths. However, this position itself seems somewhat Cartesian, with a view-from-nowhere. If we thought that the Chinese were right that constitutive identities are important, then there really would be a need to inculcate people into a particular tradition first, and so Van Norden's call for egalitarianism of cultural texts right from the beginning for everyone might be pernicious.

Moreover, Van Norden himself seems to think that "There is more than one “great conversation” in the world, and more than one way to furnish a soul," so its not clear what his response can be to someone who argues for different parts of the world teaching their own local philosophical traditions extensively first, and only then teaching about others. I suppose, Van Norden could still argue that we would still need teachers of other traditions eventually even in this narrative, but his argument would be blunted.

This objection is particularly effective against Van Norden because he later defines philosophy as:

We are doing philosophy when we engage in dialogue about problems that are important to our culture but we don’t agree about the method for solving them...where “importance” ultimately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.

If what is considered important varies by culture (even if with overlap), then according to this definition, what will be considered philosophy will itself vary culture by culture. So a position like Bloom's gets even more plausible.

(For my part, I think Western philosophy departments and perhaps Chinese ones have a special obligation to be diverse today because they have hoarded wealth and prestige to the point where non-Western students are forced to attend them if they want to have a real shot at a job. So sure, in an ideal world of fair distribution of wealth and influence, different philosophy departments can focus on their own local traditions, but hey, we don't live there. But note that this kind of reasoning does require ditching the self-conception of academic philosophy as engaging in a pristine and hermetic intellectual enterprise, and instead recognizing that philosophy exists amidst unfair distributions of power)


III. The parts of the book that were...meh (this is somewhat nitpicky)

Unfortunately, apart from all the really well-argued stuff, there's also a section that tries to defend philosophers from its haters. Apart from the fact that a lot of this is not new and a staple of any philosophy professor's spiel to first-year undergrads, it relies on a central equivocation.

"Philosophy" can be taken to refer to at least three distinct things:
1. Modern academic philosophy
2. The activity of the greats of the philosophical cannon that concerned themselves with thinking about how we should lead our lives.
3. The layperson's act of thinking philosophically

I think it's completely fair to think that there are links and similarities between all three, with maybe #1 and #2 being considered enhancements or systematized versions of #3. But I think all three are still distinct. However, Van Norden treats them as pretty much the same in the course of his argument.

For example, he points out that philosophy majors score very high in standardized testing and that they end up making a lot of money, which both seem very specific to #1. But he also criticizes #1 for obsessing with trivial puzzle solving instead on focusing on the big questions of importance, like how humans should live. But what if it is precisely this puzzle solving that helps students develop their minds in ways that help them score high in the LSAT? You don't have to think this is true, but its possibility shows that #1 and #2 do come apart.

In addition, there seem to be something vaguely anti-intellectual in this insistence that all philosophy needs to be concerned with fundamental questions of how we should live. As someone who thinks curiosity is a natural and fundamental impulse, I don't think philosophy needs to obsessively care about the question of how we should live in any explicit or systematic way to be considered legitimate.

(Also unrelated, in an effort to show that conservatives are paranoid, Van Norden points out that their regular predictions about how social progress will bring about the end of the world never come to pass. This is true, but this also seems somewhat unfair because there really were radical movements on the left, whose fruition would have brought about the worst of conservative predictions. So while its true for example that "Gays and lesbians...are happily integrated into [marriage]", we shouldn't forget that there was a fad in the 80s and 90s of radical queers denouncing marriage (check out Lee's Edelman's 'No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive' for a particularly out-there version of this). Similarly, today's young people are increasingly supporting socialism and getting rid of gender entirely, which even if good, are still radical. So portraying conservative concerns as being entirely rooted in delusion isn't completely fair, because the left has always had loud utopian voices seeking to upend the world. To ignore this and give a revisionist history of conservatism vs. homogeneous centrism was out of place in an otherwise nuanced book.)


IV. Coming back to why this book is great

Even with all these issues, it should be remembered that the central thesis in section I above has been ably defended, and so the book is great just because of that.

But in addition, this is also a really well-written book because it is accessible, funny, and surprising. For example, after a few pages of some deeply uncharitably readings of Western philosophers, he goes:

"My mainstream philosophical colleagues are champing at the bit to point out that I have taken these selections from Plato and Aristotle out of context. The allegory of the cave is part of a complex and subtle epistemological and ethical project. Aristotle’s poetic comment about pleasure comes at the end of a tightly argued discussion, and must be interpreted in the light of his nuanced view of properties. You’re quite right. But perhaps now you can understand my frustration with those who treat Chinese philosophy as nothing but context-less koans or fortune-cookie platitudes."

This is a hilarious way of making his point. And after a relatively dense section where he pinpoints the precise arguments and authors in Chinese philosophy with relevance to contemporary Western debates, Van Norden goes:

"However, this chapter discusses subtle and complex issues in only a few pages, so I would be surprised if you found nothing you want to challenge. In fact, if you have no questions or objections, I’m disappointed in you."

I love this, this reminds me of all the best teachers I've had- possessing the ability to challenge you with new content but also inviting you to outmaneuver them right back. He's right that philosophy is one of the few places where a "hermeneutic of faith" is still practiced, and he makes his own argument (for the most part) with charity, patience, and humour, making it an academic philosophy text which is actually both insightful and enjoyable.

At the end of it all, the emperor's clothes have been revealed to be non-existent, and the farcical nature of a discipline which claims to pursue objective and universal truth while strangely managing to ignore the vast majority of intellectual traditions becomes undeniable.

That's not to say that all the questions have been answered by Van Norden, I've even pointed out some questions above. It is also unclear how much diversity will a department need to have for fairness, and if this will vary depending of contextual factors (probably). But I for one also look forward to the new comparative studies that will inevitably rise when different traditions are allowed to meet. For example, Franklin Perkins' fascinating paper, 'The Greatest Mistake', argues that one reason modern Science didn't take off in China was the coherent and reasonable metaphysics employed there, unlike the then unwarranted claims to the possibility of knowledge made by Christian Europeans. This is a (possible) pattern invisible without alternative traditions to learn from and contrast, and who knows how many more patterns are out there, waiting to be discovered. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, “he who knows only his own philosophical tradition knows little of that."

Originally posted: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2413872101

In January 2017, students from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) launched a campaign called "Decolonise our minds" with the aim of drawing attention to the fact that a school focused in African and Asian studies holds a Philosophy Curriculum formed almost exclusively by white European authors. Although the intention was simply to make a call for the diversification of the study program, the reception in the British media was hostile and biased, accusing the students of wanting to remove all white thinkers from the program and of questioning philosophers that laid the foundations of our society. SOAS was originally created in 1916 to teach to future colonizers the language, history, laws, and customs of the countries to which they were being posted by the colonial enterprise, as a means to strengthen Britain’s presence in these colonies. According to the results of the aforesaid enterprise, it would be said that we do not know if, for lack of enthusiasm of the students or the poor preparation of the teaching staff, this attempt was not very satisfactory. Obviously (and fortunately) the circumstances have changed and today SOAS has an international and multiracial student body, and its mindset and objectives are very different. However, the radical rejection found in the press and in many academics throughout the UK seems to show an intellectual racism that we would like to believe was eradicated.

The claim of the students was obviously not to remove white philosophers from the syllabi but to make room for more thinkers from Asia, Islam, and Africa, something that sounds quite unquestionable considering the kind of institution that SOAS represents. At the same time, the students aim to discuss white canonical authors with a different approach that situates them in a particular historical and social background and reflects the colonial legacy. It is evident that due to the socio-historical context we must remain open to accept and understand certain characteristics of each epoch. For instance, it would be useless to try to re-read the philosophy or history of Greece and Rome pretending that there were no radical differences between the situation of both sexes. When Plato or Aristotle talk about citizens they refer only to free men, neither women nor slaves nor children are included in the lot. Does this undermine the idea of democracy as the government of the people? Possibly not, but still it is convenient to keep in mind the context in which the ideas are formulated. The same can apply to authors rooted in the religious tradition, or those for whom only Europe deserved the qualification of civilization and the rest were simply savages. Within this group, we find one of the most important Philosophers, Immanuel Kant. In Friedrich Christian Starke’s edition of Kant’s Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie from 1831, Kant speaks of four “races” as follows:

1) The people of America are ineducable. They have no motivation; because they lack emotion and passion. They are not amorous and, therefore, are not fecund. They rarely speak, do not caress one another, they don’t plan ahead, and are lazy.

2) The Negro race, one could say, is exactly the opposite from the Americans; they are completely emotional and passionate, extremely lively, talk incessantly, and are vain. They are educable but only as servants (i.e., they accept training). They have much motivation, are also sensitive, fear snakes, and do many things out of honor.

3) Hindus have motivation, but they have a high degree of serenity, and they all look like philosophers. Nevertheless, they tend both to great rage and to love. They are educable to a high degree, but only in the arts, not in the sciences. They are incapable of abstraction. A great Hindu is one who has achieved much through deception and has lots of money. The Hindus have reached their potential; they will never achieve anything more even though they have begun to achieve much through education.

4) The White race possesses all motivations and talents …[1]

Reading the words of Kant discloses a much broader and deeper debate, one beyond the geographical origin of the thinkers, but related to their ethical stances. What do we do with the work of authors who showed deeply problematic ethical or political positions on fundamental issues? In philosophy, it is difficult not to think of Heidegger and his indiscriminate flirtations with Nazism, but Sartre himself remained loyal to the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia far beyond what could be considered reasonable and excused first Stalin and then Mao’s purges. Knut Hamsun showed clear support to the Nazis, Louis-Ferdinand Celine demonstrated her anti-Semitism in both his writing and his life, Henry Miller was a misogynist and Truman Capote terribly nasty, Alfred Hitchcock used to behave cruelly with actresses, Roman Polanski is involved in some dark cases that took him to court, and lately Woody Allen is in the center of a turmoil of accusations and judgments. The list is never-ending and we may ask how ethical it is to appreciate the artistic work or the intellectual legacy of an author when his behavior is at least questionable?

If reflecting on the value system or the personal attitudes of a certain artist or public figure can strongly condition the way you see his or her work, this is still more accentuated when the character in question is a philosopher who works with ideas, values ​​and ethical and moral positions. It is difficult to separate private and public works in such cases, and that is why it is fundamental that the study approach is always critical and guarantees complete and detailed information, as well as opinions that contrast the considered as the most canonical ones. The study of philosophy should not be based merely on studying authors and memorizing and understanding their ideas, but should mainly be the construction of a theoretical grounds that allows us to refute these authors, if necessary, to study them and against them, discuss and filter, creating our own thinking system. That is why I reject the idea of ​​censoring books, authors, or ideas, however controversial they may be and I rather believe in education as the tool to navigate and choose for ourselves. Having said that, I find the demand to study Asian, African, Native American, Islamic authors perfectly legitimate and to eliminate all traces of thought that originated civilizations such as Egyptian, Chinese, Arabic, or Indian utterly absurd in a discipline like Philosophy that seeks to understand the world.

In this context, Bryan van Norden’s book Taking back philosophy: A multicultural Manifesto (Columbia University Press, 2018) is a relevant contribution to the debate. The origin of the book was in an article that James L. Garfield and Bryan Van Norden wrote for The New York Times after a conference in minorities in Philosophy hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and organized by graduate students was boycotted by the Philosophy Department showing a profound disinterest for non-Western Philosophy. The intention of Garfield and Van Norden was always to provoke and to stimulate debate, and thus, their main proposal was to change the name of the Philosophy Departments that do not include any of the considered least taught philosophies for Department of Anglo-European Philosophy, affirming that this name would be infinitely more adjusted and describes more accurately what is taught in them. The high number of comments received and the content of them, highly defensive and self-exculpatory, made Van Norden, professor of oriental philosophies and renowned expert in Chinese philosophy initiate the writing of the book.

In the book, different parts are distinguished: the first part is dedicated to analyse why the philosophy of Asia, Africa, or Native American has no place in the curriculum of the departments of philosophy. Curiously, trying to eliminate all traces of Asian and African philosophy is, in fact, impossible, since the origin of philosophy in Greece is only a convention, very convenient to classify Philosophy as something exclusively European but false nonetheless. It is not possible to ignore the reality that the first philosophical currents emerged much earlier in Africa and India, and complex texts on Ontology and Metaphysics were written in India while in Europe we were chasing each other with a big wooden club. Van Norden blames modern philosophers of kantcentrism and hegelcentrism, both tendencies that inevitably conduct to Eurocentrism. Before Enlightenment and despite the enormity of distances, the difficulties to travel, and the lack of mediums to disseminate knowledge, it is easier to find influences of non-European schools of thought and observe some sort of exchange. However, the Kantian revolution originated a current of navel-gazing and intellectual white supremacism. Probably the most radical assertion in the book is the one that connects the exclusion of non-Western philosophies not with intellectual issues but with racist postures. Van Norden clarifies that one does not need to be racist to help to perpetuate racist positions. Thus, assuming that practically all the Philosophy professors would declare themselves as non-racist their rejection to open the debate about curriculums has a racist outcome. This is closely connected with the widespread belief that not committing wrongdoing means living a just life, but on multiple occasions, the omission, the lack of action about something unfair, the washing of Pontius Pilate's hands are the source of many injustices

The second part focuses on what are the merits that make these philosophies deserve a place and be considered worthy of, at least, the same treatment and study as their Anglo-European sisters. Also, different mechanisms are offered to make this incorporation possible, even if it is a gradual one. Van Norden uses many examples from Chinese Philosophy since that is his field of expertise, those in which he understands Chinese thinkers contributions are probably more lucid than Western ideas. In the last part of the book, Van Norden offers a general reflection of Philosophy as a subject and why is necessary to include it in any kind of studies. He defends a philosophy that works as a framework to all types of knowledge and that helps to analyze texts, and write our own and uses multiples examples to explain why not only philosophers need philosophy.

One of the methods that Van Norden uses to demonstrate the rigidity and mustiness of the Western academy is to question ideas that modern European Philosophy takes for granted by comparing them with the unprejudiced acumen of other philosophies. For example, the assumption that the universe is composed of distinct individual entities accepted as an axiom and claimed by both Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes is usually considered as the orthodoxy of Western Philosophy. However, Buddhist metaphysics and particularly Nagarsena (150 BCE) describes the world as formed of transitory states and properties which depend on other state and properties. So the individual distinction is something we accept as given but it is not in the substances themselves but they are only mere designations or names that simplify our lives and no being is there to be found behind them.

Likewise, Thomas Hobbes considered the father of political philosophy, see human beings as egoist and self-interested. This characteristic leads to confrontations and so people become enemies and the natural conclusion is a permanent state of war. This situation is for Hobbes ideal for the creation of governments that provide the coercive power that maintains the status quo under the fear of punishment. Citizens give up their rights to the government in exchange for protection. Unlike Hobbes, Confucius endorses a philosophy of Virtue instead of one of punish. He relies more purely on human nature and gives people the benefit of choosing their actions and trying to pursue a life of virtue. For Confucius punishment and repression only conduces to new forms of avoiding to evade the laws but convincing citizens of pursuing a life of Virtue is a nobler path which does not recurr to fear or repression to guarantee order. Other thinkers like Mengzi or Mencius (372–289 BC), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), or Zhu Xi (1130–1200), are also studied comparing their ideas with important thinkers from the West in fields such as ethics, metaphysics, or ontology.

The book offers a remarkable set of examples of the East-West philosophical debate and even finds time to discuss Trump and his passion for big walls, as seems inevitable in any book published in the US in the last months. In my opinion, the book makes a notable vindication of diversity in the academic world and also of Philosophy as a field that can not be dismissed as an old discipline, but on the contrary can be more relevant and decisive than ever. In addition, the book serves as a bridge to access other books that are generally found outside mainstream thought circuits, which is always well received. The request to incorporate more philosophers from different latitudes in the curriculum does not respond to a simple question of quotas, for the simple fact of having thinkers representing all continents, rather is based on the value of these philosopher's work and the relevant contribution they can do in the formation of students. From universities and centers of learning, the call to study more broadly and deeply should never be questioned but celebrated with joy and that is exactly what Bryan Van Norden and the campaign Decolonise our minds in SOAS are doing.

[1] Menschenkunde oder philosophische Anthropologie. Friedrich Christian Starke, hrsg. Leipzig: Die Expedition des europäischen Aufssehers, 1831.

I received a copy for a review from Columbia University Press through Net Galley.

The author debates that academia focus only on Western philosophy, and refused to acknowledge that Eastern (and Middle Eastern for that matter) philosophy is militantly ignored. The reason for this is based on White Privilege, and in my honest opinion also influenced by Christianity. The other philosophy's are more interwove with the culture's religious beliefs such as Buddhism and Judaism. The college curriculum may contain courses on Eastern literature or religion but you find even fewer courses on Jewish literature or religion. This is an interesting fact since the deniers ignore that these cultures existed thousands of years before the Western culture. Aboriginal and African culture as a philosophical basis is largely ignored by academia as well.

What is the multicultural philosophy? Is it true that the "real philosophers" where only to be found in the western world? Then what about Confucius and the Chinese philosophy`? Can we say that there is a dialogue going on between the different traditions? And what about the Indians? And what does LCTP means? To this and some other questions the author tries to answer in a clear way to show how important it is not to consider philosophy only the "usual" one.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

There is a lot to think about in this book. Looking forward to more from this author.