Eric posted a reflection by Dave Chalmers, who asks:
How hard would it be to change the conventions so that every department would be expected to have at least one specialist in non-western philosophy?
Why not go a little further? What would be so wrong if introductory philosophy courses took up at least some classic philosophical problems through non-European texts. Take the no-self theory: why not teach it through Buddhism rather than Hume? Give the students some textual fragments, and teach them as if they were there just for content.
First of all, whenever you take up a historical figure in order to introduce students to a contemporary problem, you risk falling into ahistoricism. When Hume is used to introduce the no-self theory, or the problem of induction, his text is often mangled. Most don't mind this. Why not treat non-European philosophy the same way? One benefit, of course, would be that students would stop treating Asian and African traditions as mere outcroppings of mysticism and religion. If nothing else, it would innoculate people like those described by fabio, commenting on Eric's thread:
I remember over-hearing a conversation at a conference where two graduate students were discussing Priest's 'Beyond the limits...' book, and chuckling about the addition (in the appendix of the second edition if I'm correct) of a chapter on 'some buddhist guy' (Nagarjuna) and essentially explaining it as litte more than an idiosyncratic curiosity (Priest is into martial arts and--perhaps?--a buddhist himself, so there you go, he's a bit of a fruitcake and he included some crazy Buddhist guy).
Nagarjuna was certainly "some Buddist guy": it's true. He was also one of the great philosophers, and it wouldn't do undergraduates any harm to know so.
Additionally, some students would get interested in the scholarship and, become the foundation of a revival of interest in non-European traditions. Fifty or so years ago, Greek philosophy was taught in a completely ahistorical way. This revived the field, though (some might say) ultimately it robbed it of philosophical vigour. (Too much of the action is in exegesis and interpretation these days.) It would be good if the first half of this could happen to non-European thought.
UPDATE Some of the comments on Eric's post insist on preserving the scholarly purity of Indian and Chinese philosophy, and seem quite content to have it not taught at all. For instance, an anonymous commenter writes: "teaching a course on texts for which one can't read the original language strikes me as, basically, insane. This applies to Western texts but even more so to foreign ones. That means the availability of professional-level training in reading Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, etc. will serve as a limiting factor on the presence that non-Western thought *can* have, justifiably, in curricula."
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