Calling it What it Is?
Recently, the Times published an opinion piece in its popular Stone series that appeared to its premise into question. This series features teachers in university philosophy departments tackling important issues of the day.
However, this week's piece says that what we usually call philosophy is not really philosophy when we restrict it to the particular European intellectual traditions we usually mean by the term.
It argues that philosophy departments ought properly to call themselves Western philosophy departments given their reluctance to hire scholars who teach beyond relatively narrow traditions of inquiry in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. When they do employ scholars focused on the thought of the non-West, it is nearly always as "comparativists", that is to say, as looking at others for what we might learn about us.
The article speaks to me personally, albeit a younger me. I used to read Kwame Appiah, David B. Wong, among others, and I would share their discouragement at the disparity between the universalist aims of philosophy-as-such and the microscopically-specific range of that canon as taught in American universities. Recently, I heard its prejudice described as "European folk-reasoning, probably due to Aristotle". In some ways, that was a laugh-line. But, it does strike me as a pertinent observation.
If philosophy is "about" universally-defensible claims about human being, knowing, and doing, why is its canon so narrowly restricted to a few notables of the Greco-Roman-Franco-German tradition?
I don't know, but there are a number of productive ways to address the problem. One can call this disparity between universal problems and technical and specific answers as a testament to the parochializing effects of the colonial project. "Philosophy" has only really been academic philosophy after relatively recent European encounters with others who are said not have universalizable traditions of ethical and political thought.
If we are to transcend this, we must recognize the constricting effects of modernizing processes. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued this to particular effect in his treatment of the theme of "history", so should we not expand this to the idea of humanistic thought as a whole?
Still others may inadvertently suggest the restriction of the genre of philosophy has to do with our relatively restricted ideas of who a philosopher is. Alasdair MacIntyre mentions that philosophy is an exception to the rule that people who wind up in humanities and social sciences departments tend not to do very well on standardized tests compared to their STEM peers.
He is arguing for the moral-intellectual deficiency of people in those softer areas of study (except for his own), a very questionable bias of his, but one could just as easily say that the idea of thinker as individual genius favors popular perceptions of high-status fields like economics, physics, and philosophy much more than down-market majors like religion. These discourses intersect neatly with fields associated with the expertise of white men.
In my experience, the practice of different fields reinforces their self-image. In religious studies, is a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism really well positioned to criticize the theoretical work of a specialist in Puritanism? Likely not. And so, a weaker argument might survive hiring and tenure hearings.
On the other hand, a questionable thesis about Frege or Hegel is much less likely to go without contest in a philosophy hiring-committee. It would be subjected to more rigor. Because of the kind of institution The New York Times is, its preferences are clearly for the latter idea of seriousness versus some inchoate idea of diversity.
It is remarkable, then, that such a dissent as this week's should gain traction at all. This has been a question for philosophers among many other scholars, and it bears questioning.