Jonardon Ganeri of NYU gave a lecture at Stony Brook University on March 2, 2016 entitled “Why Philosophy Must Go Global.” You can click on the video below to watch.
In this lecture Prof. Ganeri draws from Jain nayavāda and Madhyamaka Buddhism to argue for “a pluralism of epistemic stances” (not to be confused with epistemic relativism). He maintains that philosophy graduate programs must do a better job of presenting multiple approaches, including the teachings of non-western philosophical traditions.
This might be seen as a kind of mission statement for Stony Brook’s new MA program, “History of Philosophies, East and West.” It is a joint MA program sponsored by our Department of Philosophy and Department of Asian & Asian American Studies. We are still accepting applications for our inaugural class of fall 2016. More information is here.
Having spent the month January working on Nayavāda in India, especially at the IIT Mumbai Jain Conference, I can say that it is a great idea to use this concept from Jainism. One reason is that according to some historical sources it seems to have developed in part as a response to the diversity of views that were present in India, such as various strands of Buddhism and Hinduism. Another reason is, as commonly pointed out, commonly nayavāda is neither epistemic relativism nor epistemic contextualism, which face specific types of criticisms, such as being self-undermining or prone to the problem of defining a context. Rather, nayavāda can be understood as a standpoint view, and it seems to have affinities with the argument one can run for standpoint epistemology, that many feminists have advanced. Glad to see attention to this topic.
I finally got around to watching this. This gives a lot of food for thought. Thanks for posting!
An expanded text, along with commentaries and replies, has just been published in the journal Confluence (http://www.verlag-alber.de/e-journals/confluence/). I’ve also posted it here (https://www.academia.edu/25799760/Why_Philosophy_Must_Go_Global_A_Manifesto_2016_).