So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?
I have a non-polemical question: What did you read within what you call “non-Western thought”? If the list is extremely short compared to what you know of Euro-American philosophy (say, less than 100 titles), or if it focuses on a special field (say, Confucian ethics) then it’s easy to have a less diverse impression. The problem is that scholars or students who speak of “non-Western thought” as being “less diverse” have at most taken a single class on anything other than Euro-American philosophy.
Do you think you would have an idea of Euro-American philosophy as very diverse and interesting if you had studied, say, Sanskrit philosophy for decades, and had taken a single class on French existentialism and German phenomenology?
More in general, many Philosophy departments think that diversifying means adding a single class on anything that is not Euro-American mainstream philosophy (it can be Maori political thought, ubuntu ethics, Confucianism, Sanskrit epistemology…).
The result is often implicitly suggesting that there is a single world of “non-Western” thought and that everyone can teach it, because it does not go very deep.
For instance, I am routinely asked to answer questions about, e.g., the Zhaungzi, as if my expertise should extent to the whole of “non-Western thought”, because it is implicitly assumed to be very limited.
I ask students on the first class on Sanskrit philosophy how many texts do they think were composed in Sanskrit philosophy if compared to Greek philosophy and they are ridiculously wrong, guessing anything between 30 and 300 texts.
I don’t know which of the 3 traditions of Philosophy in the strict sense of the word is more diverse. What we find only in the Greek-origined tradition is the stage of modern philosophy, which has not happened elsewhere. The phenomenon of modernity happened in Europe, and then it spread all over the world. Maybe this gives a special novelty and diversity to Western philosophy from the Renaissance on that we do not find in other traditions.
Which Sanskrit do you mean, elisa? I ask this having long attended to the discourse that became Prakrit, served for the Jain scriptures and then passed on through another fringe, of the early Buddhist movement. Already in ancient times, Paul Thirme remarked on ‘early Prakritisms’ marking the concourse on the Ganges where the earliest Fordmakers pioneered the crossing and thereby north-south trade. Later Jains pioneered the routes to the South, making the earliest inscriptions there, and meanwhile extended the caravan routes to the Mediterranean and Africa.
Serving these diverse practical interests were the intricate calculations of dates in various calendars, as also on the Elephantine island at the southern border of Egypt, These calculations posee a grand puzzle to modern commentary, resolved by Leonard Euler in Switzerland, as I remarked early in this debate. And now that breakthrough marks a substantial contribution to the modern developments in philosophy, thoughtfully highlighted by Javier Ruiz Calderón.
To make full philosophical sense of this, one can take the notion of a *sixth sense distinctive if human or rational intelligence, which is simply proverbial in modern English, yet historically derivative of the Jain *Manas, their notion of mind variously shared with Yoga and Buddhism. Manas is taken to be a material capacity which must pass with the living individual, and now at the very forefront of the modern movement we have Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff arguing for quantum consciousness realized in microtubules in the membranes of nerve cells. Yet in the perspective here, this *cannot be the consciousness that rises to spiritual horizons, for it must be rooted in the material *Manas; unless of course one opts for the reductive trivialization of all things spiritual which gnaws at the heart of modernism.
Here I take a step back in search of more dispassionate insight, and take a lead from Euler, who showed that when any material comes under load , as in a process of work, it’s form is somewhat distorted in a proportion measured as *strain. This *strain is not a physical variable, rather a coefficient *without dimension, a pure ratio, rather in the sense of Kant on pure reason. And to me the microtubules are not improbably hosting any quantum computation process, but *do modestly serve the mind as a *strain gauge, for gauging the * effort of work. And that theme of *mental effort was importantly taken up by Kant in his early essay on Negative Magnitudes in Philosophy: he took the strain as such, as a cost or overhead in performance. Kant’s essay now enjoys a revival of interest in Western universities, showing philosophy straining to accommodate the rising authority of natural science, which has just recently consolidated on a Standard Model, very largely free of controversies. Such are the current concerns which may motivate the rising generation of students.
I. The Indic Modern Movement. This is a long story, so I’m planning a sequel to show where Indic science now illuminates epistemology and the enigma of consciousness.
Modern times saw a sharp turn in Sanskrit literature through literary theory to the Puranas, and the problem of integrating the heritage in consistent form. Here we see what I call *philosophy as text in the making*: and the outcome was eventually a classic like The Subject as Freedom, sharing Kant’s concern to find a place for God, Freedom and Immortality.
So there was a modern movement within India, and the leading lights of Indian physical science, Satyen Bose and Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar, found their place in the firmament of western natural science. But Eddington tried to ridicule Chandra’s calculations, and he left Britain for the US. The collaboration started by Sommerfeld lecturing in India was not sustained.
Meanwhile a great deal of Asian heritage was reviewed in the West ~ Arabic science, Confucian ethics, Indic literature ~ serving missionaries making their own dogmatic texts. It was an ironic mix of intellectual hospitality and patronizing prejudice, which made for a sometimes toxic metaphysical mix.
Indo-European linguistics prospered, and gave us Structuralism, but natural science followed Functionalism for more precision in logic, and mathematical reasoning. Both Hume and Kant engaged mathematics directly, and we’re read in India accordingly. Here Jonardon Ganeri gives sophisticated argument to show that late Navya-Nyaya offered a kind of graph theory instead, which certainly did serve comprehending Panini. But the technical language he sought was not to be found, supplanted by the regular Jain mathematics of the Kerala school which attained everything Newton and after him Maclauren would offer.
So Indic students can now usefully read Frege’s (functionalist) Sense and Reference, and look to John Dewey for commentary. I was glad earlier to help with this insight. But across the board in intellectual life we face a situation where dogmatic interests and metaphysical aspirations easily feed through the resources of rhetoric and disputation into alluring strains of science fiction, featuring space travel and Aliens. Thus also the notoriously untestable Superstring theory in western physics; while Inationalist rhetoric in India and China alike is feeding into films depicting heritage in mythical form.