So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?

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.

Comments and discussions are welcome. Be sure you are making a point and contributing to the discussion.

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4 thoughts on “So, you think that Western thought is more diverse and interesting than “non-Western thought”?

  1. Are the “scholars [and] students who speak of ‘non-Western thought’ as being ‘less diverse'” in the room with us right now?

  2. I routinely told my first-semester students in Munich to imagine the full diversity of European philosophy, from its beginnings to the present – and then to accept that India has all that and more, and often had it much earlier. E.g., The Indians already had ‘Postmodernism’ (with ‘deconstruction’ etc.) in the early middle ages – and it died out. (I am waiting for this to happen in the West too. It’s overdue.)

    But in all fairness, the converse holds good too: a European would be astonished to see Indian universities where no other European language other than English is taught (etc. etc.; expand the list for all cultural subjects). Geographical distance seems to lessen the urge to have a close, more differentiated look at what is far away.