Your mid-week read
“Global: The New Basics” by Yoko Arisaka
This latest contribution to our “New Basics” series comes from Yoko Arisaka. Yoko asks how the shift away from global philosophy to Eurocentric philosophy in the 19th century came about. As she argues, before this time there had been records of various philosophical traditions from various parts of the world, but there was no systematic conception of a “history of philosophy”. It was only in the latter part of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century that intellectual communities began to develop a historical narrative which established the history of Western/European philosophy as we know it today. Through this process, philosophy actually became Eurocentric; global elements that were standard parts of philosophy before this time came to be excluded. You can read Yoko’s essay here.
I as a young philosophy student in the late 80’s felt similarly. I didn’t understand how this differentiating came to be. I remember challenging this in a History of Philosophy class. I now see it was a way to create some scientific validity for philosophy. Seems silly now in hindsight, but during the rise of scientific methods being implemented, philosophy was insecure! Same thing happened to psychology…
Too bad we all pander to a mere conceptual framework, at our peril.