Childish article. Should the Confucians also be forced to read plato? Philosophy (itself a greek word) is being taught as a certain tradition that builds upon its past. People from all races have contributed, but it will always remain a western-born tradition. To say that other disciplines should be included uncritically is childish. I realize the authors may be frustrated that their subfields don't gain more tractions, but even the fact that they both work in western philosophy departments, kind of nullifies their point.
If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
101–110 of 208 posts
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#102They wish to include non-European traditions of philosophy into academic philosophy. "Jay L. Garfield is - - the author of “Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy.” Bryan W. Van Norden is -- the author of “Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy.”" "Give us more money. We like money."
Or "We put our work where our mouth is", proof that they follow their own advice and have relevant expertise.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#103It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…
I am not sure that philosophers believe they are doing work like mathematics -- and if they do then they a wrong. Philosophy inevitably involves teaching of traditions (see below). But universities and indeed the word "philosophy" are historically tied to the western tradition. Philosophy students study study particular thinkers and the traditions in detail. And rightly so: theirs words are open to importantly varied…
"I am not sure that philosophers believe they are doing work like mathematics"
As someone with a postgraduate background in Philosophy I can say that, within at least the Western Analytic (mostly anglophone) tradition, that many do in fact think exactly that and I would tend to agree. Many Philosopher see their closest relations reside in Mathematics and to a lesser extent the hard sciences. They prize deductive reasoning and argument with truth as the aim.
They are not consciously engaged in a project of cultural preservation and would welcome say Indian or Chinese contributions, but the barrier to understanding their contributions are often very very high (conceptual and not just large linguistic barriers with lack of access to good translations) and so very few people bother to engage when grant applications need writing.
History of Philosophy, as the study of past traditions, thinkers, and arguments plays an outsized role in Philosophy 101 undergraduate courses, but in fact represents a minority of research activity. The majority of research philosophers are active in work relating to new work and living or recent figures such as David Chalmers, Saul Kripke, Ted Sider, David Lewis, Ruth Millikan, Dorothy Edgington, Timothy Williamson, David Parfit, and many many others. To demonstrate what I mean look at the citation network of the top journals in the subject:
Force graph visualisation: https://kieranhealy.org/philcites/
Blog post explainer: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/18/a-co-citati...
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#104Well if philosophy weren't complete bullshit I might be more upset...
“Look Mommy, … a crank!”
“And on the internet too Jimmy, how unusual.”
By the way, Aristotle covered this type of discourse in "On Trolling": http://crookedtimber.org/2016/05/07/aristotle-on-trolling/
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#105It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…
>Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory. There are strong cultural biases that show up in the history of mathematics. For instance the English mathematics community preferred Newton's notation over Leibniz due to a Anglocenteric bias in English mathematics community despite Newton's notation being clearly inferior. As wikipedia says: >"The priority dispute had an effect of separating…
At the risk of sounding facetious - isn't the whole Leibniz versus Newton thing akin to VHS vs Betamax? Considering Leibniz was perhaps superior and certainly published first, I believe Newton's principia was a more complete body of work, more widely read and as a result more widely disseminated. I read somewhere also that Leibniz came with a good bit of (potentially heretical) baggage that might have made it more difficult for his work to find mainstream acceptance. He tried to meet up with John Locke on a couple of occasions to discus his monadic theory of mind but Locke was always "unavailable".
Also, worthy of consideration in the wider context of OP article is that both versions of calculus emerged from pretty much the same European cultural milieux - there was much exchange between English and German academia and both came up with it similarly because it was "what was happening at the time".
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory. There are strong cultural biases that show up in the history of mathematics. For instance the English mathematics community preferred Newton's notation over Leibniz due to a Anglocenteric bias in English mathematics community despite Newton's notation being clearly inferior. As wikipedia says: >"The priority dispute had an effect of separating…
First of all, it wasn't "clearly inferior" historically. Liebniz' arguments why it was valid were heavily based on infinitesimals and monadology, which were not known at the time to be valid. (In fact, many of Liebniz' arguments weren't valid, although the conclusions turned out to be.) Secondly, if biases exist, one need not argue for diversity in order to achieve it. Liebniz notation didn't win because someone argu…
Lets assume your claim that Newtonian notation was not "clearly inferior"* to an unbiased person of the time, it follows then that teaching both ideas in English Universities might have helped to more quickly determine which notation is more useful. Consider the result for the English Mathematical community if the Analytical Society was never formed.
If biases exist then a spectrum of ideas from cultures which hold a different of set bias can be a critical aid in the search for truth.
*I disagree with this assumption but it is a hard case to make in either direction and I recognize the value of your perspective.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#107It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…
>If you think an idea is worth teaching just because it came from a certain culture, you must not care if it's right.
They only care if it's diverse, not if it's right.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#108It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…
I clicked around to see which topics were actually taught to undergraduates in the first philosophy program Google showed me (happened to be Yale): http://philosophy.yale.edu/undergraduate-program/undergradua... The first five: * An examination of major figures in the history of Western philosophy * An examination of attempts to reconcile the evils of this world with the existence of a perfectly good God, with specia…
Interesting! So first they teach their undergrads a year or two of completely outmoded Greco-Roman and religious stuff based on bad metaphysics, and then they manage, near the end, if the student hasn't dropped out, to throw in an introduction to formal logic and actual modern philosophizing.
This does a lot to explain why so many highly-educated people believe in outmoded stuff based on bad metaphysics when it comes to philosophy: it's what was taught in their classes!
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#109It feels like the author has missed the point of philosophy entirely. If some Chinese philosophical paper is very good, it should be evaluated on its merits and folded in to an appropriate course for that topic. Philosophers believe at least, that they are doing work more along the lines of mathematics than underwater dance (that is, searching for truth). Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in num…
> Nobody would ever dream of arguing against eurocentrism in number theory
I wouldn't argue about it, but there's actually lots of interesting ways to look at mathematics that do not come from Europe. For example, Chinese counting rods as expounded by Liu Hui or Seki Takakazu's theory of determinants. Sure, with some twisting around, you can show how the way they worked with polynomials or systems of equations is the same as how we teach it today in the west, but if you look at the way they thought of things, not how we translate them today, you get to appreciate a different mode of thought, just like reading Galois's original papers, badly written as they are, give you an insight into how he thought of polynomial equations, permutations, and substitutions.
Even Mayans' astronomical calculations (that is, calculations about the stars, not unimaginably big calculations) offer unique insights. You really do get a narrow view of mathematics if you only ever get it from one cultural tradition. Even within European mathematics there are lots of culturally different ways of doing things, such as differences in notation and nomenclature (e.g. "tan" or "tg", "[0,1)" or "[0,1[", "distribution" or "generalised function"). For example, Soviet mathematics has a very unique and distinct flavour, driven by the needs of engineering and analysis and the pressure to produce science that served the proletariat.
Mathematics, like philosophy, is a very human affair, rooted in the ways that humans think and communicate. It is thus also important to not separate the humans from the ideas that they produce. Ideas don't form in a Platonic void; they come from humans and the cultures they lived in.
Re: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
#110I'm trying to struggle through the linked discussion of Kwasi Wiredu, and it's not encouraging. http://www.iep.utm.edu/wiredu/ Indeed, terms such as reflective integration and due reflection offer the critical spaces for the theoretical articulation of something whose existence has not yet been concretely conceived. ... This reading gives an entirely different perspective on acts and themes of resistance as panoptica…
I totally object to this deliberately obscure style of academic writing. Having to re-read a sentence five times to decipher it doesn't make the author sound intelligent, it makes me suspect the author has nothing substantial to say. I'm working on my PhD now, and deliberately avoid citing papers with this style. I haven't got the time or energy to wade through pages of bullshit obscurity searching for nuggets of ins…
Obviously, not all academics write like this. Not by far. It's the hallmark of various followers of postmodernists like Derrida and Lacan. Particularly favored by far-left academics in departments of gender studies, multicultural studies, women's studies, etc.
Multiculturalism is a wonderful thing, but not the brand that these frauds sell.
You can read a pretty devastating critique of these pseudo-scholars in the book Fashionable Nonsense, which describes how two physicists made up a completely bullshit paper, full of utter nonsense, had it accepted for publication in one of the leading postmodernist journals of the time, and confronted a fierce but intellectually empty counterattack by postmodernism's supporters(this was in the 90s) [1].
1. http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-Nonsense-Postmodern-Intell...