| Having gone through an undergraduate philosophy major and taken many classes on non-western thought, all offered by other departments, I strongly support the article's position. To have a class called "Ethics" that covers only the historical Western positions deprives students of the majority of the world's thinking on the topic. What many of the comments here are missing by trying to separate "history of thought" from a more abstract conception of "philosophy" is that people do not develop their views of the world in a vacuum. Philosophy classes are not meditation sessions where students try and summon knowledge from the void, they involve reading the works of great thinkers in the field, analyzing their reasoning and engaging with their ideas. The philosophers you read provide both the content and the tools you learn for use in your own thinking. As such, only presenting philosophers from a particular tradition biases the experiences of your students whether that bias is cultural as the article points out or even towards a particular school of thought within a culture, like the shift from pragmatics to highly analytic philosophy that took place in American schools during the second half of the twentieth century. When I asked my department head why we did not, for instance, mention Confucius in our Moral Philosophy class, she explained that it is at least partially a bootstrapping issue. Because none of the faculty at my university had training in non-western traditions or spoke any non-western languages, they did not teach them nor did they feel comfortable advising graduate students doing their research on those traditions and in those languages. Take a look at the graduate program requirements for the Ivy League philosophy programs and you will see that they all require students to know a second language, but the languages they are told to choose from are: French, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, or Dutch if you are really into Kierkegaard. You might also be able to get approval for Russian. The result is an echo chamber where we only teach western so we only hire western so we only teach western. I doubt the article's suggestion of renaming departments will do much to change this situation but I agree that it would be a more honest representation of the materials taught and sympathize with the frustration behind their argument. |