APA Blog Post: "Provincializing Europe in a World Philosophy Course"

My first ever post for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association has just gone live!  It's about a course I created recently called World Philosophy and what I think courses like this can do for the discipline of academic philosophy.  (You can jump to the whole thing here, or keep reading for a preview).

Here are few quotes to pique your interest...


I start by setting up the problem (with an attempt to provoke my colleagues)...

Most philosophers in the United States today teach their philosophy courses as if places outside of Europe and North America simply never existed. This is not so much a claim as a challenge. Try to convince me otherwise.

Then I get into the guiding metaphor of my World Philosophy course...

At my home institution, our entry-level courses were designated as specifically Western, so I created a course called World Philosophy. The course description describes it as “a cross-cultural introduction to philosophy.” In my design of the course I was consciously relying on a metaphor developed by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, who discusses “provincializing Europe.” ...   

Within the contemporary academy Europe is often taken as the center of our understandings of history, literature, culture, religion, and philosophy. Europe is taken as the standard by which all things are evaluated. Europe (or the idea of Europe, anyway) is the capital; everywhere else is provincial.

In opposition to taking Europe to be central in our conceptual frameworks, we might aim to provincialize Europe, to make it one of many, rather than the center of all things.

Then I delve into some of the details about the course...

I consider my World Philosophy class to be a “buffet of philosophy”: we cover a wide breadth of material, but don’t stop to feast on any one thing (with the exception of Buddhist philosophy, which we cover for a few weeks toward the end of the term). We cover a range of historical contexts, from the early Upaniṣads (c. 800's-500's BCE) up to contemporary philosophers like Angela Y. Davis. We manage to cover at least one reading about a tradition or figure from every continent except Antarctica (I am open to Antarctic philosophy should such a tradition develop, perhaps in the form of meditations on penguins or melting ice sheets).

I end with a possible benefit of including courses like this in an undergraduate philosophy curriculum...

Another benefit of teaching introductory course like World Philosophy is that it might contribute to changing the discipline in the long run. The idea that philosophy is essentially Western is not innate; it is the result of the current acculturation process within our discipline.

You can read the whole post HERE.