Our enemy Duchesne returns again:
https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/11/the-50-greatest-philosophers-are-all-european-men.htmlSure, if you judge by Western standards.
It could be that the most important historical question that points to a monumental contrast between the West and the Rest is the following: why did Western civilization produce all the greatest philosophers in history?
Because Westerners have been the ones judging which philosophers are the greatest, as Duchesne himself then proceeds to explicitly tell us (while failing to see any problem with this):
This conviction that philosophy was almost entirely a Western phenomenon was held by historians of philosophy from every school of thought until recently. The neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband, believing that philosophy concerns the “independent and self-conscious work of intelligence which seeks knowledge methodically for its own sake,” began his two volume classic, A History of Philosophy, published in 1892, with the ancient Greeks, without mentioning a single non-Western philosopher. Windelband believed that “the history of philosophy is the process in which European humanity has embodies in scientific conceptions its views of the world and its judgments of life” (p. 9). The historicist and existentialist Julián Marías, in his Historia de la Filosofía (1941), which went through countless editions, and was translated into English, also starts with the Pre-Socratics and ends with José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) without a word about a non-Western thinker
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The liberal minded Will Durant, in his popular book, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (1926), profiles only Western philosophers. In a “Preface to the Second Edition”, written in 1962, we see the first inklings of multiculturalism, however, as Durant faults his book for leaving out “Chinese and Hindu philosophy”, even though he adds that Chinese philosophers were “averse to epistemology” or to inquiries into the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. The analytical-empiricist philosopher Bertrand Russell, in his widely known book, History of Western Philosophy (1945), which was cited as one of the books that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, took it for granted that the history of philosophy should be about Western philosophers. Philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics because it is only then that we see speculations on the nature of things with “appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation”. Russell offered a chapter on “Mohammedan Culture and Philosophy” only to the extent that Muslims wrote commentaries on Aristotle. The Catholic philosopher, Frederick Copleston, in his magisterial work, A History of Philosophy, published in nine volumes between 1946 and 1975, began with Greece and stayed in Europe, including a volume on Russian philosophy, right to the end.
This Western-centric attitude was unquestioned until recent times. It was the typical perspective of texts for university students. Konstantin Kolenda’s Philosophy’s Journey: A Historical Introduction (1974) says that it was the ancient Greeks who “were able to think through to new, unorthodox questions.” “Mythical accounts about gods and about the world…do not necessarily concern themselves with the question of truth. Myth is something that is told and need not call for critical scrutiny, examination, justification. The idea of possibly discovering the true nature of reality behind the multiplicity of appearances and behind conflicting opinions is a most original and revolutionary idea in the intellectual history of man” (p. 5). It is not only that the ancient Greeks posed critical questions — “Is there some substance or some basic stuff out of which everything is made?” – but that their answers consisted of “reasoned” arguments. Not a single Eastern philosopher is included in Kolenda’s book.
In 1991, Norman Melchert published The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, in which he tells students that the value of philosophy is that it teaches you “to believe for good reasons”. Opinions are as good as the reasons behind them. “That’s what philosophy is”: teaching students how to think “clearly and rationally”. Every philosopher in Melchert’s “great conversation” is Western.
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The Great Philosophers, a 1987 BBC television series presented by Bryan Magee, which was made available in a book of the same name, only discusses Western philosophers in its 15 episodes, beginning with Socrates and ending with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
See? Duchesne, however, does not see; instead, he genuinely thinks the above is evidence supporting his claim:
This is a remarkable statistical fact. It needs to be emphasized this is not a comparison of the West against three or two other civilizations, but a competition of the West versus the Rest. Aside from the Muslim, Chinese, and perhaps the Indian world, no other culture in the world, not the Mayas, not the Aztecs, not the Khmer Rouge Cambodians, not the Tibetans, not the Aksum civilization, not the Egyptians, not the Assyrians, not the Bantus, not the Babylonians, not the Japanese, not the Koreans, NO other culture in the world, produced any great philosopher. Let it be repeated: this is not a list based on arbitrary, idiosyncratic, purely personal, or politicized assumptions. It is based on solid, widely recognized histories of philosophies.
Widely recognized by which civilization? Duh!
Europeans 80.5 = 80.5%
Jews 9.5 = 9.5%
Chinese 7 = 7%
Muslims 3 = 3%
If we add Jews to the European list, insofar as they were all educated in Europe, then the Western score is 90 = 90%.
I agree with adding Jews to the "European" list, of course.
The fact that Indian philosophy can’t be divorced from India’s major religious traditions, or was never conceived as a separate intellectual pursuit, explains why I could not include Indian philosophers
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Sue Hamilton, an expert in Indian philosophy, acknowledges that “what Westerners call religion and philosophy are combined in India, and that its philosophies are correctly referred to as soteriologies, or ‘system of salvation’”. The Indian philosophical tradition holds that “understanding reality has a profound effect on one’s destiny”. The attempt “to understand the nature of reality” is a “spiritual undertaking, an activity associated with a religious tradition”. The aim of Indian philosophy was to escape from consciousness, to obliterate the thinking self; and every philosopher, or every philosophical outlook, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, were preoccupied with the notion of reincarnation, the process of birth and rebirth, the transmigration of souls and the “release” of the soul from that process.
So systems of salvation are excluded(!) from what Westerners consider to be philosophy? That surely says more about Western values than about the quality of Indian philosophers!
Nevertheless, Sue Hamilton, as is generally the case with Westerners who study Eastern thought, misleads readers with her view that Western philosophy “tends to be concerned with detailed and technical questions about kinds of logic and linguistic analysis” – whereas Indian philosophy is a “spiritual undertaking” about “big metaphysical questions” concerning the meaning of life and how to live one’s life in order to have an effect on one’s destiny.
I would put it even more strongly than Hamilton does. Western philosophy views language as fundamentally empowering, as opposed to viewing language as fundamentally restrictive (and only something we are forced to use for communication due to decay of empathy (itself partially caused by reliance on language)). This is also why Western philosophers tend to be more anthropocentric: in worshipping language, it trivially follows that Western philosophers have a higher opinion of language-users (ie. humans) compared to non-language-users (ie. non-humans). (As I have pointed out in the past, reincarnation was a mainstream belief of ancient Greeks, yet amazingly (to non-Western eyes) the idea that humans could reincarnate as non-humans and vice versa (the most trivially obvious thing in non-Western imagination) did not occur as a possibility to them: that is how ludicrously anthropocentric they are!) Similarly, Western philosophers tend to be dismissive of Original Nobility, because, as language-worshippers, they find it hard to accept the superiority of a pre-linguistic human (ie. infant):
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/childcare-issues/msg15015/#msg15015Continuing:
The fact is that Chinese philosophers were accustomed to express themselves in the form of aphorisms, apothegms, or allusions, and illustrations. The whole book of Lao-tzu consists of aphorisms, and most of the chapters of the Chuang-tzu are full of allusions and illustrations. This is very obvious. But even in writings such as those of Mencius and Hsun Tzu, when compared with the philosophical writings of the West, there are still too many aphorisms, allusions, and illustrations.
Why do you think this was the case FFS? Answer: they were at least trying to partially overcome the limitations of language by not using language to crudely approximate an idea, but using language merely to describe a scenario that hopefully will cause the idea to independently arise in the listener's/reader's mind!
it was Aristotle who did the most in ancient times to delineate what constitutes a proper philosophical statement about what there is and what constitutes a valid form of reasoning about why something is so. He invented formal logic, a precise language about reality, about what things can be said to be substances and the reasons why they are as they are. He showed that true philosophical statements are composed of basic categories — substance, quantity, quality, relationship, place, time — which express the various ways in which being is, and that these statements can be formulated to be subject-predicate statements. This is just a little particle of what this incredible philosopher did.
The following then comes as no surprise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics#The_highest_goodAristotle claims that a human's highest functioning must include reasoning, being good at what sets humans apart from everything else.
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/antropocentricism-the-most-dangerous-ideology-in-the-world/Back to enemy article:
Europeans took seriously Zeno’s paradoxes, for they seem to suggest that one could reach a logically unacceptable conclusion on the basis of sound reasoning from apparently sound premises. They wondered whether these paradoxes revealed deficiencies in the way we reason, calling for improvements in our reasoning powers, a better system of logic and a more precise usage of language.
But did they ever suspect that reliance on language itself might be the problem? No, because the Western approach to problems caused by language is always more language, never an attempt to discard language.
the Western mind was able to develop methodologies to understand texts from different eras and different cultures, because this is the only culture that learned how to draw ontological distinctions between mind and matter, individual and society, the three parts of the soul, and so on, in the course of which this mind eventually developed particular sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, botany, sociology, economics, etc.—to explain different aspects of reality, and newly emerging properties, while also realizing that the concept of “man in general” is limited by historically determinate factors. The prior ability of ancient Greek philosophers to discover the distinctiveness of the faculty of the mind, the distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (law or custom) nurtured a transcendental outlook that allowed Western thinker to stand aback from their context and view other cultural contexts in their own terms. Therefore, it is not enough to say that all knowledge is historically situated, the expression of a particular people. If all knowledge is contextual, then all knowledge claims are equally valid. We have to ask why the West developed all the theories about how knowledge is context-bound, and why the West produced all the modern sciences.
Since when was philosophy supposed to be judged by its utility to science/knowledge? But Duchesne probably doesn't even notice his own screwup that perfectly illustrates the problem with Westerners like himself:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/truth-knowledge/So long as Western philosophy continues to predominate in prestige, it will be almost impossible to get off the track of:
https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/progressive-yahwism/which is what we are desperately trying to do.