| Major World Philosophies |
| Philosophy in Major Culrures |
| World Philosophiccal Discourse |
The objective to diversify philosophy in terms of content is frequently supported by the thesis that philosophizing is not an intellectual practice confined to the alleged roots of the "ancient" philosophy of the Greeks. This is subsequently developed in Europe and the West over the last two millennia - which as Heidegger ([1959] 1982: 15) implied - is linked to the gradual thrust towards "the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man.." Many departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences recognize that our human world presents a much larger tapestry with diverse and varied histories and socio-political systems; the same, one could argue, ought to apply to the systems of thinking and knowledge-making. In philosophy, this diversifying objective was (and continuously is) for nearly 100 years promoted under the umbrella of an enterprise known as comparative philosophy, or recently, cross-cultural (and sometimes "intercultural" or "fusion") philosophy, as we will see below. The label "comparative philosophy" is frequently used in two ways. First, in a broader sense, it stands for an attempt to make the discipline of philosophy a more universal, and cosmopolitan intellectual inquiry. Ronnie Littlejohn (2005) characterizes this appeal as both an aspiration and challenge "to include all the philosophies of global humanity in its vision of what is constituted by philosophy.." Probably the first influential scholar to use the term "comparative philosophy" was Paul Masson-Oursel (1926: 31):
We only plan to extend our knowledge in order that the more we know, the better we may understand; we only peer more distantly in order that we may see more plainly and more clear[ly] (sic). Both ends are secured when we discern fundamental likeness beneath apparent dissimilitude. All judgement is comparison: every comparison an interpretation of diversity by way of identity.
Masson-Oursel evokes
"comparative philosophy" in the opening words of the first volume of the journal Philosophy East-West (1951: 8):
Comparative philosophy can furnish to each nation or people resources that others conceived, the knowledge of which can be humanizing.
One may wonder, how is "comparative philosophy" done? What distinguishes its method from the regular ones applied to the standard philosophical canon? Mark Siderits (2017: 76) characterizes comparative philosophy as an interrelation of two distinct traditions or cultures:
(. . .) there is another sort of scholarship, one that proceeds from the
assumption that a given Indian text or author is sufficiently well understood that we can bring it into dialogue with something from Western philosophy. In the past much of this was done under the banner of something called "comparative philosophy."
Siderits (ibid.) coins the term "fusion philosophy" understood as a form of a dialogue (related to the terms "engagement" and "confluence") not restricted to only comparison and contrast of the two distant cultures, but rather stands for deliberate cross-cultural philosophizing:
(. . .) when we set out to solve some philosophical problem we should look at how others have approached the issue, regardless of whether they belong to "our" philosophical lineage or not.
A practical consequence of this framework would be to incorporate cognate "non-Western" philosophical theories and problems into university curricula, still dominated by "Western" thought (Garfield and Van Norden 2016)
A border, literally, is a line, often conventional, seldom natural, that separates two regions of space. Borders connect what is separated and separate what is connected. In principle, borders can be crossed (. . .)
Comparative philosophy is all about the erecting, detecting, smudging, and tearing down of borders, borders between philosophical traditions coming from different parts of the world, different time periods, different disciplinary affiliations, and even within a single period and pedigree, between opposite or at least distinguishable persuasions. Philosophical comparisons, more often than not, separate and connect at the same time what are very likely or unlikely pairs of, or entire sets of comparanda (that which is set out to compare).
Diatopical hermeneutics is the required method of interpretation when the distance to overcome, needed for any understanding, is not just a distance within one single culture (morphological hermeneutics), or a temporal one (diachronic hermeneutics), but rather the distance between two (or more) cultures, which have independently developed in different spaces (topoi) their own methods of philosophizing and ways of reaching intelligibility along with their proper categories.
Here diatopical hermeneutics has a functional role of forging a common universe of discourse in the dialogical form taking place in the very encounter. Panikkar does seem to echo the methods from "fusion philosophy" but argues for recognition of the distinctiveness of the tradition as well.
Purushottama Bilimoria and Agnieszka Rostalska.2023.'Diversity in Philosophy', in Sarah Flavel and Chiara Robbiano (eds.) "Key Concepts in World Philosophies - A Toolkit for Philosophers", Bloomsbury Publishing, p.356-359
Purushottama Bilimoria
Agnieszka Rostalska
The Methods of Comparative Philosophy
The endeavor of "comparative philosophy" consists in executing a particular comparative methodology in philosophical studies. An original depiction of this approach using a metaphor of "removing border" was made by Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber (2015: 1-2):
Another and more recent model developed is the project attributed to Daya Krishna (1991) calling to go beyond mere platitudinal dialogue among contemporary Indian philosophers and modern philosophers and, instead, return to the classical texts (Sanskrit: śāstra), albeit as living traditions, and engage in intense discursive dialogue and debates (Sanskrit: vāda) with (sam-) traditional pandits versed in the ancient and classical texts. In this encounter the parties may have to concede to what might be called "counter-positions," i.e., confrontational cavil with a view to defeating the opponent's standpoint and arriving at the truth of the problem at hand. Samvāda is further propelled by K.C. Bhattacharyya's ([1928] 2011) manifesto of "Svarāj in ideas" (echoing Gandhi's idea of swarāj, self-determination, in national politics to disrupt colonial domination), advocating freedom in the spaces of thinking with a preparedness to accept a synthesized outcome or a "reasoned rejection" of the other's or one's own position as the case may be. However, this exercise should at the same time lead to expanding the horizons beyond the limited purview of the traditions in dialogue so that the work of conceptual retooling for the benefit of global borderless philosophy - crossing borders, visiting the other as curious stranger ("strangification") - would be advanced a step further.
There is yet one other intervention in this attempt to find the best possible model for engaging the diverse traditions of philosophy. Panikkar in the quote below suggests in this regard that we forego the comparative project for the imperative one (from the nonverb in + parare, to prepare, furnish, provide). Imparative philosophy proposes that,"we may learn by being ready to undergo the different philosophical experiences of other people" (1988:127-128), even strangers to us. He also calls this diatopical hermeneutics (1988: 130):
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