2024/03/17 by Lea Cantor · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Classical Philosophy and Thought #History of Science and Medicine
paper · doi:10.1093/mind/fzae005
openalex publication_date 2024/03/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The history of philosophy mostly continues to be told and taught as if only ‘Western Philosophy’ were obviously, and unproblematically, recognizable as a philosophical tradition. Specialists of so-called ‘non-Western’ traditions have long remarked upon this phenomenon, including contributors to the present volume. The issue has also begun to attract the attention of philosophers more generally working in the history of philosophy. One issue which remains almost entirely absent from existing scholarship, however, is the question whether the narrative of a ‘Western Philosophy’ even makes sense to begin with. What exactly is ‘Western’ about ‘Western Philosophy’? And what, if anything, is especially ‘philosophical’ about this supposed ‘tradition’? How does the tendency of the category of ‘Western Philosophy’ to remain unquestioned affect engagement with traditions and figures currently marginalized from the philosophical canon? Despite the term’s pervasiveness in academic and popular discussions about philosophy and its history, these kinds of questions are almost never explicitly raised, let alone answered. Eric Schliesser’s masterful introduction to the second volume of his Neglected Classics of Philosophy series marks a refreshing point of departure from the status quo, echoing recent contributions by Lucy Allais (2016), Sean Meighoo (2016), Christoph Schuringa (2020), and the much earlier Ben Kies (1953; cf. Platzky Miller 2023). Contextualizing a book about the neglect of philosophical works in terms of an explicit challenge to the idea of a ‘Western Philosophy’ is still remarkably rare. It is an approach which will be extremely valuable in future work on the global history of philosophy.