Comment by hackeyed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackeyed | Hacker News Reader

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I realize you are replying to part of the discussion but your comment seems to be a nice point in support of the original article and I would like to see if you agree.

You mention one strand of western philosophy, "the Western Analytic (mostly anglophone) tradition" that believes its work is most closely related to math but then also point out that, while practitioners from that school are open to participation from non-westerners, they often face "conceptual and not just large linguistic barriers" at engaging with such contributions.

You seem to be saying that there may be value in these contributions but that we lack the cultural framework to understand and engage with them. If that is true, even though this is the portion of philosophy most consciously focused on mathematics-like deductive reasoning, doesn't that suggest an insufficiency in our current programs and perhaps argue that we need to expand our coverage if we are going to engage with practitioners in a global field?

Two things. Firstly, well I suppose I should strip the pretense. There is the added difficulty that we lack enough willing partners, or "practitioners" , on the other side to bridge the gap. There aren't many working philosophers, as opposed to scholars, to talk to. My old department had relationships with departments in Iran and China that included staff transfers, but what they encountered in these departments were practising philosophers working on Western philosophical projects segregated from the larger faculty, which acted as cultural custodians rather than engaged practitioners. Secondly, most philosophers want to do philosophy, not get bogged down in anthropological reconstruction of what an obscure historical figure might have said - which like most things, is probably either false or not new. The few that do actually go to the effort find it very hard to get anyone to pay attention unless you can draw a direct connection to an active problem without the any baggage in terms of conceptual or ontological commitments.

I'm not going to pretend that there isn't some real problem with engagement with other cultures as you only need to look at the ongoing divide between the Analytic and continental traditions. That divide is partly artificial driven by politics and events in early 20th century Europe. At the same time, its is a misunderstanding of what philosophy is if you think its just about cultural preservation. Philosophy in the West is an active and living discipline that is not standing still. A philosophy wants to know what is true, not necessarily what Kant thought was true.

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