VON PETER ADAMSON (MÜNCHEN)
Dieser Beitrag erscheint im Rahmen des „Themenschwerpunkts Diversität”. Alle Beiträge zum Schwerpunkt sind hier zu finden.
We are living through a significant change in the philosophy world, with respect to both teaching and research. Increasingly, it is indeed the whole world that is being considered by philosophers. In this respect philosophers in Europe and the English-speaking world have lagged behind their international colleagues. For example in China, it has long been standard to teach both Chinese and European philosophy, and in Islamic countries thinkers have been turning to European traditions like positivism and existentialism as a potential antidote to colonialism, this for more than a century now. By contrast, with some exceptions it has really only been in the last decade or two that leading institutions in “the West” have started to invest significantly in the study of global philosophical traditions, like African, Chinese, Indian, and Latin American philosophy. My admittedly subjective impression is that in this respect, Germany lags behind the UK and US.
In this blog post I won’t try to make a case for the globalizing of philosophy; this is something that has often been done elsewhere (cf. for example Van Norden and Garfield 2017, “Taking Back Philosophy”, Columbia University Press). Rather, I will take for granted that it is no longer tenable simply to ignore the wealth of philosophy that has been produced all around the world – if only because students will keep demanding to learn about it – and ask what is to be done. Ideally, universities would hire specialists in all these different traditions. But that is not really a realistic demand. Even a large faculty like my own at the LMU does not really have the capacity to create professorships for all these traditions while still covering European history of philosophy and the various “systematic” fields (logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, etc.). So even philosophers at a well-resourced institution will always face the difficult choice: either one refuses to cover (at least some) global philosophical traditions at all, or one covers them without having in-house specialists for the task.
I would like to make a case for the latter. The cause of global philosophy is not undermined, but to the contrary well-served, when non-specialists integrate it into their teaching. I do not necessarily mean that instructors should offer entire courses on, say, Chinese or Islamic philosophy. That would be very welcome, of course, but would also require a huge investment of time and effort. Rather, what I am suggesting is the teaching of selected texts and topics in broader thematic courses. To take an obvious case, most overview ethics lectures and seminars at least touch on virtue ethics. A discussion of this topic would be enriched by including selections from Confucian texts alongside Aristotle and modern-day virtue ethicists. Less obvious suggestions might be to look at Avicenna’s flying man argument or conceptions of the self in African oral philosophy within a course on the mind-body problem, or the Indian Nyāya argument theory within a course on epistemology or scientific reasoning.*
There are several advantages to this approach. Of course it makes things a lot easier for the teacher. Inserting a single “global” topic or text into a course probably only requires a week’s additional preparation or so. It also creates the opportunity to bring European and non-European philosophies into dialogue with one another, exploring both parallels and contrasts. It is rather reassuring to discover that, broadly speaking, similar philosophical problems and discussions are found both in Europe and outside of Europe. The fact that there is monism, skepticism, atomism, dualism and so on in Indian philosophy makes one think that there is really something to these positions, that they must demand to be considered by any reflective human being given that they have emerged independently numerous times in numerous places. On the other hand, it surely benefits students to see that what looks basically like the same problem at first glance may be treated very differently in a different cultural and linguistic setting.
One might of course object to the notion of teaching so far outside of one’s comfort zone. For example, is it really a good idea to teach Confucianism if you don’t know classical Chinese and don’t know much about the historical context? To this I would say a couple of things. First, people do this all the time when it comes to European philosophy. How many people teach a bit of Plato and Aristotle in their courses without a grasp of ancient Greek or the ability to give a spontaneous explanation of what the Peloponnesian War was all about? Second, and more importantly, it can be positively beneficial for students if an instructor openly admits that they are not an expert on the topic at hand. I’ve done quite a bit of teaching along the lines I’ve been describing here, and my experience has been that students do not just welcome the chance to engage with philosophy that is off the beaten path. They also respond very positively to the idea that I am learning about the text along with them, that we are engaged in an effort to discover it together. Of course one should still “do one’s homework,” as it were, by trying to get on top of the subject at least to some extent before teaching it. But there are now plenty of good resources to help with that, like various handbooks and companions (and as I must mention, podcasts!) devoted to the various global traditions. This means that what I’m describing is vastly easier now than it would have been only twenty years ago.
My advice then would be to take the plunge, even if only gradually. You might, for example, add just one global philosophical topic to your teaching repertoire each year, a manageable task that across a decade or so would significantly diversify what you can offer students. Even if you make a mistake or have to admit that you aren’t sure about the answer to a student question, that is a small price to pay for broadening the students’ horizons, and your own.
* For suggestions of how to do this with respect to several global traditions, you can look at the series of APA Blog posts on Africana, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic philosophy.
Zur Person
Peter Adamson hat als Forschungsschwerpunkt Philosophie der Spätantike und der arabischen Tradition. Seine Monographien befassen sich mit der arabischen Version Plotins, al-Kindī, al-Rāzī, und Autorität in der mittelalterlichen Philosophie. Aufsätze hat er über die folgenden griechischen Autoren geschrieben: Aristoteles, Alexander von Aphrodisias, Plotin, Porphyrios, Proklos, Damaskios; und in der arabischen Tradition u.a. al-Kindī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, al-Fārābī, Yahya Ibn ʿAdī, Miskawayh, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, und Ibn Khaldūn. Er hat mehrere Bücher herausgegeben und mitherausgegeben, darunter The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, drei weitere Bände über Philosophie in der islamischen Welt für das Warburg Institute und Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays für Cambridge University Press. Seit 2012 hat Prof. Adamson noch eine Teil-Professur an King’s College London, wo er von 2000-2012 in Vollzeit tätig war. Er produziert auch den „History of Philosophy podcast“, der als Buchreihe bei Oxford University Press erscheint.
Auf Twitter: @histphilosophy, Website: www.historyofphilosophy.net.
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