Is Philosophy at Brown Euro-Centric?

Every once in a while, I'll hear from a student, or group of students, who worry that the philosophy department at Brown is too `euro-centric'. I take this concern seriously. I'm sure there are ways in which what we do is artificially narrow. But this particular concern, it seems to me, is somewhat misplaced, and I want to take a moment to record why.

Before I begin, I should say that part of the reason we are unable to teach certain subjects regularly is that we are a very small department. We are, last I checked, the smallest department in the top 50, with the exception of MIT, which is a special case. So there are a lot of areas we'd love to be able to cover but can't, because we just don't have the people. But if that's all we say about the charge of euro-centrism, then someone might well ask why we don't prioritize, say, Chinese philosophy. That question needs another answer.

One important thing to recognize is that we do not teach students about philosophy but teach students to do philosophy. And we teach students to do philosophy in the ways that we believe are most productive, just as people in, say, cognitive science teach students to do research in cognitive science in the ways that they think are most productive. (E.g., they don't spend much time teaching behaviorism.) So we do not even teach all the approaches to philosophy that contemporary European philosophers pursue. E.g., we don't regularly teach (indeed, have never taught, so far as I know) the work of Slavoj Žižek, even though some people regard him as one of the most brilliant European philosophers since the second world war. We definitely do not claim to teach everything that might reasonably be called 'philosophy'. 

The term "philosophy" has broader and narrower meanings, and what we do under that label is partly defined by the intellectual tradition of which our work is a part. That tradition began in Greece, flourished for a time in the Islamic world more so than in Europe, but was eventually rekindled in Europe, and has since spread more widely. Exactly what philosophy as done in this tradition is---well, that's itself a philosophical question, and one much debated. To my mind, what's distinctive of work in this tradition is the way it prioritizes argument, analysis, clarity, and the like: the relentless demand that one give reasons for the claims one is making, reasons that are supposed to provide some kind of rational support for one's claims. Much that is reasonably called `philosophy' does not fit this description. That does not make it less valuable or less important. It does make it not what we do, not what we teach students to do.

Philosophy being what it is, some philosophers have questioned the commitment to `reason' just articulated. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and I can well imagine such a criticism drawing upon work done in other traditions. Such criticisms have sometimes led to important correctives and could do so again.

The worry about euro-centrism is often focused on the two history requirements for the philosophy concentration: a course in Ancient Greek Philosophy, and a course in Early Modern Philosophy (which of course means roughly Descartes to Kant). If we're going to teach history of philosophy, then why do we only teach the history of European philosophy? Why not the history of Indian philosophy? or Chinese philosophy? or whatever? The answer is that we require these two courses because the work we do is part of a living tradition that began in Greece and, in many ways, came to fruition in the Age of Enlightenment. The relation between philosophy as we do it and this history is more intimate than the relation between, say, physics and its history. Indeed, one of the ways of doing philosophy today involves engaging closely with the history of our tradition. My own work on Frege is of this kind. In this sense, then, history of philosophy is never just history but is also philosophy in its own right.

That is why the way a philosopher approaches, say, Hume or Kant is itself quite different from the way a historian might approach them: Philosophers are interested, primarily, in the reasons that these philosophers gave for their claims, less so in the intellectual and cultural background for the claims (except in so far as those help us understand the claims themselves and the arguments given for them). 

Once again, then, the relentless focus on reason and argument shapes how we do what we do. One can only do this kind of work with historical texts that are (to some extent at least) engaged in the same sort of philosophical inquiry in which we engage today.

Philosophy in the sense in which we do it has closer and less close relationships to other things that have, both in the west and in other parts of the world, gone by the name "philosophy". (For interesting discussion of the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy, see the SEP article by David Wong.) We try to be open-minded about work in other traditions that might bear upon philosophy as we do it. But it's just a confusion to think that, just because something is reasonably called 'philosophy', it has very much to do with philosophy in the sense in which we teach students to do it at Brown.