Not the West alone

Every so often, I come across something online of immense relevance to the political theory classes I teach. This is one such. The author makes the excellent point that

Though departments of religious studies, literature, geography, political science and others in the humanities increasingly recognise that the world is not the west, in philosophy the rest of the world does not yet exist. Asian traditions tend to be confined to religious studies or area studies, where philosophy competes with anthropological, political and historical approaches to the study of Asian traditions—and this despite a shift in how philosophy itself is taught, away from canonical writers towards key concepts.

And one could substitute 'African' for 'Asian' without any trouble.

The reality is that the canon of philosophical thought (or of theoretical thinking -- thinking that produces theory) in the West is narrowly ethnocentric. I teach undergraduate political theory using a standard text, Princeton Readings in Political Thought, that is exclusively Western in content. Thus, for example, the political thought of Confucius and Mencius is excluded, even though the former came before Plato (and in his concern about the development of virtue and the relationship of the virtuous individual to the state is looking at the same sort of issue -- albeit from a different perspective), and the latter sees the foundation of the state as being the support of the people in a way that was not to be argued in the West until Locke. And this is without mentioning Kautilya, Mozi, Xunzi, Han Feizi, Islamic thought, and modern reactions to the hegemony of the West. As the writer concludes:

It may be that terms from non-western traditions will also become keys of analysis in a future global tradition of thought, but those of western philosophy, their uses conceived in many novel ways, will continue to be used, as they are bequeathed to a global successor. But to give thus, western philosophy must first also receive, even if on its own terms. Parochialism and fear of the unknown on the part of western philosophers, and a loss of nerve on the part of Asian thinkers, stand in the way of that reception.