Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy

SUNY Series: Philosophy and Race

by Peter K.J. Park

In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gerando s "Histoire comparee des systemes de philosophie," Friedrich Schlegel s lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast s and Thadda Anselm Rixner s systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over pantheism. "

Genres: Philosophy, History, Race

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the things I love most about the history of philosophy is how it can show that ideas thought to be obvious today have specific histories. Such ideas were once strange and new. People had to argue for them in the face of controversy; it was only much later that they became obvious.

Many philosophers today take it as obvious that Africa and Asia have no philosophy or at least no philosophy worth knowing about. Africans and Asians, it is thought, have religion or mythology or literature or "wisdom traditions," but real philosophy is, like the word "philosophy" itself, derived from a specifically Greek phenomenon. Few philosophers these days will explicitly say this (although more will say so than you'd think), but the shape of the discipline (at least in North America) continues to tell a deeply Eurocentric story.

Park's book gives a historical explanation for the exclusion of Africa and Asia from the history of philosophy in Western academia, looking to the history of European (primarily German) scholarship in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. During this period scholars like Joseph-Marie de Gérando and Freidrich Schlegel did compose histories that included African and Asian thought, but eventually a Kantian a priori method won out, culminating in Hegel. Park gives a thorough history of histories of philosophy and demonstrates how the burgeoning theories of scientific racism and the notion that a history of philosophy could be written in a scientific, Kantian vein made it possible to entirely exclude what had previously been included.

As someone whose career involves putting non-Western traditions (in my case Indian philosophy) into the history of philosophy, I learned a lot from Park's book about the specific history of the exclusion. Perhaps most important is the lesson that what was once deliberately excluded can now be deliberately included. Cross-cultural philosophy is not some newfangled development but a putting right what was wrong, making whole a story that has been partial.

(See also a version on my blog: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...)

[David K. Glidden · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary and scholarly detailed account of how the history of philosophy came to exclude Asian and African philosophy due to largely racist „reasons“ taken up by Kant and Hegel, influenced as they were by a few late 18th Century and early 19th Century historians of philosophy. Had Kant or Hegel followed other historians of philosophy instead, racism might not have become endemic in Euro-American academic philosophy.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main thesis of this book is strong and, undoubtedly, right. Eighteenth century' notions of Eurocentrism, "racism" and "white" pride, left an relentless mark in the academic history of philosophy.

Said that, I think that the facts and reflections deployed here by Peter Park need further developments urgently. From different perspectives...

I am not convinced of much of what is dimly pointed out in this boring and reiterative exposition. I miss insight and a questioning of the position hold by those who weren't "racists", but were under the sway of theology, tradition and phantasy. Their perception of the history of philosophy seem flawed too...

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the fact that Kant and Hegel were very racist is news to you, this might be a good read. But I'm not convinced by Park's attribution of the exclusion of Indian, Chinese, Iranian, and Egyptian philosophies from the canon to Christoph Meiners, and I'm not convinced that the Orientalist scholars (in the descriptive, but also pejorative, sense) like Freidrich Schlegel and August Tholuck are really less racist.

[Jyothis James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is critical to understanding how Western philosophy has warped the influence and origin stories of Non-western philosophical systems. If you ever need an impetus to avoid Western philosophy, this could be one of those foundational texts.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

a truly ground-breaking book. I wonder why I was not taught about this book while studying philosophy. so weird. why good research are always marginalized?