The Western Blindness to Non-Western Philosophies
Western philosophers still tend to think that philosophy, in a sense that they can take with professional interest, does not exist in non-Western traditions. To persuade them otherwise would require them to make an effort that they prefer to evade. I attempt to begin to persuade them by closely paraphrasing a few arguments by the early Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu and a few by the Indian skeptic and mystic Shriharsha (about 1150 CE). One of Chuang Tzu's arguments has some resemblance to Plato's Third-Man argument, another with the impossibility of distinguishing between waking reality and dream, and a third with the impossibility of objective victories in debates. The skeptic Shriharsha, in a way that can be taken to parallel Wittgenstein's attack on conventional philosophy, shows that philosophical definitions cannot be rigorous enough to fulfill the task that philosophers set for them. The rest of this paper is devoted to the problem of commensurability. I contend that philosophies are either commensurable or incommensurable depending on the light in which one prefers to see them. Each way of seeing them involves a loss of a possibility that may be considered precious, but the Westerner who continues to insist on the full incommensurability of non-Western philosophies with his or her own is losing a great deal that might be intellectually helpful.
We have always been and remain insular. The insularity I am referring to is our professional blindness to any but Western philosophy, which fills our whole professional horizon. Insularity tempts us by its overestimation of whatever we have learned wherever we happen to have grown up, but it is no intellectual birthright. There have been more than a few great thinkers who have done their best to resist it. Kant and Hegel, both conscientious, omnivorous scholars, took the trouble to learn what they could of Indian and Chinese thought, even though, as has become clear, they were not informed well enough to allow them to make plausible judgments. Schopenhauer was extraordinarily favorable to Indian thought but wildly subjective (or egotistical) in his use of it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, eager to understand the nature of languages, made an often painstakingly detailed study of a great number of them-Greek, Latin, Basque, the languages of Central America, Sanskrit, North-American Indian, Chinese, Polynesia, and Malaysia. (1) What Humboldt learned convinced him that the Indo-European languages — the Sanskritic ones, as he called them — were the best for methodical reasoning.
“Why Western History Matters” is an essay adapted from a speech Donald Kagan delivered to the National Association of Scholars, and was reprinted in the December 28, 1994, issue of the Wall Street Journal. Throughout Kagan’s essay, he describes the essential need for the college course, Western History. He does so by examining older cultures and explaining why they were quintessential to the past and to our future development as a society. I strongly concur with Kagan’s standpoint of the necessity of history, and the realization of how exactly our flourishing society came about. History is a key constituent in determining who we are; for to determine who we are one must first know from whence they came. In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
As victim count continues to rise, its difficult to see how such great numbers of men, women and children are bought and sold every year. Trafficking can be found in many forms, including: prostitution, slavery, or forced labor (Harf and Lombardi, 2014). It wasn’t until the 1980’s that international human trafficking became globally noticed. With the lack of government intervention and control in several nations, and the free trade market, slavery once again became a profitable industry (Harf and Lombardi, 2014). As previously mentioned, easier movement across nations borders is one of the outcomes of globalization. It is also what makes human trafficking so easy today. It is estimated that about 20.9 million people are victims across the entire globe (United Nations Publications, 2012); trafficking accounts for 32 billion dollars in generated profit globally (Brewer, n.d). 58 percent of all human trafficking was for the purpose of sexual exploitation, and of this 55-60 percent are women (United Nations Publications,
The word Transcendentalism, as used at the present day, has two applications. One of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical and precise. In the former sense it describes man, rather than opinions, since it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each other, but directly opposed. (1)
Normative ethics is a branch of ethics which attempts to illuminate how humans should live their lives, and more specifically how to make moral decisions concerning oneself and others, according to c...
However, the success of the building schemes relied on the construction methods and innovations that are now attributed as bei...
Wittgenstein, Ludwig; G. E. M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (eds. and trans.). Philosophical Investigations. 4th edition, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
Human Trafficking is a global problem that affects the lives of millions of people in almost every country in the world, and which deprives them of their human dignity. As one of the most infamous crimes in the world, human trafficking is misleading and makes victims in women, men and children from all corners of the world every day and causes them to be exploited. Although the best-known form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation, hundreds of thousands of victims are also trafficked for the purposes of forced labor, forced labor as domestic servants, child begging and organ removal (Shelley, 2010). On the other side, “human trafficking is both a global problem and a domestic problem” (Jones, Engstrom, Hilliard, & Diaz, 2007, p.108-109)
Laczko, Frank and Elzbieta Gozdziak, eds. “Data and research on human trafficking: a global survey.” International Organization for Migration 43, no. 1/2 (2005).
The study of Buddhism over the past century or so has resembled the encounter of the blind men and the elephant in many ways. Students of Buddhism have tended to fasten onto a small part of the tradition and assume their conclusions held true about the whole. Often the parts they have seized on have been a little like the elephant's tusks a striking, but unrepresentative, part of the whole animal. As a result, many erroneous and sweeping generalizations about Buddhism have been made, such as that it is 'negative', 'world-denying', 'pessimistic', and so forth.
Analysing The West: Unique, Not Universal. Throughout history, Western civilization has been an emerging force behind change in foreign societies. This is the concept that is discussed in the article, the West Unique, Not Universal, written by Samuel Huntington. The author makes a very clear thesis statement and uses a variety of evidence to support it. This article has a very convincing point.
In this paper, one will explore the beginnings and ideas of Buddhism while investigating the rational justification of the highest good a human can achieve from this belief- nirvana. My conclusion is that no such clear rationalization exists for such attitudes due to the fact that Buddhism has self-contradictory ideals that disallow a balanced pursuit of enlightenment for all beings.
The practices of many cultures are varied from one another, considering we live in a diverse environment. For example, some cultures may be viewed as similar in comparison while others may have significant differences. The concept of Cultural Relativism can be best viewed as our ideas, morals, and decisions being dependent on the individual itself and how we have been culturally influenced. This leads to many conflict in where it prompts us to believe there is no objectivity when it comes to morality. Some questions pertaining to Cultural Relativism may consists of, “Are there universal truths of morality?” “Can we judge
Nantha, H., & Tisdell, C. (2009). The orangutan oil palm conflict: economic constraints and opportunities for conservation.
Conceivably the one of the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century, Pablo Neruda, whose real name is Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born in the town
When first looking at the relationship between philosophy and religion, I found it easier to explain the differences rather than the similarities. I began this paper the same way I do others. This generally involves a profound amount of research on the topic at hand. However, in contrast to the other papers I have done, the definitions of philosophy and religion only raised more questions for me. It was fascinating how the explanations differed dramatically from author to author.