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The Present Disputes

Since the mid-twentieth century Western scholars have argued the question tradition by tradition.

For India, the dispute was over a Sanskrit word. Hermann Jacobi had rendered ānvīkṣikī, the investigative science, as “philosophy”; Paul Hacker answered that Jacobi “was obviously so impressed with the Occidental emancipation of philosophy from theology that he projected this conflict into his own area of research, India”, and concluded that Hindu culture “knew the concept of philosophy, but no word which expressed this concept fully and exclusively” (as Halbfass quotes him, in English). Wilhelm Halbfass, in India and Europe (1988), held that neither darśana nor ānvīkṣikī “has played a role in India which would be historically comparable to the role of ‘philosophy’ in Europe”, and yet that “Today, it is no longer necessary to argue that there was philosophy in India”: India had “constructive metaphysics as well as critical epistemology, ontology as well as linguistic analysis”, at “a level of reflexivity and conceptual articulation which is fully commensurable with what we find in Europe”.

For China, Carine Defoort asked in 2001, “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?”. Universities, bookshops, journals and conferences, she observed, “all confirm a vision that, in fact, they have seldom explicitly discussed”. She sorted the implicit debate into four positions: that it does not exist, a position “primarily, though not exclusively, implicit and Western”; that it does, “best and most explicitly represented in contemporary China”; that its content should be redefined, “held above all by sinologists with philosophical training and, analogously, by philosophers with sinological training”; and that the project itself is in question, “why should China even have had a philosophy?”, a position “predominantly Chinese in its representation”. “‘Chinese philosophy’ seems to have died of its own birth” (Philosophy East and West 51.3). The same year, during a visit to China, Derrida said to Wang Yuanhua, as the remark is reported in Chinese, 中国没有哲学，但/只有思想, China has no philosophy, but, or only, thought; the French original has not been preserved, and the remark is read both ways.

For Japan, Thomas Kasulis framed the question as “Philosophy as Wissenschaft or Way?”: “When Japanese philosophy considers itself a Way rather than a Wissenschaft, it stresses engagement over detachment” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with Raquel Bouso). John Maraldo distinguished senses of the name, the first being “philosophy of a Greco-European vintage distilled by people who happen to be Japanese”, and noted the scale of the dispute: “The name Indian philosophy meets almost no resistance today, but whether Chinese thought should be called philosophy is a matter of controversy. Even more controversial is the question whether pre-modern Japanese thought counts as philosophy”. He preferred “philosophy in Japan”, which “not only avoids ethnocentric connotations; it is also more balanced and inclusive”, and wrote: “If there is a defining characteristic to philosophy through the ages and across cultures, surely it is the habit of interrogating given definitions” (Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1, 2017).

For Africa, one dispute in the West turned on Egypt. Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa (1996) disputed the Afrocentrist claims about Egypt and Greece; her reviewer Lawrence Tritle noted that “As Lefkowitz acutely notes, philosophy and related ideas can not really be ‘stolen’”. Martin Bernal, reviewing the same book, granted that “the Afrocentrists have been wrong on many particulars”, but held that “The term ‘philosophy’ is extraordinarily slippery but taken in the Socratic sense of ‘wonder, or speculation on truth and reality,’ there is every reason to suppose that it was present in Ancient Egypt. Indeed, it was conventional wisdom among Greeks and Romans that philosophy had derived from Egypt” (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1996).

For the thought of the Americas before the conquest, the scholars of Latin American philosophy differ. In Jorge Gracia and Manuel Vargas’s account, “Whether this body of work is rightly characterized as philosophy or something else is a disputed matter”, and the wider debate over Latin American philosophy has four approaches, “universalist, culturalist, critical, and ethnic”. Susana Nuccetelli argues that pre-Columbian works “of philosophical import are proto-philosophy of the non-academic variety”, while Gracia “defers taking a position” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). James Maffie, in Aztec Philosophy (2014), held that the idea that philosophy is exclusively Western “plays a vital role in the West’s conception of itself” (as a reviewer quotes him).

For the Islamic world, the dispute is over the name and over the later centuries. Peter Adamson finds “Islamic philosophy” too narrow, since some of its philosophers were not Muslims, and “Arabic philosophy” too narrow, since some of the work is in Persian and Hebrew, and prefers “philosophy in the Islamic world”, “a neutral designation”. Frank Griffel traces the reading that philosophy declined in Islam after al-Ghazālī to nineteenth-century Europe, Renan among others, and reads the following centuries instead as a change of name and genre: in his account, as a reviewer quotes him, philosophers after al-Ghazālī “avoided the word falsafa and replaced it with another word that assumed largely the same meaning”, ḥikma, and with al-Ghazālī, in Sabra’s term, “philosophy and the Greek sciences were ‘naturalized’ into the discourse of kalām”. Dimitri Gutas reads Ibn Sīnā as bringing religion inside philosophy as one of its subjects, and renders the title of Ibn Sīnā’s al-Mashriqiyyūn as “Eastern” against the “Oriental” or “Illuminative” philosophy of other readers. Sajjad Rizvi, drawing on Pierre Hadot, sums up Mullā Ṣadrā: “Philosophy is thus a practice and a way of life”.

In the profession itself, Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden counted in 2016 that “of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy”, and that of “the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy”. Their proposal: “any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself ‘Department of European and American Philosophy’” (“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”, The New York Times). Van Norden followed it with Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017).