Philosophy education should be truly universal | Oran Magal | TEDxMcGill
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV6yM92uxuM Video ID: oV6yM92uxuM ============================================================ [Music] [Applause] the word philosophy uh as you probably know comes from the ancient Greek philosophia the love of wisdom and so have a bit of a strange question to start with is philosophy more like dance or is it more like ballet I don't mean uh the actual uh techniques the question is is it like dance a universal human phenomenon that is expressed differently in different cultures but is always recognizably dance or is it like ballet a particular thing that arose in a particular time in a particular place so there's a a tendency to tell the story of how all of this came about as you know there was nothing right and then suddenly around 2,500 years ago there was a miracle in the part of the world that we now call Greece and suddenly there was mathematics and literature and philosophy and all those things to take nothing away from the greatness of the great thinkers and writers of that time that is obviously not what happened so is philosophy a universal thing well if I had an hour and I'm being told I do not have an hour I would have gone through a list of criteria going one Bunch look by this criteria and by that criter take any reasonable set of criteria for what counts as real philosophy that you want and you will find non-western philosophy significant chunks of it meet that just fine so might say okay fine fine we're convinced but uh who on Earth is arguing against this well you'd be surprised so whether or not something gets to have the label philos phos ophy makes a difference it's not just a name it's not just well you know it's t in the philosophy department or it's t in the religious studies department or uh I don't know Regional studies Department of one kind or another what does it matter it matters because whether something is taught at all how it is taught by whom is it part of the reg regular curriculum does a medium or large siiz University uh is is such a place expected to have expert and that all of those things definitely do depend on the label now for many years now there has been incredibly strong student demand among those who take philosophy courses philosophy majors and so on to include and to have more courses of non-western philosophy a demand that has met very little Supply unfortunately there has been some acceptance but also a lot of push back now just because people are asking for something doesn't mean that you know that that it's the right thing to do but there are very good educational Reasons from the point of view of teaching philosophy which is you know what I do uh to do that to make the effort to expand and to include non-western philosophy and the reason for that is well there are many reasons but one simple reason is look we live in a world nowadays that is extremely interconnected and so the humanities in general should be about Humanity of of it if the humanities can still convince people that it's worth supporting and having and learning and funding it's because it allows us to get a better understanding of ourselves individually collectively and of other people again other people around us other people in the world and so it is also pedagogically the right thing to do but there's an even deeper reason and perhaps no less important reason to insist on the label of philosophy even though there has been some quite significant push back against it so if the struggle to have recognition for let's say uh Philosophy from India Philosophy from China and so on recognized that struggle has been far worse for the recognition of another major or set of traditions in World philosophy namely African philosophy I'm sorry this is the only long quote in the entire thing don't worry but let's read this together together because this is very important so this is from a text byq who sadly passed away a few years ago and it goes like this to deny two African people's philosophical thought is to imply that they are unable to make philosophical sense of or to conceptualize their experiences it is in fact to deny them their Humanity for philosophy of some kind is behind the thought and action of every people it constitutes the intellectual sheet anchor of their life in totality so this denial that non-western philosophy can really be philosophy this denial that African thought is not just a set of Customs or sayings or stories but constitutes African philosophy of course is not one thing there are many different cultures and peoples but that that tradition as a whole does not constitute a tradition of philosophy is coming Downstream historically from what I think everyone nowadays will agree is horrendously wrong colonialist racism denying full Humanity to non-european peoples to African peoples yeah and so uh you might ask but but wait if things are so bad why did it even get to to be this way so again I'm I'm restraining myself from giving the full story the full story is in this very good book full of uh highly detailed textual evidence and historical evidence but the short version is this the ancient Greeks themselves did not think that they emerged out of nothing you know there was darkness and suddenly the light came on you know and in Athens and its surrounding communities you know roughly 2,500 years ago they saws as indebted to much older civilizations around them the Egyptians the Persians and through the Persians the ancient near East and so on and so forth in fact even if we fast forward to early modern Europe to early modern European philosophers we see that they are once there starts to be uh regular contact with India with China in the 1500 1600s early 1700s they are quite happy to accept that those places have their own indigenous traditions of philosophy that do not fall in any way short of Western philosophy and sophistication in being worth the the name philosophy so what went wrong I regret to say that what went wrong has to do especially with two of the greatest philosophers of all time and what I'm about to say does not make them less great philosophers it's just another of those cases of you know somebody can be great in one way and absolutely awful in another way both at the same time so these two two culprits main culprits are Emmanuel Kant and generation later Hegel so two of the pillars of modern philosophy unfortunately their tremendous intellectual Authority was used also to support explicit quote unquote color based racism According to which the non again in scare quotes the nonwhite races are simply incapable of any kind of higher abstract thought so by definition even if they have something that someone might say oh this looks like philosophy no it can't be philosophy because they are incapable of high level abstract thought so we don't even need to check if it's philosophy or not it just can't be and for many many generations thereafter the history of philosophy was written and taught with that assumption in mind it starts with the Greeks it continues through the helenistic period the Romans etc etc etc through to what we now is called Western philosophy yeah now again both uh concerning the quote from kuam and concerning this story here I am not let me let me be clear I am not accusing people nowadays who push back and who argue against including non-western philosophy I'm not saying that they're racist I'm not saying no absolutely not what I'm saying is the origin of this exclusion is in explicitly racist thought that ought to make us very suspicious and very critical of that that continuing exclusion and as I've said there are excellent reasons to end this exclusion to work towards diversifying what we teach expanding the scope of what is typically taught right making it part of the regular curriculum and not something that maybe sometimes if someone happens to be passing through who's teaching it right so I want to briefly comment on another kind of marginalization and exclusion that comes from partly similar motivations it's not the main topic of my talk because this is not what I personally work on this is not my area of expertise but I want to recognize and acknowledge this as a parallel issue that needs a parallel kind of approach to solve it and of course a lot of work is already being done on addressing this and this is the long-standing exclusion or marginalization of women from the history of philosophy and very often from from the the the course outlines from the reading list of courses in contemporary philosophy where there is absolutely no conceivable excuse for it and yet the problem is ongoing and yet it's a continuing struggle to have this be recognized and resoled all right now what can we say about so someone might say look fine I'm with you I agree with you in principle this would be great but there are some serious problems here look what universities are fa facing nowadays especially in the humanties when I say nowadays I mean the last 20 30 40 years yeah a lot of a lot of days so is constant pressure budget cuts staff Cuts faculty Cuts how on Earth do you expect us to expand what we teach without being reasonably able to expect any kind of increased budget well the answer is well I would love to see an increased social investment in universities and all levels of education but since that's probably not happening still some things can be done I'll just give two examples of the kinds of things that that I personally work on a lot uh namely even in what we already teach we can rethink how we do it so as to include a lot more than the almost nothing that is nowadays usually included for example intro to philosophy is a very broad course heading lots of things can be intro to philosophy there's absolutely no reason why in to philosophy has to be some version of Plato Aristotle deart Kant and somebody from the 20th century I mean there's nothing wrong with that but does that have to be the only way to do it no I would I would suggest to you similarly when there are courses that are not explicitly about a specific time period of philosophy if it's a course in 17th century European philosophy fine then that's what it should be about but when courses are about topics of Universal human and philosophical concern ethics politics human nature The Good Life appearance and reality the nature of the self there's absolutely no reason not to expand the range of sources that we draw on for teaching students these things nevertheless someone might say but look we don't have experts for these things we don't have anybody able to read Sanskrit for let's say the the Traditions that come out of India able to read classical Chinese uh and so on and so forth we just don't have anyone so you know as convincing as your pitch might have been you know there's really nothing we can do maybe next time we have a position open we'll try to hire someone but until then well the answer is once again we teach we people who teach philosophy we often end up teaching people when we cannot necessarily read the original language not everyone who teaches let's say uh to Aristotle decart Kant is able to read classical Greek and French and uh German fluently in the original language and yes we manage don't we so that doesn't need to be a barrier of course ideally you would have a local expert doing this but not having one is not in itself a reason to do this not at all uh another objection might be and this is uh perhaps the strongest objection raised against all the things I've just been saying money is not our only limitation time is another limitation right we get our students for a limited number of courses whether it's a minor or a major or an honors there's only so many courses there's only so many hours of philosophy that we're giving them and already we're making tough choices about what to include and what not to include so you want us to include more people fine why don't you tell us who do you want to push off the curriculum right well the answer is look the can the things that we typically teach has always been changing you look at typical course outlines today take a representative sample of universities look at the same universities and their outlines if if you can find them let's imagine you can find them in an archive somewhere 50 years ago you'll see it's very different even 20 years ago it would be different it's fine we are always rethinking but can we are always revising the curriculum and yes of course we can't include everything but once again we have always been making changes the question is not can we make changes we always do the question is are we not people in this room but are we people in higher education students and faculty and everybody involved are we convinced that there's a need to do this because where there is a will there will be a way I do however want to end on a positive note which is to say I don't mean to paint a bleak picture yes there has been push back yes progress has been been very slow but there has been progress and that is absolutely essential to say things have been moving even in my own time in in in Academia let's say the last I don't know 20 years or so I can already see change people who have been around longer can see an even bigger change so things are moving and here's where I I include the the call to action at the end things are moving because there is persistent and consistent demand and from people on the other side of higher education from students and people who take interest and people who are involved to continue in this process to include more non-western philosophy to rebalance course outlines and reading lists so that it's not 95% men 5% women which is more common than you might think unfortunately right and so this process needs to this process excuse me this process yes this pressure needs to continue because not because anybody is evil and mean and don't want do it but because institutions by their nature are slow to change and if you leave them alone they just keep doing the same thing so you know gently but firmly don't leave them alone all right that's been my talk thank you very much [Applause]