319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. In many ways, the modern world lives in the shadow of the enlightenment, that period, from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries when it it was sort of a philosophical movement, intellectual, political, cultural movement that shaped what we think of as reason and rationality and empiricism and science. And a lot of the Enlightenment was about rejecting authority or dogmatism, right? You don't believe ideas just because they've been handed down by ancient texts or authorities. You don't accept government controls just because there's a monarch that has been there for many years. You test ideas, right? You think about them, you test them if they're scientific ideas against experiments. If they're purely philosophical ideas, you test them against other ideas. There might be a free market of ideas where these ideas battle each other out with the idea that the best ones will rise to the top. Now these are standards that can be hard to live up to. Right? We are not all very good at being open to ideas we don't already agree with, but that's kind of part of the ideal of the Enlightenment is that you should think about lots of different ideas and compare them to each other rather than just accepting certain ones blindly. Now it's been pointed out many times that modern philosophy as taught in departments like Johns Hopkins, my own department, but also throughout The United States, throughout Europe, etcetera, doesn't always live up to this ideal of being open to other approaches. Philosophy has, like every other area of academic inquiry, its favorite ways of doing things, its foundational texts, what it considers to be the most important ways of doing things, the most important tradition in which to discuss ideas. Maybe, some people would argue, philosophy could use some expanding into other traditions. In particular, the particular tradition that we generally work in in most Western universities is handed down from the ancient Greeks. Now the ancient Greeks didn't just appear out of nowhere. They got their philosophical impetus from other places. But we tell a story of ourselves. It starts with roughly Plato and Aristotle, goes through, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Europe and ends up in modern universities. It doesn't talk a lot about the philosophies that are discussed in India or China or indigenous cultures or Africa or elsewhere. So So some people have been pushing against this and saying maybe we should, in the best enlightenment tradition, be more open to these other traditions. Of course, you have to show that there's something useful, something worthwhile in these other places, but to make that judgment, you have to know something about them first. So today's guest, Brian Van Norden, has long been one of the loudest voices in saying that philosophy should be open to traditions besides the Western one, besides the one handed down from the ancient Greeks. Not because …