Wednesday, May 31, 2017

B&L

It's gratifying to find that some work I did a (long) while ago has found an appreciative audience. Even more so to have proved useful for an important argument about the very recent construction of "philosophy" as a distinctively western thing, born in Greece. As with the modern theory of race, this happened in German scholarship - with Immanuel Kant playing a major role - not the colonial metropoles and peripheries where it might seem the traditional story that philosophy began in Egypt and the "Orient" would have been more threatening.

Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: 
Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 (SUNY 2013), 92