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Introduction
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction In the modern university, courses on the history of philosophy introduce students to philosophy as a discipline.1 History of philosophy courses alternate with logic courses as ways to teach students the canon of philosophy in more than one sense of the word canon. By recounting philosophy’s past (what philosophy was), the history of philosophy teaches what philosophy is (the concept of philosophy). The history of philosophy teaches the goals, rules, and language of proper philosophical reasoning. Teachers of philosophy do not merely recount the history of philosophy, they use it to define philosophy in exact terms and set its epistemic boundaries, differentiating it from other fields of knowledge such as mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and theology. Philosophers use the history of philosophy to reaffirm the canon of philosophy in the sense also of the authors and texts that define the discipline and to show philosophy’s coherent and progressive development. “History of philosophy research reveals clearly that its ultimate goal is never only a historical knowing , but always at the same time an understanding that puts itself in the service of philosophy.”2 The history of philosophy can do all this work, however, only by performing massive exclusions. The present work is a historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy. It is an account of the events that led to the formation within German philosophy of an exclusionary, Eurocentric canon of philosophy by the first third of the nineteenth century. The exclusion of Africa and Asia from histories of philosophy is relatively recent. It was no earlier than the 1780s that historians of philosophy began to deny that African and Asian peoples were philosophical. Also beginning at that time, they segregated religion from philosophy and argued that Africans and Asians had religion, but not philosophy.3 Stated more simply, historians of philosophy 2 Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy began to exclude peoples they deemed too primitive and incapable of philosophy. There is, however, an older tradition of history of philosophy writing. From the time of Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) to the death of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80), the prevailing convention among historians of philosophy was to begin the history of philosophy with Adam, Noah, Moses (or the Jews), or the Egyptians. In some early modern histories of philosophy, Zoroaster, the “Chaldeans,” or another ancient Oriental people appear as the first philosophers. The great majority of early modern historians of philosophy were in agreement that philosophy began in the Orient. It was in the late eighteenth century that historians of philosophy began to claim a Greek beginning for philosophy.4 Historians have established that from the eighteenth century onward Europeans had ever greater access to the languages and literatures of Asia and that the stream into Europe of manuscript sources and source-based information on Asian philosophies only increased over the course of the modern centuries.5 Prominent names in European cultural and intellectual history are associated with the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century “Oriental Renaissance.”6 Some historians pinpoint this rebirth to the time when officials of the British East India Company acquired the knowledge of Sanskrit and then intensified the collection and transport of Sanskrit manuscripts to Europe. A key activity of the Oriental Renaissance was the translation of Asian texts into European languages, which cleared the way for their literary and scientific appropriation by Europeans.7 This led to reevaluations—even radical reorderings—of the perceived historical origins of European peoples and civilization. In 1786, the Chief Magistrate for the Supreme Court of British Bengal, Sir William Jones, spread the news that Sanskrit and Persian appeared to be descended from the same mother language as that of Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages.8 Jones formulated the thesis of the family relation between these languages. The names Indo-Germanic, Indo-European, and Aryan were coined in the nineteenth century to signify this relation. The excitement generated by the European discovery of Sanskrit and Persian literatures led to efforts in Europe to establish institutions for the study of them. The first professorial chair of Sanskrit in Europe was created at the Collège de France in 1814.9 Paris in the early nineteenth century was Europe’s center of Oriental philology. The Schlegel brothers traveled to Paris to learn Sanskrit. The older brother, August Wilhelm, went on to become the first professor at a German university to offer courses in Sanskrit language and...