To reflect on coloniality is not to study the history of colonialism from the safety of a “postcolonial” present. Rather, it requires one to interrogate ongoing legacies of colonialism, not only in...

Comparative philosophers have noted that some comparative methods perpetuate colonial legacies. What follows employs aspects of the scholarship of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Anîbal Quijano, and María Lugones to identify one colonially problematic methodology that some well-regarded contemporary comparative representations of “Buddhist Philosophy” arguably adopt. In 1995, Lin Tongqi, Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Roger Ames identified “the most fundamental methodological issue facing all comparativists” by raising and responding to the question: “Does the imposition of modern Western conceptual categories on non-Western patterns (...) of thought and modes of discourse with different categories promote or hinder our.. (shrink)

There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such (...) as the Sanskritic traditions of pramā ṇ avāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramā ṇ avāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism. (shrink)

In ordinary philosophical contexts, it is customary to abide by due processes. For example, we engage the particularities of arguments rather than contenting ourselves with cursory approximations of claims and positions. We reject conclusions by demonstrating that specific premises are suspect or that these premises do not offer valid support. We do not dismiss arguments against us on the basis of sentiment or through tu quoque arguments and other fallacies of diversion.In practice, however, these due processes do not extend equally (...) to all in our community. My point is not that we occasionally fall short of our ideals and norms, which is to be expected. Rather, I mean that explicitly denying these due processes to.. (shrink)

Given the public’s affective responses to volatile global financial markets in recent years, one might expect that “we” as a society would interrogate capitalist conceptions of “value.” After all, if flows of abstract capital are untethered from tangible realities, as the 2008 collapse of global financial markets showed they can be, and if the supposedly concrete gains that people earn from their labors, such as pensions and salaries, remain vulnerable to the vicissitudes of this abstraction, then capitalism’s promises might be (...) thought to lose their appeal. Capitalist practices of value production work through anticipation, and the future of capitalism now appears to be bad for most people. Surely, one might .. (shrink)

In her anchor-piece on historicizing the canon, Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee appeals to professional philosophers to develop several tools that can be implemented in historicizing the canon. Amy Donahue, David H. Kim, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Kris Sealey tessellate different aspects of this call. Donahue augments Rosenlee’s argument by braiding together Dharmakīrti’s “anyāpoha” theory and Charles Mills’ ruminations about “white ignorance”; Kim explores some of the nuances of Rosenlee’s account for a post-Eurocentric philosophy; Maldonado-Torres ruminates about the larger social context in which (...) thinking can be decolonized; and Sealey uses the work of Kristie Dotson to acknowledge the possibility of multiple canons. In putting on the table a number of questions, concepts, and approaches to canon-building, the symposium aims to contribute to what is by now a large array of similar reflections and engagements in different parts of the world. (shrink)