I am a historian of philosophy at New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts college. When I arrived first in 2018, one of my duties was to expand the philosophy curriculum into areas beyond the Western tradition, and I set about building a course introducing students to the history of philosophy from a global point of view. This course most recently took place in Fall 2021 as a seminar for first-year students entitled “What is Philosophy? Global Perspectives on Philosophical History.” As a first-year seminar, in addition to teaching standard disciplinary content, the course aims to ease students’ transitions to college by devoting time to developing academic skills and familiarizing them with campus staff and resources. An advanced undergraduate, Marina Sidlow, also served as a peer leader for the course.
The course is built around two distinct approaches to the global history of philosophy, each occupying roughly one half or “module” of the semester. The first approach is a “comparative” one that puts distinct philosophical traditions into dialogue, and the second is a “historical” one that examines how philosophical ideas have engaged concrete historical circumstances. Both approaches should furnish customizable models for philosophers interested in adopting global perspectives in their courses.
The comparative approach forges points of contact between philosophical traditions by emphasizing overlap in the ways that they address specific philosophical problems. Moreover, by grouping texts thematically, a course can be constructed around topics of interest both to the instructor as well as the students. This time, the module studied conceptions of virtue and the self in Platonic dialogues including the Euthyphro, Crito, and Phaedo alongside those of the Mengzi and Bhagavad Gita.
The historical module centered on the relationship between philosophy and the project of European colonization and subsequent decolonial struggle. In what ways did philosophy shape the colonial project, and how may have it helped critique it?
We started by examining the sixteenth-century debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda concerning Spanish colonial policy regarding the indigenous peoples of the Americas. This debate turns on the question of how to understand and apply Aristotle’s term “barbarian” and provides a disturbing and important historical case study of the concrete application of philosophical ideas. Previous versions of the class have also discussed Locke on property and Leibniz’s “Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese” as further examples of how modern European philosophers approached other cultures. From there, we examined how anti-colonial and anti-racist thinkers such as Gandhi, King, and Fanon used philosophy to articulate forms of critique and political action. We also considered multicultural philosophy in the work of Linda Martín Alcoff and David Haekwon Kim, two authors who explore how philosophy has helped mixed-race and multiethnic subjects make sense of the world and respond to historical conjunctures resulting from the American empire.
The two modules were bookended by readings directly addressing the question “what is philosophy?” These included the preface to Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers, in which one of the first historians of philosophy defines philosophy as a practice by definition carried out in Greek (and hence from which so-called “barbarians,” or non-Greek speakers are excluded), as well as Brian Van Norden’s recent plea for conceiving philosophy globally in Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. We closed with Justin E. H. Smith’s The Philosopher: A History in Six Types, a book that traces historical instantiations of six distinct job descriptions of the philosopher. While the first two texts frame the question as a choice between the local and the global, Smith’s book cautions against constructing a global image of the history of philosophy too neatly mirroring the local concerns of contemporary philosophers. Instead, Smith encourages us to consider sundry historical forms of ascetic practice, folk-wisdom, and poetry incommensurate with the templates of contemporary Anglophone philosophy as candidates for inclusion within philosophy. Professor Smith also kindly took the time to visit the class virtually to discuss the book and his practice as a historian of philosophy.
The question “what is philosophy?” was left open throughout the course. In this spirit, the final project asked students to read texts of their choice individually (selections included The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings) and then collectively discuss how they help address the question “what is philosophy?” I can only hope that this project—and the course itself—conveyed the opportunity we have to actively reimagine what philosophy has been and what it should become. If you have any suggestions on how to make the course better and develop these approaches further, please let me know.
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Dr. Matt Deaton via MattDeaton.com or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall via sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org with potential submissions.
Christopher P. Noble
Christopher P. Noble is a historian of philosophy at New College of Florida. His research focuses on the metaphysics and natural philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and he has further interests in the global history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and Continental philosophy.
