Category Archives: African Thought

Catholicism before Europe

18 Sunday May 2025

Posted by in African Thought, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Place, Roman Catholicism

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Much has been made, in the US at least, of the fact that the new pope – Robert Prevost, now Leo XIV –comes from the USA. The papacy is one of the few institutions in the world where Americans have been under-represented. In recent decades, the reason for that was the US’s disproportionate global influence – a pope from outside the US was seen as a counterbalance. Yet until the previous pope – an Argentinian – it would have been ludicrous to argue that the selection of popes was in any way balanced, since for over 1200 years every single pope had come exclusively from the continent of Europe.

It’s crucial to remember, though, that that wasn’t always the case! For the Catholic Church as an institution predates the rise of European influence in the world. Christianity, with its combination of Greek and Hebrew influences, is closely tied to the development of the “Western civilization” with those same influences. And a look at the Church’s history can help remind us, in a new way, that the West is neither white nor European – for neither, fundamentally, is the Church.

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Notes on a Jewish Sufi

20 Sunday Oct 2024

Posted by in African Thought, Islam, Judaism, Politics, Prayer, South Asia, Sufism

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I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.

The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.

What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.

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A very brief survey of Latin American philosophy

12 Sunday Feb 2023

Posted by in African Thought, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphilosophy, Place, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Western Thought

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When one aspires to love all wisdom, one should look for it worldwide – and that task is not easy. Typically, when we philosophers look outside the West, we look above all to Asia. But within the West (at least after the fall of the Roman Empire), we also tend to narrow our focus to the United States and Western Europe, with occasional bones tossed to Canada and Australia. And there’s a lot we miss when we do.

Like Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Latin America is largely a Western culture, even if it has been on the periphery of the West’s overall attention. (Latin America and Eastern Europe each pay more attention to the USA and Western Europe than they pay to each other.) Like Africa, it is a continent-sized region of the world that gets much less philosophical attention than does Asia. Two years ago I gave African philosophy a survey post here – still less than it deserves – but have not yet done the same for Latin America. I’d like to fix that now.

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The West is neither white nor European

16 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in African Thought, Asian Thought, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Place, Pre-Socratics, Western Thought

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In the discourse of the United States today, everything is supposed to be about race. That particular American view infects any American discussion of the West. Overt racists like Lothrop Stoddard associated Western civilization with racial whiteness. Today, the American left often seems to agree with Stoddard, viewing “the West” as code for racial whiteness – as when Natalie Wynn says “the association between whiteness and the West is always lurking beneath the surface”. But the Greek, Semitic and Latin historical roots that make the West go back much earlier than the 17th-century concept of the “white race”; Westerners thought of themselves as “Christendom” long before they thought of themselves as “white”. Anti-black and anti-native racism are the US’s original sin, but we mislead ourselves in a deeply parochial way if we think of the whole world in those American terms.

Rather, it seems to me that the important thing is to reclaim the West from that recent (and harmful) concept of whiteness. “Whiteness” never was constitutive of the West as a historical complex, and the last thing we should do is treat it that way now. For as it turns out, the history of the West is in key respects not even European.

To see why, let’s take a look at the history of the West. Philosophy forms a key part of that history, and this is a philosophy blog, so the history of Western philosophy is as good a case study as any other.

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A very brief survey of African philosophy

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by in African Thought, Asian Thought, Christianity, Early Factions, Eastern Orthodoxy, Greek and Roman Tradition, Islam, Judaism, Metaphilosophy, Place, Supernatural

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For the most part, the study of non-Western philosophy has tended to focus on the continent of Asia. There are many good reasons for this. More than half of humanity lives in Asia. And Asia has long, rich traditions of philosophical reflection that have survived and left their works to us – unlike the thought of Mesoamerican traditions, where so much was pillaged and destroyed by the barbarian Spanish invaders. Asia is not even one single context; I would argue that South Asian philosophy is in many respects more like Western philosophy than it is like East Asian. In particular I see no problem in maintaining an Asian focus in my own work, since it is the philosophies of Asia – especially Buddhism – that have left by far the biggest influence on me. One can love all wisdom, but one cannot inhabit all of it.

Still, when we do aspire to love all wisdom, it’s worth taking a look beyond both Asia and the West – at least what we usually think of as the West. There is considerably more to the world. The continent of Africa, in particular, may well overtake Asia in population by the end of this century. So perhaps it is particularly worth thinking about African philosophy.

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The philosophy of The Good Place

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in African Thought, Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Practice, Virtue

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the good placeThe Good Place, an American comedy-fantasy series created by Michael Schur and airing on NBC, is perhaps the most explicitly philosophical American television show in recent memory. I think it aims to do for moral philosophy what Breaking Bad did for chemistry. (This post speaks of the second season, but does not have spoilers – at least in the sense that it does not reveal any of the show’s twists.) Continue reading →

Augustine and Xunzi at Stonehill

05 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in African Thought, Confucianism, Happiness, Human Nature, Politics, Roman Catholicism, Social Science

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For the sorts of reasons I discussed last week, I have been strongly leaning for the past couple years toward Xunzi‘s negative dark view of human nature – or so I have thought. I observe my own tendencies and see just how hard it is to be good even when I really want to. Augustine, whose similarities to Xunzi run deep (as Aaron Stalnaker has noted), points to the behaviour he observes in babies: creatures not only of desire and greed, but even of jealousy and anger. It’s as we grow up that we learn to be good. And then, of course, there’s the history of human violence and bloodshed. I often find myself a little bewildered by the 20th-century philosophies that say philosophy must be entirely different after the Holocaust; the Holocaust would not have surprised Augustine. He knew what evil lurks in our minds.

One of the more common objections to such a dark view of human nature is that it leads to tyranny: if people can’t be trusted, they need an iron ruler to rule them. Such a view is most famously associated with Thomas Hobbes, and it seems that Xunzi held something like it, but I’ve tended to find it a bit puzzling. If we can’t trust people to rule themselves, how on earth could we trust an arbitrary sovereign to rule them? A dim view of human nature seems perfectly compatible with Winston Churchill’s endorsement of democracy: that it’s the worst form of government except for all the others. We need a strong system of checks and balances to hold down the dark tendencies of our leaders.

And yet. With reflection I have realized that I cannot endorse a view like Xunzi’s and Augustine’s, even modified in the latter way. Continue reading →

The dark side of human nature

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Confucianism, Human Nature, Morality, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind, Virtue

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After Confucius’s death, the great debate in classical Confucian philosophy was over human nature: between Mencius, who, broadly speaking, thought humans were naturally good, and Xunzi, who thought we were naturally bad. In a liberal democracy suffused with the individualism of the sixties, I think most people lean much closer to Mencius’s view. But we miss something very important if we ignore Xunzi’s. Continue reading →

Marx, Augustine and early Buddhism: diagnosis vs. prognosis

27 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in African Thought, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Economics, German Tradition, Health, Hope, Human Nature, Politics, Work

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The past couple weeks in the United States have been very congenial to a Marxist worldview. I don’t remember any time when the bourgeoisie has so clearly been waging war on the proletariat – or when that kind of language seemed an accurate description of contemporary society. The best known example of this is the ongoing conflict in Wisconsin, where the newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to strip public-sector workers of both their generous benefits and their rights to collective bargaining. With a limited grasp of the local situation (such as Margaret Wente demonstrates in this breathtakingly ignorant column), one might imagine that this is primarily a matter of shared sacrifice in a time of burgeoning government debt. That view is plausible, and entirely wrong. For not only did Walker recently enact corporate tax cuts in a volume comparable to the workers’ benefits, the unions agreed to let their costly benefits be cut if they could keep their right to collective bargaining. This action isn’t about reasonable budget cuts, but about union-busting, plain and simple.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle. Continue reading →

Aesthetics and ethics in Zanzibar Town

13 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, African Thought, Food, Place, Politics

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Skholiast has an interesting riff on my recent post about happiness, and I’d like to riff right back. Skholiast quotes from Alain Finkielkraut‘s La défaite de la pensée – a book I read long ago while backpacking through France, in the hope of beefing up my philosophical French. And Skholiast’s quote from Finkielkraut got me thinking of a much more recent trip, my honeymoon in Zanzibar two months ago.

As well as spectacular beaches, Zanzibar has a tremendously atmospheric old Stone Town, and crumbling palaces built in the nineteenth century by Sultan Said. On a tour of these palace ruins, our guide spoke mournfully about how the government had destroyed and misused these palaces after independence and revolution in 1964. It is surely worth mourning when a beautiful object from the past is lost forever. In addition to this destruction, the revolutionary government built most of Ng’ambo, the “other side” of Zanzibar town – the part that is completely non-atmospheric, full of concrete blocks designed by East German engineers. It is in Ng’ambo that the majority of urban Zanzibaris live. The tourist guidebooks tend to scoff at Ng’ambo if they mention it at all, which they rarely do – and no surprise, since it is utterly charmless to look at, a generic site that could be anywhere.

And yet driving through Ng’ambo, I could also see what motivated the revolutionary government to build it that way; more than that, I was quite pleased to see it. Continue reading →