Peter K. J. Park: Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, asia, china, egypt, empiricism, history of philosophy, idealism, india, pantheism, persia, philosophy, race, racism, religion, science
“A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.
In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant—a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Friedrich Schlegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast’s and Thaddä Anselm Rixner’s systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over ‘pantheism.'”
Review (Carlin Romano, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014)
Discussion (Warp, Weft, and Way blog, Oct 2014)
Publisher SUNY Press, 2013
Philosophy and Race series
ISBN 9781438446417
237 pages
Thomas McEvilley: The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · antiquity, greece, history of philosophy, india, philosophy
Spanning thirty years of intensive research, this book proves what many scholars could not explain: that today’s Western world must be considered the product of both Greek and Indian thought—Western and Eastern philosophies.
Thomas McEvilley explores how trade, imperialism, and migration currents allowed cultural philosophies to intermingle freely throughout India, Egypt, Greece, and the ancient Near East. This groundbreaking reference will stir relentless debate among philosophers, art historians, and students.
Publisher Allworth Press, with the School of Visual Arts, New York, 2001
ISBN 1581152035, 9781581152036
732 pages
Review (Will S. Rasmussen, Philosophy East and West)
Commentary (David Carrier, Artcritical)
McEvilley talks about his book (video, 34 min)
Wikipedia
Publisher
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Partha Mitter: The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922—1947 (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, art, art history, avant-garde, bauhaus, colonialism, india
“This richly illustrated book explores the contested history of art and nationalism in the tumultuous last decades of British rule in India. Western avant-garde art inspired a powerful weapon of resistance among India’s artists in their struggle against colonial repression, and it is this complex interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism that is the core of this book.
The Triumph of Modernism takes the surprisingly unremarked Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta in 1922 as marking the arrival of European modernism in India. In four broad sections Partha Mitter examines the decline of ‘oriental art’ and the rise of naturalism as well as that of modernism in the 1920s, and the relationship between primitivism and modernism in Indian art: with Mahatma Gandhi inspiring the Indian elite to discover the peasant, the people of the soil became portrayed by artists as ‘noble savages’. A distinct feminine voice also evolved through the rise of female artists. Finally, the author probes the ambivalent relationship between Indian nationalism and imperial patronage of the arts.
With a fascinating array of art works, few of which have either been seen or published in the West, The Triumph of Modernism throws much light on a previously neglected strand of modern art and introduces the work of artists who are little known in Europe or America. A book that challenges the dominance of Western modernism, it will be illuminating not just to students and scholars of modernism and Indian art, but to a wide international audience that admires India’s culture and history.”
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2007
ISBN 1861893183, 9781861893185
271 pages