![]() It is that piece that has triggered our back and forth, which has, unfortunately, reached rare levels of unpleasantness. ![]() He has written a book, just out, entitled Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, in support of which he has published a piece in Aeon magazine. During the last several weeks I’ve been sparring on Twitter with Bryan van Norden, a self-described “leading scholar” of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, based in Singapore. Which brings me to the point of the current post. An obvious acknowledgment of the existence of several other traditions, over which Plato had little or no influence. This isn’t a thing peculiar to philosophy: Galileo made a huge number of discoveries, from the craters of the Moon to the rings of Saturn, simply because he was the first one to use a telescope.īack to Whitehead: notice that the phrase specifically refers to the European philosophical tradition. ![]() The reason for this, in turn, is arguably twofold: on the one hand, he truly was a towering figure, who had a lot to say about all sorts of things on the other hand, he was one of the earliest philosophers, which means that the field was completely open and ripe with a bunch of low hanging fruits. The quip, however, does hint at a historical reality: Plato is - for good and for ill -the single most influential Western philosopher, in good part because he touched on pretty much every major topic that subsequent philosophers have been preoccupied with. I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean it seriously, or at least I hope so. This is not because I am inordinately fond of Plato (among the ancients I prefer the Stoics, as many readers know), nor because I literally believe the famous phrase by Alfred North Whitehead from which the blog title derives: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, p. The title of this blog is Footnotes to Plato.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |