MCLC: Chinese philosophers missing from college classes (1,2)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Chinese philosophers missing from college classes (1,2)
An interesting if somewhat belated question: "Our neglect of ancient Chinese philosophers in U.S. philosophy departments is partly a remnant of our European colonial past. But is it justifiable on academic grounds?" Well "colonial" might be a misnomer here. I haven't sat in a philosophy class since I was an undergrad in the 1980s, but even back then people were placing Heidegger and Buddhism side by side. "Chinese" philosophy is still considered "Chinese" despite the tremendous contacts between the West and East going at least as far back as the Jesuits (Ricci's "True Meaning . . ." coming at the cusp of the 16th and 17th centuries). And of course there's Leibniz seeing the binary in the Yijing. The American Transcendentalists certainly looked East. And some posit a whole line of poetics from Pound's "ideogram" (see Gefin's "The Ideogram") to American writing that runs up to the Beats. And Ginsburg and Snyder certainly deserve credit for presenting some ideas about Asian philosophy and religion in their writings. This is a curious call, coming 30 years after Jameson's "Third World Literature" which was, after all, a proposal to open up the American humanities curriculum to "non-canonical" writing. I suppose each canon is as powerful as its faculties.
Sean Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
==========================================
What a wonderfully thorough and persuasively argued case.
Lily Lee <l.lee at sydney.edu.au>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 17, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20150917/454779c1/attachment.html>