Bryan W. Van Norden lives in Singapore, where he is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor at Yale-NUS College. He is also Chair Professor in Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University (PRC) and Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College (USA). A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, and a Mellon Fellowship, Van Norden has been honored as one of The Best 300 Professors in the US by The Princeton Review. Professor Van Norden has published nine books on Chinese and comparative philosophy, including Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy and (with Justin Tiwald) Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy. Professor Van Norden is also a frequent contributor of opinion pieces as a public intellectual, and has written about US politics, public policy, and international relations for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Straits Times, and 联合早报, among other publications.
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once dismissed the teachings of Confucius as “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” In doing so, he was expressing the perspective of a long line of conservative thinkers who think that “so-called philosophy” outside the West is nothing but shallow platitudes. For example, in his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom claimed that contemporary colleges and universities were corrupting the morals of their students by undermining their faith in the classic texts of Western civilization.In contrast, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto argues that education must become multicultural in order to maintain its contemporary relevance. China is an increasingly important geopolitical power, and President Xi Jinping routinely praises Confucian philosophers. In India, the dominant political party espouses a version of Hindu nationalism, grounded in classical Vedanta philosophy. The US population is increasingly ethnically diverse, and within a few decades whites of European descent will be a minority. Can we afford not to learn about philosophy outside the European tradition?I got a PhD in Chinese philosophy from Stanford University in 1991. Since then, I have been fighting to convince my colleagues to teach Chinese and other non-European philosophies. I have given carefully argued examples of the sophistication of Chinese philosophy. I have provided model course guides and reading lists. I have run informational sessions at conferences. A handful of institutions, like Vassar College, where I have taught for 20 years, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore, where I am currently teaching, have been open to multicultural philosophy. However, most have not. The vast majority of philosophers have simply ignored the irrefutable evidence for the existence and high quality of Chinese, Indian, African, and Indigenous American philosophy. I hope that my fellow philosophers will read my book and finally be convinced. But if they are not, I think it is time for students and the general public to demand a multicultural approach to philosophy.
Bryan W. Van Norden Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto Columbia University Press248 pages, 5.5 x 8.4 inches ISBN 978 0231184373
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