What’s in a Name? “Philosophy” in Non-European Traditions (guest post)
If certain cultures didn’t have the word “philosophy,” or a word that can directly be translated with “philosophy,” is it illegitimate, maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them?
In the following guest post, Peter Adamson (LMU, KCL) takes up that question.
Readers may know Professor Adamson not just from his academic work but as the host of the long-running podcast, “History of Philosophy without any Gaps” (from which a series of books came about).
(A version of this post first appeared on the History of Philosophy without any Gaps website.)
What’s in a Name? “Philosophy” in Non-European Traditions
by Peter Adamson
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently in which people challenged the use of “philosophy” in contexts outside of the European tradition, like pre-modern India and China.* Basically their worry is that if these traditions didn’t have the word “philosophy,” or a word that can directly be translated with “philosophy,” then it is illegitimate, and maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them. Rather, they say, we should talk more loosely about “intellectual traditions” or “thought,” or something like that (at least I guess this would be the alternative). As is no doubt apparent to those who listen to History of Philosophy without any Gaps, I don’t agree with this. Since I have encountered the point quite a few times over the past years, I thought it might make sense to explain why.
1. You don’t need to have a word for something to do it: trees grow without having a word for growing, and people all over the world experience schadenfreude without knowing German, or having a word of their own that means the same thing. So more needs to be said to show that the worry is a genuine problem; we clearly can’t just have a blanket rule against using words to describe activities that wouldn’t be used by those who engage in the activities.
2. Even within the history of European philosophy, we use non-immanent terms of analysis all the time. For example we might speak of intensional vs extensional distinctions, or dualism and physicalism, when talking about ancient philosophy. True, one needs to do this with some care, but it isn’t obviously problematic and indeed often seems illuminating, even unavoidable. So again, anyone who has the worry should explain the difference between these cases, or be just as rigorous in never using contemporary terminology to discuss historical philosophy.
3. One can and should be open to importing terms in the other direction. For instance, having looked at Confucianism one may see that filial piety (xiao) and ritual propriety (li) are fundamental terms of philosophical analysis in that context; one could then use these terms to clarify one’s understanding of European philosophy. I actually wrote something recently about ritual in ancient Greek philosophy that was inspired by having looked at the topic in Chinese philosophy for the podcast, and I might describe this piece as an inquiry into “ritual propriety” in the Greek context. (Cf point 5 below.)
4. As anyone who has been following the podcast will know, there is a lot of material in ancient Indian and Chinese literature that is just obviously philosophy. Or to put it another way, if it isn’t philosophy it’s hard to know what else to call it, and refusing to use the word seems like mere pretense. There are plenty of examples one could give, but to offer just two, consider the Mohist arguments for impartial care (jian ai), which are startlingly similar to utilitarianism, and the Nyaya tradition with its discussion of the structure and criteria for explanatory arguments, which looks very similar in intent to Aristotelian syllogistic theory (albeit reaching a different set of rules for reasoning). It is extremely implausible to claim that these things do not count as “philosophy” despite being eerily similar to core examples of philosophy from the European tradition.
5. On the other hand, there is plenty of material in these other traditions that challenges and stretches our conception of what philosophy is and can be, what topics it covers and what sorts of consideration it could take seriously. The examples given under point 3 above are a good example; another example would be the debate over oral philosophy in Africa. To my mind it is question-begging and reductive to assume in advance that none of this could possibly be “philosophy,” merely on the grounds that the people involved didn’t have this word. This seems to me lazy, and worse, to be a way of shielding ourselves from the prospect that people doing philosophy in the European tradition might benefit from broadening their horizons.
With this last point, we go beyond a defense of speaking about “philosophy” in non-European contexts to give a positive reason for doing so. By taking seriously the idea that philosophy has existed in these other contexts, we can expand our conception of philosophy itself. This is how I would answer the worry about cultural imperialism. That does seem to be a valid concern. But, while it is legitimate to talk about “philosophy” in pre-modern India, China, Africa, and other places and times, it is not legitimate to use the specific features of European philosophy as a litmus test for deciding what does and doesn’t count. Far from being imperialist, the global approach has the potential to de-center European philosophy, showing it to be just one of many examples of a phenomenon that has existed around the world through history—probably wherever and whenever there have been humans, in fact, though that’s another question!
*The Islamic world can be set aside here since they did inherit the word “philosophy” from Greek, and thus spoke of falsafa. There’s more to say about this but I won’t get into it here. [return to text]
I’ve found it helpful in my teaching (I teach Buddhist ethics and Confucianism in my ethics class) to call out the idea that *we* recognize these ideas as philosophical in the same way we recognize Newton’s work as scientific. I also take some time to point out that in these cultures at that time, there was no distinction between a lot of what we recognize today as separate subjects or areas, so the already blurry lines of “philosophy” may seem especially blurry here. All that being said, I have no problems talking about “Confucian philosophy” or “Buddhist philosophy.” If nothing else, they’re helpful descriptive labels.
Re the “more to say about this”, I reflected on this question a while ago with particular reference to the Muslim world’s examination of falsafa: https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2016/09/on-al-ghazali-and-the-cultural-specificity-of-philosophy/
Thanks, Peter, for both this post and your work that it is built out of! I think you’re right here and wanted to add two further points.
1. It is a white supremacist history which makes people think that philosophy—both the activity and the word—are Greek in origin. Eurocentric philosophers love to break the word ‘philosophy’ down into component Greek morphemes of ‘philia’ and ‘sophia’. But, they never continue this inquiry to trace ‘sophia’ back to the Kemetic word, ‘sbyt’ or ‘sebayit’—also meaning wisdom. Furthermore, the Greeks were clearly building off of philosophers and philosophical work from Kemet and Phoenicia. Folx interested in learning more about this should take a look at any number of works by Lewis Gordon over the last 15 or so years.
2. While I understand the worry of potential cultural imperialism, I’m more worried about the actual existence of a long practice of denying that philosophy has existed outside of European traditions as part of white supremacist projects. For those interested in learning more here, check out Peter K. J. Park’s “Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830”.
Hi Matt. When you make claims like this around other philosophers in person, do you get much push-back? If so, what sort? I’m pretty sure I couldn’t contain myself if someone within earshot said “It is a white supremacist history which makes people think that philosophy—both the activity and the word—are Greek in origin“. If we ever cross paths at a conference, feel free to look me up!
Hi Preston,
Yes, I do get a lot of push-back on claims like this. The last thread I participated in https://dailynous.com/2025/08/26/the-apa-board-the-gaza-petition/ shows you what some of that looks like. I also talk about some of the different push-back responses I’ve gotten from philosophers when I make claims like this in a piece I wrote for the blog of the APA https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/25/where-the-hell-have-us-white-philosophers-been-the-need-for-peace-love-and-racial-justice-in-philosophy/ .
While those cover most of the types of responses I’ve gotten, I’d say there’s three others I can think of at the moment.
1. While I certainly think (and you’ll likely be happy to hear) that I get more negative responses and push-back from philosophers than anything else, I should say there are some people who respond in positive ways. My book, which discusses many such claims, received some nice praise for the cover and was reviewed relatively positively in a few journals.
2. There are also those who clearly want to push back, but aren’t willing to for some reason. This seems to sometimes come from something like, “I generally disagree with or dislike you, but I feel there’s some way I can exploit being seen publicly accepting you being a part of the conversation.” Other times, this seems to come from something like, “I agree with you on some things, but I think you go too far, but I don’t want to be seen publicly disagreeing with you.” This is obviously the most speculative category, though.
3. Your comment also reminds me of another pattern of responses I get. It’s often something along the lines of, “well, you’re lucky I don’t tell you all the ways you’re wrong”. This isn’t the first time you’ve given me this kind of response. And, before you lean on your offer to discuss in person, we’ve been at conferences together before. We were both at the Society for Exact Philosophy in Miami in 2016. My co-author and I ran into you on our way to our talk. We mentioned something about what we were arguing for and you said you wouldn’t want to show up because you’d just disagree with me the whole time. We were also at the Philosophy in the 21stCentury conference in Pittsburgh together in 2012 with no engagement either. Not trying to say you haven’t been willing to engage with me also. Just pointing out that there’s a pattern of people giving me promissory notes of engagement. It feels similar to when I’m protesting and somebody drives by, flips me off, and yells something like “you dumbass. You don’t even know why you’re out here,” when we’ve got flyers and zines explaining why we’re out there.
My best,
Matt
Sorry I messed up those links. They should have been
https://dailynous.com/2025/08/26/the-apa-board-the-gaza-petition/
and
https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/25/where-the-hell-have-us-white-philosophers-been-the-need-for-peace-love-and-racial-justice-in-philosophy/
Ah, right! I remember you in Pittsburgh, Matt. That was a conference I co-organized. I brought the idea up with Brandom and he offered to give us some money, so we went to Duquesne and Emory as well and they all chipped in. Got the Chancellor’s room in the Cathedral of Learning. It was a blast. I suppose my attempt at humor in Miami didn’t land; at the time I wasn’t really comfortable enough to speak up about these things, perhaps falling into your category of “I don’t want to be seen publicly disagreeing with you“. But that’s changed over the years, and I’m now more inclined to talk with people who accuse, broadly, the western intellectual tradition of being founded on, broadly, white supremacy. I didn’t mean to be flipping you off at a protest rally — just genuinely interested in how people respond to this sort of thing in person. It is, after all, a bit anachronistic to decry as “white supremacist history” the location of the historical origin of philosophy in ancient Greece.
Rather, what is anachronistic is the received wisdom (manufactured in the 18th century) that philosophy originated in ancient Greence… Apart from the Park book, there is a paper by Lea Cantor on how “Thales was the first philosopher” was manufactured in the 18th century by white supremacist historians of philosophy: https://philpapers.org/rec/CANTT
Just as an etymological point, we can trace the use of the word “philosophy”, and the common noun “philosopher”, to ancient Greece — and in particular to the people surrounding Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the various schools they developed, and the transitive closure of the intellectual tradition that descends from those who engage with their work.
Why would you not be able to “contain” yourself? The construction of a Western historical canon with the Greeks as its origin, specifically, is a relatively recent invention by the Germans of the 18th or so century, as documented in the Park book cited above. For a shorter take, there was the Cantor paper on Thales more recently. As a non-historian, would have thought that these are standard references one is aware of by now, at least the Park book.
I should add I was assuming an awareness that scientific racism emerged at the same time, around and from the same people. But again, it’s all in the cited standard references throughout these comments, which people who say are “genuinely interested” should consult; there’s discussion of etymology and so on.
What is the argument supposed to be? That scientific racists two hundred years ago are responsible for two and a half thousand years of intellectual engagement corresponding to the ancestral of the relation “philosopher I am interested in responding to”?
I can understand that Kant was a racist, say. But that doesn’t mean the history of philosophy is a history of white supremacy, or that the very idea of a history of philosophy that runs through that ancestral relation is itself white supremacist just because some of the individuals standing in that relation were themselves racist.
There’s so much ground-shifting here, I have no idea where to start.
Who exactly claimed that “the history of philosophy is a history of white supremacy”?
The claim this thread is responding to is that “philosophy originates with the Greeks”. That’s an 18th century, yes, white racist construction. One that, as Park and Cantor, among others, point out, the Greeks themselves wouldn’t have subscribed to!! (!!)
I can, as I and others have tried to, point to the relevant works but of course I can’t read them for you. I mean, it’s not difficult to acknowledge the historical sources, isn’t it? What one does with that acknowledgement is a different, and to my mind more fruitful question. Happy to go into that once there’s enough requisite knowledge. Feel free to take your time. In the mean time, this is just arguing from the armchair, which I appreciate but only when it’s wine time and it’s only Tuesday. So peace.
Sorry History Reader, I want to address this first: you wondered who said that the history of philosophy is a history of white supremacy, and by putting things in those terms I took myself to be responding to you saying “The construction of a Western historical canon with the Greeks as its origin, specifically, is a relatively recent invention by the Germans of the 18th or so century…” In the context of Matt’s original post, I took you to be defending some version of the following view: to trace the history of philosophy to ancient Greece is to commit some sin of white supremacy. Is this not your view? If it isn’t, could you maybe say more about where I’m getting you wrong in the context of this conversation?
Incidentally, I don’t mean to be denying that some racists have advocated seeing the ancient Greeks as white (which is bizarre), and then for racist purposes they locate the historical origin of the thing we call “philosophy” in ancient Greece. I’m just denying the relevance of that to the question of whether, in fact, the thing we call “philosophy” has its historical origin in ancient Greece, and in particular in the ancestral of the relation “philosopher I am interested in” (where this is understood across languages, of course).
Also, I want to point out that in the essay I link to below, I advocate for a more universal conception of the discipline, despite these rather local and contingent features of its historical origin (which, for whatever it’s worth, I personally suspect are rooted in the star-mapping cultures that surround the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the last ice age, before climate change forced the diffusion of these peoples into the river valleys of Asia and the Middle East).
Hi Preston,
I do not think continuing this exchange is very productive (for reason 1. below). But since you took the time to respond, let me do that too.
(You respond in a way that may seem ‘civil’. Fine. But, given reason 1. below and the general unwillingness to at least engage with relevant work that has been pointed out to you, this type of empty ‘civility’ isn’t worth much in my book. But I digress and will refrain from contributing further.)
1. You say: “Is this not your view? If it isn’t, could you maybe say more about where I’m getting you wrong in the context of this conversation?”
No, it isn’t; and nothing in what I said above (or the passage you quote) implies this view, so I don’t know where you got that from.
See above for the view this thread is responding to: the view that “philosophy originates with the Greeks”, this view, as the thread has pointed out, is a white supremacist construction from the 18th century.
2. More to the point, you say: “Incidentally, I don’t mean to be denying that some racists have advocated seeing the ancient Greeks as white (which is bizarre), and then for racist purposes they locate the historical origin of the thing we call “philosophy” in ancient Greece. I’m just denying the relevance of that to the question of whether, in fact, the thing we call “philosophy” has its historical origin in ancient Greece, and in particular in the ancestral of the relation “philosopher I am interested in” (where this is understood across languages, of course).”
Is the claim here that, yes, “philosophy originates with the Greeks” might have been a racial construction, but, in a true Gettier twist, it might be that this is just ‘luck’: what we call ‘philosophy’, in fact, does originate with the Greeks? I really don’t know how to interpret this, since it seems to treat what ‘philosophy’ is as some kind of ‘natural fact’ (whatever that means) that we discover.
So to make some sense of this, I did read the blog post you mention. Here’s what this post says:
“Regarding the idea that there’s no unifying research project animating our work today, I’ve always found this suggestion puzzling. *The discipline we call “philosophy” traces its roots to a tradition that grew out of interest in (among other things) beauty, truth, and goodness.* While not a definition of philosophy, and though the people working in analytic philosophy today may not give much thought to these transcendental ideas together, they remain the focus of much of what we do. Furthermore, *this has taken place within an intellectual lineage – beginning with direct tutelage in the relations between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – that successive generations have participated in since roughly the coining of the term “philosophy”*.”
So, given that there was definitely thinking about “beauty, truth, and goodness” before this “lineage” and outside this particular geographical place you single out—thinking that was acknowledged and very much discussed by the very members of this “lineage” you appeal to—what exactly is the basis for identifying “philosophy” with a supposedly existing tradition since the Greeks? (And what exactly makes it a “tradition” if it existed?)
What exactly justifies the Gettier twist? Nothing in the blogpost actually offers a justification and/or responds to the arguments in the cited references above (Park, Cantor, etc.), so I’m at a loss what the argument is exactly.
3. Again, for those actually interested, I’d just urge consulting the relevant recent historiographical work. ‘Philosophy’ is not a ‘rock’, it’s not found in the wild; claims to what counts as *philosophical* reasoning about “beauty, truth, and goodness” are not natural facts (again, whatever that means).
Hi history reader — thanks for the reply. Okay, so just to be clear, I wrote:
To which you replied:
So is the idea that any attempt to trace the historical origin of the millennia-spanning tradition, whose participants have called themselves “philosophers”, to the people who first used that term count as a white supremacist construction? That’s an idea I’m rejecting even if, as it happens, some white supremacists held the view that the tradition of philosophy begins in ancient Greece. Even evil men sometimes get things right!
You also write, in response to the view of philosophy I give in that essay linked below:
Because the term was first used by the ancient Greeks, and for some two and a half millennia there has been a tradition of people responding to people who themselves were either ancient Greek philosophers or were responding to ancient Greek philosophers, and which has been widely incorporated into what we do today as philosophers. That’s not to say that philosophy has only taken place within that tradition — but until we who are in that tradition start to incorporate thought that developed outside of it, then it will remain true that our tradition descends from the ancient Greeks (and indeed it will remain true afterward, although now the descent may include other lineages). I don’t take this to be very contentious, and one virtue of the view I lay out in that essay, I think, is that it can both account for this etymological and historical contingency while also incorporating much that developed outside this tradition as philosophy worth incorporating in it.
Compare: if ancient Chinese researchers had hit upon a theory of oxygen combustion reaction to explain why things burn, we might well count what they were doing as chemistry even if, as it happens, they were not part of the tradition of chemistry that descends from the use of that term (and its Arabic root in al-chemy, which as it happens may refer to “Khem”, a word for ancient Egypt). In addition, if European chemistry was taught in schools for centuries before we learned of ancient Chinese chemistry, it would be perfectly reasonable to incorporate the relevant elements (pardon the pun) of Chinese chemistry into the curriculum, to use it in expanding what chemists do and teach, etc. Nevertheless, it would remain true that the term “chemistry”, as a label used by people in the European tradition, referred to a study that, up until that integration, took part in that tradition (assuming, of course, the ancient Chinese chemists didn’t denote their work with a term cognate with “khem”).
Finally, I’d like to point out that I have engaged with the literature referenced here. This morning I looked at the book Matt quoted in defense of the claim that the Greek “sophia” is rooted in the ancient Egyptian “sbyt”, but I didn’t find adequate support for that claim there, and I asked for something more substantial. I know you’re unsure of how to read my effort at civility here, but I really am trying to dialogue in good faith.
Right, the ‘view’ you’re defending (including some *imagined* two-and-a-half-millennia ‘tradition’) is a (white supremacist) construction from the 18th c. There was no such ‘tradition’ before that. Not that there is any evidence of. If you find contrary evidence, let us all know. Happy to continue after you’ve done the reading, like I did.
Until then, as I said, peace.
Right, so that was your view. What a shame. For there has been, without question, a two and a half thousand year tradition of people calling themselves “philosophers”, engaging with those who do and have done the same, and which has gradually come to include more than those who happen (for contingent historical reasons) to use that term, but who are interested in the same topics falling under that term. No hint of white supremacy there!
How fortunate for us that the Romans loaned philosophia from the Greeks. Had they called it meditationes, I couldn’t be teaching Aurelius in my intro philosophy. Heavens help us had the Germans come up with their own word!
Kidding aside, why would etymology matter? You seem to be saying that if some phrase made it across the silk road, then Chinese chemistry is “chemistry”, but if it didn’t, then it is not “chemistry”. This is like saying that there is no such thing as Eastern art because their words for it are different. That is plainly absurd.
I suspect that what you want to say is that “philosophy” is used to refer to works that bear some connection to Plato. And so, analytically, stuff only becomes philosophy if it is brought into such connection.
Even if this is the meaning of “philosophy”, you (a) cannot get this out of etymology, and (b) this would be something particular about philosophy. Mathematics, rhetoric, art, engineering, astronomy and, yes, chemistry are obviously not defined by connection to a single originator. Let alone a single etymological root! (Sorry, I just can’t get over that.)
The claim by history reader, and others, is that philosophy is not special compared to these other disciplines, so it is likewise not defined by relation to some ur-philosopher.
I think you got too hung up on the term “white supremacy” and started making associations about what your interlocutors are saying.
The claim is not that tracing the history is supremacist, the claim is that tracing this history to Plato, stopping, and then designating him the originator is an arbitrary stipulation that was only made very recently.
NB: That this stipulation is arbitrary has nothing to do with the supremacy. It is arbitrary because of the historical fact that Plato saw himself in conversation with thinkers before and around him.
Nope, not what I’m saying. Here’s what I said:
Happy to clear that up! As to the more general view, I’m happy with the way I spelled it out in the essay I link below. Feel free to take up anything I say there, or send me an email and I’d be happy talk more about it.
Hi y’all,
Sorry for the delay. I’m traveling for work right now, academia is my side gig these days, and the government shutdown is making flying quite the hassle.
There’s been some clearly mistaken interpretations of my claims around ‘white supremacy’ and some question as to why I brought it in. So, I want to make some clarifications there.
First, the claim was never that philosophy is white supremacist. I very clearly claimed that work on the history of philosophy has been white supremacist—driven by white supremacist ideologies, institutions, cultures, and assumptions for the last several centuries.
Again, as I said earlier, philosophy exists and has existed all around the world for at least 5,000 years. The vast majority of that work has not been white supremacist. That’s what’s been so frustrating about the recent white supremacist trend in history of philosophy (and ideas generally). Again, for some clarity, my claim is that histories which go something like the following are white supremacist:
(1) Ancient period: philosophy has its origins with the Greek Miracle
(2) Medieval period: philosophy continues with the dark ages and renaissance.
(3) Modern period: philosophy continues with the epistemological and metaphysical shakeups caused by the renaissance and scientific revolution (and some enlightenment social and political thought which has made the world more free).
This is all racist nonsense. Again, if you want the details of the construction of this racist story, Peter K.J. Park’s book is a great place to start.
If we’re teaching philosophy in an Ancient/Medieval/Modern paradigm, then it should look something like the following instead:
(i) Ancient: Starts around 3000 BCE, rather than 500 BCE. Includes Kemet, China, India, etc. in the millennia preceding the Greeks. Includes Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, Mohism, Zoroastrianism, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, etc. along with the Greeks in the first millennium BCE.
(ii) Medieval: Shows that the dark ages and renaissance are co-dependent myths started by the Anti-Arab sentiment of Petrarch. Instead, focuses on golden ages around the world—most obviously the Islamic Golden Age, but also Tang and Song Dynasty China, Gupta Empire India, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Maya Classic Period, the flourishing of the Mali Empire, the height of the Mexica, etc.
(iii) Modern: philosophy becomes an integral part of an attempt to dominate the world through white supremacist settler colonialism, set in motion by the doctrine of discovery, but continued by philosophers and the academy up to today.
I’ll try to catch up on the rest of the discussion when possible.
My best,
Matt
Hi Matt — thanks for this, and safe travels. I sent you an email at your SUNY Potsdam address about whether you have a syllabus that covers the history of philosophy you briefly sketched here. Please let me know if that’s not the one to use. There’s a lot to agree with here, and while I’d take issue with some of the framing — and, I suspect, much of the detail surrounding the parts of the framing I’d take issue with — here probably isn’t the best place to hash that out. But thanks for the reference to the Park book — I’ll pick it up.
I also want to say, I wholeheartedly agree that this is hogwash:
(1) Ancient period: philosophy has its origins with the Greek Miracle
As you note, the Greeks themselves looked to ancient Egypt for all sorts of intellectual inspiration, and that gives the lie to the “miracle” claim.
Finally, I very much appreciate learning the possible root of “sophia” in the ancient Egyptian “sbyt”. It makes me want to reread my Hermes Trismegistos. Now someone please tell me we can plausibly trace that word to the language used by the people who built Göbekli Tepe!
Hello again y’all,
Again, my apologies for the delay. I had a referee report and an article due. And, even though I’ve provided an outline for an intro philosophy survey of the history of philosophy syllabus below, this is not something I’ve taught before. Because of a weird set of circumstances, I basically never got to teach intro philosophy. This is a combination of things I taught in environmental philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mathematics, and logic courses, though. And things I’ve published on in social and political philosophy. I include that background because it’s definitely an idiosyncratic combination of things. That said, I still think the general framework provides some helpful starting points. Way more than happy to get feedback from any folx who might be interested in providing it.
My best,
Matt
You quoted a claim that I did not contest. Here is what I contested:
Your parenthetical read like an “unless” claim for me. So I took you to say the following:
“Chemistry” referred to an endeavour that only existed in Europe, unless it was the case that the Chinese researchers who were engaged in a similar endeavour called it something of a shared etymology.
Please clear up how I misunderstand you here.
Here’s the full quote:
My point is that, until the tradition T that uses the term “chemistry” to refer to what they (the members of T) are doing comes to include people doing chemistry in other traditions, the term “chemistry” will not, for the members of T, denote what these other people are doing. Not because these other people aren’t doing chemistry, but because the term “chemistry” will not be used by the members of T in such a way as to mark that fact. And so if we want to talk about a tradition that develops around the use of the term “chemistry” to refer to what its members are doing, this is important to note — even if what they call “chemistry” is practiced within other traditions, no matter what they call it.
Thank you. Two points:
First, etymology. I still don’t see why you think it would matter. What would you say differently if these other people doing chemistry would be using a cognate of “chemistry” to denote what they are doing?
Second, your semantic claim is just false. “Chemistry” refers to shared subject matter and shared methodology. This use “marks” that people who came to this subject matter and methodology independently are also doing chemistry.
Your claim entails that when the members of T call something outside of T “chemistry”, they are either changing T or are changing the meaning of “chemistry”. But this seems implausible. If we tomorrow discover that a 12th century Indian mathematician had independently discovered calculus, this would change neither the practice of calculus nor the meaning of “calculus”.
Re 1: it matters, in the context of this conversation, because the linguistic tradition engaged in that study is a tradition — its members understand themselves to be sharing an avowed common project, using the same language. So if we want to understand what those people took themselves to be doing, and if what they took themselves to be doing involved (at least in part) drawing on and reacting to the research undertaken by those who used the term “chemistry”, we have to look at the work they engaged with under that heading. This is not to deny that we ourselves would say that their topic of study includes more than they included in that tradition.
Re 2: I’m not talking about what “chemistry” refers to in our idiolect, but rather how it is used by others. I’m talking about what (in my imagined scenario) the tradition that uses the term “chemistry” understood as the denotation of that term (hence the parenthetical remark “for the members of T”) — and until they discover the Chinese theory, it simply will not be true that they understood “chemistry” to denote anything the ancient Chinese were doing (hence the remark “up until that integration” that was in the ellipsis of your quote above).
Does this help clear things up?
It does not because it does not address my question:
In that situation we would have a single intellectual tradition that branched apart in the distant past (assuming there was no interaction between the branching and the reintegration), rather than two traditions that converged on a common topic.
Okay, thanks. But see, this is not remotely how language works.
Words can be cognate for all sorts of reasons, so if some root had made it to China, this would not be indicative of a shared tradition. It would just be indicative of the vagaries of language.
I was assuming the two branches started from a single intellectual tradition that used the term to denote a common topic of inquiry. I confess to finding you a rather uncharitable interlocutor, QP. At any rate, I am content to leave things here, as I have the impression this exchange has reached diminishing returns.
Sorry, but it is not uncharitable to press someone on a claim they made.
I even offered a charitable interpretation in my first response to you (“I suspect that what you want to say is…”), but you continued to insist on etymology.
You made a claim about cognates, not a claim about shared traditions. These are different, since there can be shared traditions without cognates (French arte and German Kunst) and there can be cognates with no shared traditions (English gym and German Gymnasium).
I have to say, QP is way more charitable and patient than me. I was frustrated by your assumption of some imagined tradition, without a reasoned account of what makes this a tradition (especially in light of the evidence of its arbitrary construction, in the specific case of ‘the history of Western philosophy’, a racist construction); and just the sheer refusal to acknowledge it’s an assumption. QP has had the patience to try to help you articulate a view of what makes this tradition you continue speaking of a tradition. I too am sceptical of the ‘etymology’ route, but maybe you can pull it off in the end.
Agreed that charity was in short supply, but I understand that hackles will rise when people are worried about white supremacy. Either way, I explained at the start of the conversation what made it a tradition: use of the term “philosopher”, from its coining in ancient Greece, through the transitive closure of the relation “philosopher I am interested in engaging with”. As it happens, that’s a historically contingent origin and subsequent tradition, but it’s a tradition nonetheless. And its topical focus in (among other things, of course) the Beautiful, the True, and the Good mark it as something with an in-principal universal interest, given that we can understand our inquiry into these transcendental ideas as the socio-historical and self-reflective exercise of our natural capacities as human beings for sensory, central, and motor neural activity. So this is one of those happy occasions where a historical contingency reveals the cunning of reason at work. And so this is to agree with Kant, white supremacist though he may have been, that questions like “what can I know?”, and “what ought I do?”, and “what may I hope?” are of central importance to the philosopher.
Sure, Preston, heartily agree, about the “short supply of charity”.
So you define a tradition by the use of the word “philosopher”? Then, I don’t think you can avoid the questions QP posed. And if you’re serious, you should respond to them.
It’s all really baffling; so by this:
“And its topical focus in (among other things, of course) the Beautiful, the True, and the Good mark it as something with an in-principal universal interest”
You don’t mean to suggest that the Greeks, and all the subsequent “Europeans”, at least as they were defined with respect to a *constructed* common lineage with the Greeks, were the only ones (or the first ones) engaging with these questions. I take it that’s the case.
So the only thing that makes it a ‘tradition’ is the use of the Greek ‘philosopher’? Just trying to get what your position is here.
Thanks, hr. I think I have a fairly good sense of your perspective based on our previous conversation, and I think I’ve done well enough to explain my side of things here, and in that essay you read. If you’re interested, in the last chapter of my book I talk a bit about the Beautiful, the True, and the Good as the socio-historical development of our evolved and habituated capacities to sense, think, and act — and of the opportunity to construct a set of categories sufficient to see this natural-cum-historical process as a single event, by synthesizing a bunch of resources across philosophy, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and evolutionary anthropology. More recently, I’ve taken steps to spell out the formalism that underpins this synthesis (and investigated it’s historical background in what I call the “MIT-UCLA” and the “Prague-Pittsburgh” axes of semantic research) in a couple of essays either shortly appearing or in progress.
Feel free to send me an email if you want, as I’d be happy to talk about any of this in more detail in personal correspondence; but I’d feel a bit of a bore if I pressed it further here. Please have the last word, and truly, thank you for the exchange.
I’m still baffled by this.
Supposedly the “members of T” were using the term “chemistry” in a sense that would let them recognize Chinese chemistry _as chemistry_ once they encounter it, and without modifying their use of the term. That is, their understanding of chemistry was inclusive of Chinese chemistry. They just did not know that such a thing existed.
Let’s make some distinctions. Supposedly, the members of T use or used the word “chemistry” in a way that fixed some intensional meaning M. Now, is your claim that:
1) The extension of M did not include some Chinese work.
2) The extension of M did include some Chinese work, but the members of T did not realize that it does.
Either way my claim is: (1) is obviously false and (2) is irrelevant. Which one do you dispute?
I’m slightly confused about your etymological point. Is your idea that the etymology of ‘sophia’ stems back to Kemetic ‘sbyt’, or is it that, even if it doesn’t, this would be a helpful connection to make? If you mean the former, what evidence is there that Greek ‘sophia’ and Kemetic ‘sbyt’ are in fact etymologically related? If the latter, why draw this particular connection rather than a connection to, well, any other language’s use of a word meaning ‘wisdom’? I agree with your general point; I’m just trying to understanding this specific part of your message.
Hi Marketeer,
Thanks for the helpful clarifying question! I personally believe both claims and would want to make them both (precisely for anybody who doesn’t hold the first). With respect to the etymology of ‘sophia’ stemming back to ‘sbyt’, please again see many of Lewis Gordon’s works, or Theophile Obenga’s “Ancient Egypt and Black Africa” or “African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period,2780–330 bc” or Enrique Dussel’s work.
A summary of some of this work given by Gordon:
“Though the word ‘philosophy’ is often translated as ‘the love of wisdom,’ it represents an important meeting of languages and worlds as the Greek words philia and philo (fondness or devotional love) was conjoined with the transformed word sophia (wisdom), whose origin was more southern than many proponents may prefer. It is from the Mdw Ntr word Sbyt (“wise teachings”). The related Sba (“to teach” or “to be wise”) was transformed through the ancient Greek tendency to transform the Mdw Ntr “b” to “ph” or, in English, “f”.”
As for the second claim, that even if one doesn’t believe these etymological claims, there’s reason to make the connection between philosophy in Greece and sebayit in Kemet. I think there’s good reason to make this connection simply in terms of understanding the history of ideas and culture. Philosophy runs throughout all cultures and civilizations. We should expect it to go back to the earliest cultures and civilizations in Africa and Asia. And, we actually see this historical connection between Greece, Kemet, and Phoenicia.
Furthermore, I have argued in places that philosophy is something like the rigorous and systematic investigation into those questions that people across disciplines and walks of life normally take for granted. The earliest account that I’ve seen which is similar to this is from Ancient Kemet. Again, quoted from Lewis Gordon’s work:
“[The seeker of wisdom is the one] whose heart is informed about these things which would be otherwise ignored, the one who is clear-sighted when he [or she] is deep into a problem, the one who is moderate in his [or her] actions, who penetrates ancient writings, whose advice is [sought] to unravel complications, who is really wise, who instructed his [or her] own heart, who stays awake at night as he [or she] looks for the right paths, who surpasses what he [or she] accomplished yesterday, who is wiser than a sage, who brought him [or her] self to wisdom, who asks for advice and sees to it that he [or she] is asked advice. (“Inscription of Antef,” 12th Dynasty, Kmt, 1991–1782 BCE
My best,
Matt
Agreed. This is a topical characterization of philosophy, as a reflective endeavor characteristic of our ability to think, act, and sense — or to ask questions like Kant’s: what can I know, what ought I do, and what may I hope? But surely there’s room within this general characterization of philosophy as a topic, or a phenomenon, that also recognizes the etymological root of the term “philosophy”, and the interest in these ideas through the tradition that develops out of, crudely, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their students.
What am I missing, Matt? Where is the white supremacy here, today?
Okay, so I’ve had a chance to look over the book where Lewis Gordon makes the claim you quote about the ancient Egyptian words “sbyt” and “sba” as the supposed etymological root of the ancient Greek “sophia”. It comes up twice in the first two chapters, but he adduces no textual or other evidence for this claim, other than (apparently) what he thinks is the similar enough sound and a supposed transfer of the Egyptian “b” to the Greek “ph”.
Is that all there is to say in support of this etymology? Or can you direct me to a place where Gordon (or someone else) traces a more substantial link between “sophia” and “sbyt”? If not, it seems a sort of speculative etymology — which has its place, but needs to be treated as speculative.
And don’t get me wrong, I’d be as happy as the next guy if we could trace a concrete link between ancient Egyptian wisdom literature and the tradition descending from Socrates. I love that stuff; right now as I look across my living room, a copy of the Emerald Tablet sits next to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ohiyesa’s The Soul of an Indian, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. As I said in reply to “history reader” above, I suspect (speculatively) that the roots of much of our culture trace back to star-mapping peoples living in the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the last ice age, before climate change forced the remnants of that culture out across the Fertile Crescent and into the river valleys of ancient India and China. Hell, if we found a copy of Plato’s Republic with an expanded version of the Atlantis story in which the ancient Egyptians tell Solon about the Richat structure, my 20-year-old self would be thrilled! But I’m no longer 20 years old, so when it comes to linking ancient Egyptian wisdom to successive generations, I think we should be more guarded. Apologies in advance if Gordon (or anyone else) gives that more guarded exposition somewhere, and thanks in advance for directing me to it.
I would definitely be interested in seeing more on this etymology! My usual etymology source, Etymonline, doesn’t go back before Greek for this root. On the entry for “sapient”, it draws a connection to the Greek “sophos”, and it says that “sapere” comes from a Proto-Indo-European root “sep” for “taste”, but it doesn’t actually say that “sapere” and “sophos” are in fact both reflexes of the same root. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/sapient) Wiktionary doesn’t list “sophos” as a reflex of that root, though it does list Latin, Celtic, and Armenian reflexes (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sep-). Wiktionary lists the origin of “sophos” as unknown, possibly from an indigenous language spoken in the region before Indo-Europeans arise (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BF%CF%86%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek). It doesn’t mention the possibility of an Egyptian borrowing, though I have found other people speculating about it (https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientEgyptian/comments/mrl2n7/are_there_any_latingreek_words_derived_from/) and it certainly doesn’t seem out of the question.
Rensberg (1989) “Black Athena: An Etymological Response”
Arethusa, 22, 67–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26308577
says he finds Bernal’s etymology for sophia “very convincing”.
Thank you, David. That definitely moves my credences concerning the etymological root for the Greek “sophia”.
Thanks, Kenny. That’s helpful. And while I agree that it “doesn’t seem out of the question” that the word has an ancient Egyptian root, that’s a damn sight farther away than “It is a white supremacist history which makes people think that philosophy—both the activity and the word—are Greek in origin“.
Sincere, not rhetorical, question for Matt:
Say we’re looking for a way of referring to the specific thought tradition which, in our warped canon, is supposed to have been inaugurated by Socrates. We’re not interested in depicting participation in this tradition as confined to any particular geographical area or culture, but rather we’re simply trying to settle on a term that picks out this particular lineage (with all its twists, turns, and ramifications, of course). This might be helpful as a way of differentiating this lineage from other thought traditions emanating from distinct genealogies. Would you object to using the term “philosophy”, in a narrow sense, to fill this role? Of course, there’s also a broader sense of the term that seems perfectly legitimate (see my earlier post).
If you do want to speak about this tradition specifically, it might be best to use a phrase like “post-Socratic philosophy”, since the word “philosophy” is understood by many people to have a general sense, and it could be very confusing to use it if you really do want to talk about the one tradition separately from all others that might fall under the usual use of the word.
Fair enough. Though I would imagine that in certain contexts the implicature of ‘philosophy’, uttered in the narrower sense, might be clear to all those involved even without qualification.
Is philosophy a trade? A craft? A practice? A psychological stance?
Most importantly, who gets to anoint themselves arbiter of assigning the appellation ‘philosophy’? Only a bona fide philosopher, of course.
Assorted decoupage-
Jeanne Willette (2013)
https://arthistoryunstuffed.com/post-colonial-theory-the-subaltern/
“Who can speak? And under what conditions does one speak? What language should be used? The answer depends on the point of view. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak investigated the issue of the “subject” in 1988. Borrowing from Structuralism and Georg Hegel, Spivak pointed out that the West is the Subject, the one who speaks and the East is the Object, the one who is spoken of. But Spivak’s essay which challenged the use of Western methodology to examine the non-Western Other, contributed to an important questioning of using Marxism in Postcolonial studies. She stated that the group of scholars who were among the first to consider the “subaltern,” the “Subaltern Studies” group “must” consider the question of whether or not the subaltern can ever speak. As Vivek Chibber pointed out in his 2013 book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, this group at the University of Sussex, used Marxist theory—a point also make by Spivak who effectively revealed the contradictions inherent in Western philosophy which empowers the One and silences the Other.”
Kai Milanovich (2025)
https://phil.washington.edu/sites/phil/files/documents/research/Milanovich%2C%20Kai.%20Distinguishing%20Situated%20Knowledge%20and%20Standpoint%20Theory.%202025..pdf
“Standpoint theory is committed to (and begins as) an account of how social location shapes epistemic resources—this is the situated knowledge thesis, akin to what I described above. The role of this thesis is generally to situate the onto-epistemic space on which standpoint theory relies: knowers are embodied, social, and relational beings who are shaped by local social structures…
The epistemic privilege thesis (or “inversion thesis”) holds that an achieved standpoint will have relative epistemic privilege with respect to some domains of inquiry (Wylie 2012; Collins 1997; Hartsock 1997; Harding 1997; Crasnow 2008; Ashton 2019). The content of a standpoint’s epistemic privilege depends on the method one adopts to collectively develop a standpoint…
A social location is a knower’s structurally defined position within a social system. The structure of a knower’s environment will—with a degree of reliability—enable and constrain the epistemic resources she develops and uses. Conversely, a standpoint is a political analysis of a (set of ) social location(s). The aim of the analysis is to explain how the epistemic resources of the target social locations are produced, authorized, and maintained.13 The function of the analysis is to recontextualize a knower’s understanding and use of the epistemic resources of her social location. Thus, while situated knowledge is a general claim about the socially structured nature of knowledge, a standpoint is an analysis a knower critically develops from her social location and about a (set of ) social location(s). While the epistemic advantage of a social location arises from relative differences among social locations—i.e., where some locations afford greater epistemic advantage— the epistemic privilege of a standpoint is that it contextualizes and clarifies the function of those epistemic resources and their authorization. What is clarified is contextual: a standpoint analysis might help to explain why some forms of knowledge receive poor uptake (e.g., because they contrast with a dominant paradigm), or might explain why particular kinds of knowledge are disregarded (e.g., because they are culturally taboo).”
Steven Bartlett (1986)
https://people.willamette.edu/~sbartlet/Documents/Bartlett_Philosophy%20as%20Ideology.pdf
“By the term ‘ideology’, we usually mean something like ‘a distorted, if only because unilateral and partial, view of reality which comes to supersede and to substitute for the real world’. From a psychological viewpoint, it is essentially an obsessive delusion, because it reifies a system of beliefs, conferring on these a significance which closes the mind of the believer to realities not admitted by the belief-system. Philosophically speaking, allegiance to an ideology amounts to subscription to a solipsistic creed. It is an orientation which Marx therefore judged to be essentially alienating, since in an ideology, a man mistakes his own mentations for reality. He becomes hermetically sealed in his own system of constructs…
Detailed similarities between ideology and philosophy are striking. An ideology forms a substitute for reality: it is fostered by an underlying belief that there is a single, best system of beliefs which can provide the basis for a conceptual framework in terms of which the important problems can be solved and the relevant questions resolved. This framework comes to have an exclusionary status as the context for social and political self-understanding. The ideology is institutionalized, and becomes the built-in conception of reality for its adherents. {6} Similarly, a philosophical position is intended to serve as the universally applicable theory of reality, one which seeks to “include all relevant evidence.” The frame of reference it establishes is therefore essentially exclusionary. The questions of importance to its propounders derive both their interpretation and their resolution in terms of the philosophical position advocated. The philosophy becomes the preferred framework which permits self-understanding. Like an ideology, it constitutes a hermetic definition of what is real. An ideology, as we have said, comprises a set of beliefs that motivate an appropriate kind of behavior. A social-political ideology motivates social, political behavior; a religious ideology motivates certain personal and community behavior including ritual. The ideology is a source for general principles of conduct and responsibility; a pattern of behavior is prescribed by the ideology’s belief-system.”
There is an old, parallel debate in the philosophy of art with respect to the application of the term ‘art’. The concern there has often been that we’re illegitimately applying a western concept (Fine Art) to traditions where it doesn’t fit, but there’s a hard place on the other side of that rock, which is that we have to beware of over-exoticizing the practices of other cultures. For example, at first glance, the heavy religious underpinning and competitive aspect of Balinese music makes it look very different to what we normally call ‘music’; but we shouldn’t forget the traditions of sacred and choral music in Europe, Eurovision, etc. There are all kinds of cases in the literature of both kinds of mistakes.
Looking at top-level categorizations is a recipe for screwing up in one direction or the other; we’re much better off looking at the underlying practices, and how they function across both societies being compared. So, while there may not be parallel philosophy _institutions_ in other cultures, that doesn’t mean nobody over there isn’t asking similar kinds of questions, or doing similar things to what philosophers over here do, whatever that is.
It’s also worth noting that this kind of concept-matching can be not just tricky, but pretty misleading. French, for example, has no exact equivalent of English’s word “evil”; we manage to get by with words like “the bad” instead. But I’m pretty confident that monolingual French speakers have the relevant concept.
In the art case, the situation is also complicated by the fact that throughout the 1990s, many Indigenous artists in the US, Canada, and Australasia formed what’s come to be called the “no word” movement, arguing that their languages had no word for ‘art’ and, thus, that artworld institutions were illegitimately imposing their standards on them. As it turns out, this was a somewhat misleading way to frame things, because it wasn’t really a linguistic claim at all; rather, it was a political slogan meant to express Indigenous artists’ alienation from the institutional artworld, and a rejection of artworld categorizations (which, e.g., arbitrarily classify some everyday Indigenous practices as ‘art’ and others as ‘craft’ or some other non-art category without regard for what goes into the practice, and how it functions in that culture).
(As it happens, this is a topic I’ve published on. For anyone interested: https://philpapers.org/rec/XHIFVW)
This was great. I really admire the way Adamson simply and directly makes the case. No need to dance around it. I’ll use this in some form going forward.
It does raise the question of what to mean by “philosophy”, as a phenomenon having Adamson’s 5 features. I looked at something similar a couple years ago, and outlined an understanding of philosophy as an activity that is both rooted in the tradition developing out of ancient Greece, and an in-principle universal activity that captures a common core across different cultural practices frequently labeled “philosophy”.
https://theelectricagora.com/2021/07/25/in-defense-of-philosophy-analytic-pragmatist-and-transcendental/
Apologies for the self-promotion. I hope it’s taken as relevant.
Oh my God, how carefully you phrase that! Of course it’s exactly as you say, that’s completely obvious. But I could imagine that for some people, that’s precisely why it doesn’t sound anti-Western enough. As Augustine said: Truth is so loved that even those who love other things more than truth want what they love to be true.
I once parodied the “did premodern China have philosophy” discourse with a verse on whether premodern Europe had “Learned Thought”, a discourse happening in an alternative universe: https://dikaioslin.blogspot.com/2020/10/chinese-western-philosophy-parody.html (written in Chinese, sorry!)
My concern is this: using “philosophy” is useful as a first approximation, but there is an underlying tendency to recognize a global identity for philosophy only when “our” (Eurocentric) philosophical themes and debates are (re)discovered in other cultural contexts. Consider, for example, the way Eurocentric labels such as the “Ethiopian Descartes” for Zera Yaqob are used in attempts to diversify the philosophical canon. A global perspective on philosophy, however, could broaden our understanding of what philosophy is (about).
I really appreciate the sentiment in this post and the arguments mainly express my position on this issue.
I think behind them, though, is an assumption that somehow philosophy would be laudatory as a moniker. Perhaps this is what someone might want to challenge? What such challenges might suggest is that by refusing to call traditions of thought outside the European context “philosophy” is not as much to deny something of them, but rather to provincialise philosophy itself. It is to say that approaching these myriad intellectual traditions as a uniform “philosophy” loses what is distinctive about them, and that these traditions are worth approaching on their own terms.
If it is this argument that guides one, I think the same kind of arrogance against these other traditions catalogued by Adamson is not a problem. One would, rather, have a much stricter task of elucidating where one’s inherited categories differ from the object of study. I mean just try to transpose the various debates about Being etc. over to non indo-European languages. Sometimes the fact we can do that is also thanks to grammarians who standardised them through a discipline a linguistics deeply immersed in the Western tradition of philosophy.
How much do these ideas influence whether we call non-European (I know the term is silly already with Ionia etc.) derived practices philosophy? Hard to say. Academically speaking, philosophy is the discipline within which these other traditions might be represented. Sociologically it does not seem like a good move to change that in any way, and have all the departments be called “science of systems of thought” or sth. of the sort.
ps. These arguments are clearly only applicable to relatively isolated intellectual systems. Maybe that would only leave cultural systems isolated from the Eurasian one outside philosophy.
I’m inclined to agree with Adamson about the word “philosophy”. But does this lesson apply broadly to all philosophical terms? I suggest it doesn’t. Some philosophical terms seem to function as family resemblance concepts that take their meaning from historical lines of influence. For example, in response to difficulties with defining “consequentialism” precisely, Tom Dougherty suggests that:
If this is correct then the cultural contextualists would have a point in objecting to the term “consequentialism” being used to describe Mohist philosophy. However, this objection would only apply to such historically loaded family resemblance terms. Philosophical terms that simply pick out basic divisions in logical space do seem to have cross-cultural validity. For example, I argue here that “agent-neutral” (in contrast to “consequentialism”) functions this way. Whenever any culture anywhere endorses a rule, that rule must either: (1) have the logical properties that constitute agent-neutrality, (2) have the logical properties that constitute agent-relativity, or (3) have its meaning underspecified such that it is indeterminate whether (1) or (2) is true.
The upshot is that a crucial starting point for cross-cultural philosophy lies in distinguishing historically loaded family resemblances terms from precise terms that pick out options in logical space. The former are ill-suited to cross-cultural comparisons, whereas the latter enable meaningful comparisons.
There’s also much scholarship on how non-(European v West Asian) thinkers, upon their first contact with the “philosophia” tradition, sought to see the continuity in between. I understand, but think it’s unfortunate, that such scholarship (a lot of which is not written in European languages) tends to get sidelined.
Just to add something: Mohism’s definitions of square and circle are almost identical to Euclid’s definitions, although they did not develop into a systematised axiomatic system. A circle is that which has the same length from a single centre (圆，一中同长也), and a square is that which has four angles and four corners equal (方，柱隅四权也).
Additionally, Mohism had an atomism-like metaphysics, they claimed that everything is made of a very small component, “duan” (端). A “duan” is an object that does not have a size and cannot be divided (端，体之无厚而最前者也。端，是无间也). (Although there is some debate over whether this is a geometrical or an ontological concept.)
These examples affirm Adamson’s point 4 (that this is “obviously philosophy”). The primary paradigmatic differences in intellectual history are not, as some might assume, between regions. Rather, the divide is between analytical, logical, abstract, systematic, and universalist approaches (for example, Mohism, Nyāya, Euclid and Plato), and contextual, emotional, concrete, empirical, and particularist ones (for example, Confucianism, Cārvāka, Sophists, and post-structuralism), and their intermediate states, which are present within different civilisations.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that our use of the term “philosophy” could be disambiguated into two distinct senses which might help to remedy some of the angst here:
(1) On the one hand, “philosophy” has the general, capacious sense of ‘applying reason in an effort to answer the fundamental questions of life’, or something along those lines. Taken in this sense, it seems there is no reason that “philosophy” couldn’t be used to describe the practices of numerous distinct cultural traditions.
(2) On the other hand, “philosophy” might just as well be used, more narrowly, to refer to the particular thought tradition that traces its genealogy back to Plato, Socrates, and whomever these Greeks were inspired by. This is not to suggest that the tradition we’re talking about here is linear or uncomplicated in its structure (obviously it is not), but merely to note that insofar as people do sometimes try to circumscribe the tradition under one label, they usually use the term “philosophy” in this latter sense.
This argument commits a category mistake, conflating a political-historical grievance (the contingent sociology of the label “philosophy”) with a methodological-epistemic distinction.
Philosophy, as a cognitive enterprise distinct from soteriology, speculative metaphysics, or cultural praxis (cf. Bunge’s demarcation), is defined by its method: logical-analytical rigor aimed at truth-tracking, constrained by empirical reality (cf. Psillos’s hard facts).
The attempt to semantically inflate “philosophy” to include methodologically distinct traditions (e.g., those prioritizing harmony, enlightenment, or doxa over episteme) does not achieve intellectual parity. It achieves conceptual dissolution. It renders the term cognitively useless—an empty honorific—by severing it from the very procedural commitments that give it non-trivial reference. This is not rigor; it is the theology of inclusion.
Depends on how large your world is.