Quote:
Originally Posted by driveway
Also, when the entirety of your discursive catalogue comes from a single culture, or cultural tradition, it absolutely leads to 'blind spots.' This is the problem with a syllabus for a rational/critical thinking class which is entirely drawn from a single broad culture, and it would most likely colour your conversation with Bob, as, if you're working from similar backgrounds, you're going to have similar reasons to believe X.
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But this is what makes the Western intellectual tradition so rich and enduring - during the classical age and again in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the intellectual field was fiercely contested. Ideas were proposed, championed, challenged, and competed with alternatives. There isn't a single great idea in the Western tradition that wasn't challenged by an alternative, often diametrically opposed, theory within that tradition.
While other civilizations had their day in the sun, by the 17th century intellectual and scientific development outside the West had declined into a moribund state. In the Islamic world this was due to religion increasingly stiffling thought (Taqi ad-Din's observatory in Istanbul was destroyed in 1580), and after Zheng He's final voyage in 1433, Chinese emperors forbade further explorations of discovery and turned inwards. Despite its head start, China made no important discoveries or innovations for centuries, in an era when European thinkers were laying the foundations for virtually all modern science and philosophy.
I'd hazard an assumption that the curriculum of modern Chinese universities is heavily weighted towards 'dead white European males' as well, because those are the ideas and innovations that form the foundation of the modern scientific, economic, and political world (communism itself being a Western idea).
Nobody is suggesting we shouldn't study Confucius, or recognize the contribution Arabic mathematics have made to our knowledge. And in the arts, Arabic and Chinese poetry is sadly neglected in the English-speaking world. But as Corsi says, they should be studied and acknowledged on their own merits, not as representative of Oriental or Arabic thinking. And yes, let's recognize the place in history of Hypatia of Alexandria. But her being a woman should have no bearing on the merit of her mathematical and philosophical work (which we have little detailed knowledge of in the first place).