Using Shahzad Bashir’s open-access publication A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures as a baseline, this symposium debates whether and how intellectual history can be done otherwise. Mohamed ‘Arafa follows Bashir’s invitation to explore the potential of open-ended historiographies when he thinks about the viability of a flexible method to interpret Sharī ʿ a. Nader El-Bizri interrogates whether the assemblage of personal experiential accounts offered by Bashir can be framed within the discourse of intellectual history at all. Nauman Faizi (...) reads Bashir’s approach as a radical attempt to open up hermeneutical possibilities. Lena Salaymeh suggests that modern aesthetics can contribute to neo-colonial distortions of the Islamic tradition, rather than offering alternatives to positivist historiography. Bashir proposes in his response that academics adopt generosity as an analytical gesture in their academic writing, a generosity that would enable different ways of being human in the world. (shrink)

There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such (...) as the Sanskritic traditions of pramā ṇ avāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramā ṇ avāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism. (shrink)

Andrea Pitts’ Anzaldúan reading of multiplicitous agency critically weaves together Latinx, Latina feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, and disability theorizing alongside Anzaldúan scholarship to demonstrate how pluralistic communities come together for positive social transformation. In this process, they provide a powerful scholarly resource to Anzaldúan scholarship. Ultimately, Pitts invites us to break away from modes of being that fall into individualism, insularities, binaries, isolation, and even imperialism to imagine instead “new geographies of selves” (32). This revision involves developing an (...) agential capacity that recognizes ours and other’s (nos y otrxs) multiplicitous and complex identities and their interaction. By being open to this complexity, opacity, ambivalence, and the imperative to new ways of being both intangible and tangible radical transformations emerge in practice. However, though rooted in Leonard Harris’ insurrectionist ethics, Pitts recognizes one must leave room for a coalitional process that may not succeed but is always open to interpretation and challenge considering the fluidity of multiplicitous agency that informs it (166). (shrink)

This article argues that if world philosophies are to remain relevant for social emancipation in the present time, they must incorporate critical reflections about the methods and sources of philosophy that were at the center of the African philosophy debates in the 1970s and 1980s. The debates that surrounded the emergence of African philosophy as an academic discipline entailed thorough and innovative methodological reflections on the role of ethnography, language, and genre in philosophical expression. These reflections critically recast the relationship (...) between indigenous traditions and academic texts and between popular and professional philosophical expression, enabling their practitioners to re-think the important questions of what it means to philosophize and who philosophizes. My argument is that these methodological reflections from African philosophy reveal the profound and essential link between methods and content of philosophy and that they must be incorporated as key methodologies for world philosophies to tackle questions of social and political relevance in the present time. (shrink)

Theories of art developed by philosophers of the Islamic era were in large measure unknown when I began my work. This was especially true of philosophers like al-Fārābī, who was unknown as a philosopher of art even in the context in which he is located, Persia. This has changed today. My own work, I hope, has contributed to that change. In this essay, I’ll focus on my journey through art and philosophy and relate it to my theoretical work.

The Virtues by Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe is supposed to be a work about the virtues themselves. Virtue is not limited by language or by race, so one would expect the book to be properly multicultural. However, the entire book is Graeco-Abrahamic, except for a single chapter on Confucianism, which is sometimes erroneous and ultimately below standard. The book is also permeated by an utterly unjustified notion of the instrumentality of virtuosity, which the authors treat as though it (...) were traditional. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea of Mexico and Miguel de Unamuno of Spain are two exemplary philosophers in twentieth-century transatlantic Hispanism. In this article, these thinkers are put in conversation to explore their contrasting orientations toward existence, which reveal both the breadth of modern Hispanic thought and the benefit of Emilio Uranga’s concept of zozobra, in this case applied by holding in tension the differing approaches of Zea and Unamuno rather than choosing one over the other.

The shift towards world philosophies within the academic philosophical landscape is part of the “global movement towards intellectual decolonization.” This critical corrective endeavour and its correlative task of restoring the philosophical enterprise its richness and diversity is taking place against the backdrop of waning belief and intellectual loyalty in the efficacy of a single dominant tradition. By expanding the circle of intellectual engagement to include the various traditions of philosophy, the world-philosophies approach gestures towards a future that is not only (...) open but emancipative. The courage to acknowledge different traditions, philosophical genres, and conceptualizations of the enterprise not only transforms the terms of conversation, but it unshackles the collective creative powers of human imagination. For those who have suffered exclusion, philosophy must dispense with rigid orthodoxies and instead celebrate “the plurality of reason” in the sense of that “intellectual disposition to reflect, to criticize and to ask infinite questions” as it expresses itself in the variety of philosophical traditions at our disposal in this world. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to (re)introduce D. P. Chattopadhyaya (1931–2022, henceforth DPC), one of the key-players in the field of contemporary Indian philosophy, his main books, his community-building activities, and his unique life-story. A modern Rājar ṣ i, DPC was both a philosopher and a statesman who served both as a minister in the Indian government in the 1970s and as the governor of Rajasthan in the early 1990s. The Śvetāśvatara Upani ṣ ad narrates the famous story of (...) two birds sitting on a single branch, one eating a fig, the other watching-witnessing. DPC’s life-story and writings show that the two birds could be one and the same, namely that action and reflection, or engagement and the detachment needed for reflection, do not necessarily exclude one another but can in fact complement and contribute to one another. Relying primarily on DPC’s chapter “A Short Intellectual Autobiography of D. P. Chattopadhyaya,” written by him in 1999, but not forgetting the next decade of his writing-life, this essay focuses on DPC’s contribution in the fields of phenomenology, philosophy of science and mind, and socio-political philosophy, and on his pivotal role in the ongoing attempt to decolonize knowledge towards the fulfillment of the ideal of Svaraj in Ideas, “independent thinking.” DPC is further depicted in the present essay as a comparative philosopher without borders, drawing on materials from different traditions of thinking, and committed to interdisciplinarity, traveling freely between disciplines, languages, eras, and life-experiences. (shrink)

This article recounts one contemporary Muslim philosopher’s journey into the discipline of philosophy, detailing the importance of diversifying the study of philosophy to take it beyond its Anglo-American and Eurocentric boarders along the way.

This essay discusses a core tenet of pessimism, Afropessimism, in particular. Pessimism claims to be a metatheory analyzing the assumptive logics of the system it critiques. Afropessimists hold that a logical treatment of pessimism is unwarranted because pessimism does not employ a logical treatment of its object. We’ll discuss Afropessimism and, by extension, pessimism, in general, on their own terms as metatheory. We’ll see that a metatheory indirectly follows the logic its object follows directly. From this, a metatheory must hold (...) an assumptive logic of its own, even if superficially disavowed. Consequently, we’ll arrive at a puzzling result when, in this particular case, the metatheory’s claims empty its object of its content, hence the pessimism. (shrink)