 Okay. So I'm very pleased to welcome everyone to the first edition of the source world philosophies lecture series. It's mainly designed to provide space to listen to and engage with experts in world philosophies. And we'll be looking in these lectures at key themes and debates and challenges that emerge from the study or research in world philosophies as a broad and diverse approach to philosophy. And this is in fact in the spirit of how philosophy is approached here at source as a very diverse and rich tradition that emerged from the various worlds tradition and rather from solely the western perspective. And so we do value a lot the contribution of African philosophy, Indian philosophy, Eastern philosophy and all that world philosophical traditions to the discourse of philosophy in general. And this series provides a space to do that as well. Today we are beginning with what I think is a very important way to start talking about the very essence of globalizing philosophy and we have an eminence philosopher, Professor Richard King to speak on that topic of reflections on globalizing philosophy. But to start that we would like to call on the subject head of the world philosophies program here at source, Dr. Sean Hawthorne to say a thing or two about the world philosophies program here, and also to properly introduce our guests, Professor Richard King. And just before that please remember to mute yourself, particularly as the lecture is going on, and the lecture will go on for about an hour or have about an hour for questions and comments. And then you can mute yourself to say your mind. Just raise your hand if you need to. Thank you Dr. Sean. Well this good afternoon everyone and welcome to the inaugural lecture of the world philosophies lecture series which we're hosting here at South University of London. I'm Sean Hawthorne and I'm the convener of the BA program in world philosophies which is a program that has really been intent on broadening the panorama of philosophy as a discipline, particularly the themes with which it engages but more importantly the intellectual traditions that it is. I'm very delighted along with Elvis to introduce our first speaker and my dear friend Professor Richard King. I first encountered Richard's work when I was a postgraduate student towards the end of the 1990s. When I read his now very famous book Orientalism and Religion which was published in 1999, in which he addressed and I would say also just put very firmly on the table. One of the most important issues facing the academic study of religions but which scholars have been very slow to engage with and that was the troubling legacy of colonialism and Orientalism and its constitutive role in producing the discipline in shaping its conceptual apparatus and its priorities. It was one of those texts I think we could say to coin a philosophical phrase, which shook the field out of its dogmatic slumber. Although I would say that since then there's still been a lot of work to be done. Now I've returned to this text repeatedly in the last 20 years both in my own research, certainly in my teaching to explore the politics of knowledge production and knowledge circulation and the insidious force of colonial spirituality and shaping how we think and indeed in telling us who this we is that we repeatedly evoke in the Academy, but also teaches us how to escape the bind of coloniality in our disciplinary context how to avoid its repetition. This work has really been a continual conversation partner for me over the years and I benefited hugely from his careful, humane and illuminating scholarship. Now, even in this text, however, founded as focused as it was on on European colonial production of the category religion and its construction, particularly what we now name Hinduism. Now itself was replete with philosophical themes and reflections. And this is no surprise given that Richard from the very start of his career, straddled both the discipline of philosophy and the discipline of the study of religions and much of his very extensive work in numerous published volumes journal articles conference papers and the like, whether his text on Indian philosophy, or the other one on the relationship between Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist thought. However, as many articles really pursuing a decolonizing and post colonial line of questions has sought to find ways of speaking of and thinking with non European intellectual traditions in ways that not only do justice to the rich variety of these traditions, and refusing to reduce them to that most colonial of tools, the category of religion, but also recognizes and puts to work their own conceptual apparatus in order to undo the hegemony of Western thought, and to enable the decolonial work of thinking Richard has been a great friend to us at sell us in helping us in fact to put together the be a world philosophies program, serving as an external examiner for the program and engaging with many fruitful and nourishing conversations about the potential of world philosophies to enable the long overdue overhaul of philosophy itself. Richard has worked in an impressive number of institutions University of Sterling University of Derby Vanderbilt in the States Glasgow and finally more most recently the University of Kent and it was there that he worked to establish a similar program in global philosophy. And so I'm so pleased he's here today to tell us about that work to help us in our ongoing reflections about what decolonizing philosophy needs to look like, and perhaps more poignantly, the particular challenges this involves in a context of the neoliberal market and its instrumentalization of metrics as the measure of intellectual quality. So please join me in very warmly welcoming Richard to saw us. And, and to, well, just welcome him to saw us. I'm really looking forward to hearing what Richard is speaking of today, which is really global philosophy is possibility is intellectual force and value, and the title of the talk is reflections on globalizing philosophy. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sean for that lovely kind and insightful introduction. I'm just going to share my screen and, and the PowerPoint that I intend to use because I think that will make things just a little bit easier. Let me see if I can. I'm sure there's an easy way of doing this but how's that. Can you see that perfect. Great. I'm in a privileged position. Oh, first of all, thanks for inviting me to so I have to say it's looking a lot like my office. I'm in a kind of privileged position here because there are three dimensions of this that experience I want to bring to this that the first is that I two of them relate to saw us and one of them relate to Kent. I was consulted as an external consultant by the institution when the idea of world philosophies was first mooted as an idea at so I so I was there watching the process right from the very early stages and then subsequently. Sean said I served until recently as the external examiner for for that be a program so I've seen the early days of that program. And then thirdly as Sean also said, in my own institution at the University of Kent, I came up with the idea of developing a degree which which I called global philosophies. And there's some questions there about about that choice of title which maybe we can get into in the discussion but that that was the choice that was eventually started on and what I'd like to do today is door upon some kind of theoretical ideas but mainly in a way that's a little unusual for me because I usually like revel in the abstract and the theoretical. This is talk about some of the more practical aspects of offer offering a degree of teaching world philosophies based upon my experience both at a slight distance as an external observer but so as but also in my own capacity when I was head of department of religious studies at Kent in terms of developing such a degree so so I'd like to begin by talking about some of the challenges and what I saw as the responses to those challenges in globalizing philosophy. I'll talk a little bit about some of those issues and how they fed in very practical ways into my structuring of the degree at Kent. And then we will look, I'll look at some of the kind of challenges, some of them institutional some of them cultural some of them economic to that whole project. And then hopefully at the end, we'll have time not only for questions but also I'm really interested to hear your thoughts and have a discussion about this whole project which I see so as as at the forefront of. So, I hope that you find these reflections of interest. So, in terms of challenges to the globalization of globalization of philosophy I would say that the first main one that I struggled with quite a lot in my own work is the question of Eurocentrism. All the essentially summed up as the West is best bias, which is pretty well established within not surprisingly, you might argue the Western Academy. Or the idea, not even that the West is best but West is normative that that the way that Western culture Western civilization has thought about the world is necessarily the natural or normal or best way of thinking about the world. And in reflecting upon this, I found that one of the ways to embed a response to that within the development of a degree is to reflect upon and recognize the social and cultural location of thought. I think that's an important element of the process of globalizing philosophy is recognizing that what people are calling philosophy in different cultural contexts are formed within those contexts. So thought doesn't occur in the abstract, even though one can discuss it in the abstract, it's formed in social, cultural and institutional ways. And this this point is sometimes lost in mainstream philosophical discussion the idea being we're not really interested in the social or cultural location of ideas. We want to discuss them, if you like, on their own logical or philosophical merit. So there's a kind of abstraction that occurs that that I think does a disservice to our understanding of the complexity of those traditions and where they, where they come from. The second challenge which I'll come back to also at the end is one of disciplinary or institutional challenge. And this is the issue of disciplinary territorialization. So as in some regards was in a unique position for an institution of its kind in that it does not have a freestanding independent philosophy department already in existence. The challenge that I had at the University of Kent was that there was already a philosophy department that did philosophy Western philosophy, mainly but not exclusively in the kind of analytic framework, or style, if you like. So that creates a different kind of politic that perhaps is worth reflecting upon in terms of how you would develop such a degree, given that there's a department already in existence which is using that title. And the response to that I would say depends on local institutional conditions so so as we'll have a different set of challenges or did have in relation to that. And at Kent I had my own challenges in terms of keeping on board the philosophy department in these processes. Also, one of the aspects behind the naming of the degree. It became clear that there was a great deal of anxiety, let's say about the use of the term philosophy at Kent outside of the department of philosophy. And so that's one reason why the degree became known as a global philosophies, because the study of philosophies was seen as somehow a kind of study of worldviews that sounds like something a religious studies department might do. But it isn't philosophy, which is what we do in philosophy. And so there's that there's a kind of territorial claim being made there, which affects the title of the degree. But there's a third issue which I think is one that many people who work in the study of ancient medieval and historical forms have to encounter. And that's what I would call presentism, which is the deeply embedded set of assumptions in the modern Academy, which tend to prioritize sometimes without reflection. It's a kind of secularized model of modernity, and a kind of implicit myth of progress. I see this, this kind of attitude being expressed quite a lot amongst colleagues in other departments who sort of think for instance that because I worked in religious studies that religion is somehow pass a is out of date is not relevant anymore. So those kinds of issues. One has to deal with, and I decided that in thinking through how to develop the program at Kent, that we would meet those full on. So one of the the kind of guiding principles I had in developing this degree was was to challenge the exceptionalism of those accounts, because I think it's only if you if you do that, that you are actually able to step outside of a very narrow disciplinary framework in considering what is and isn't philosophy. So, focusing upon one of the points I brought up the locatedness of thought. I would suggest that Western philosophy is often presented not always and it does depend upon the style Western philosophy of course is not a singular thing. It's often presented particularly within those forms of or philosophical traditions that are sometimes called Anglo American or more analytically oriented. As the discovery of universal truths based upon the abstract exercise of reason, the Greek logos. But the problem, and that but it's a big but if you pardon the phrase is that philosophy will in fact look different, depending upon its historical and cultural location. So we have to accept this point I think. Otherwise, we are assuming that the conversations that we might be familiar with when I say we here I'm thinking of white, those who are trained within the white Western Academy. The conversations that we are used to are not necessarily the only ways in which conversations can be had. I would address this point to students by asking them to reflect upon when they go to a party. Maybe they just come the freshers at university they go to a party. I don't know anyone. And, and they may be experiencing social anxiety they're trying to fit in they're trying to break into pre existing groups who are already having a conversation. In terms of that conversation. There's the issue of how how you enter into it do you enter into it and speak about the experience of those within that group maybe they come from a different part of the country or a different part of the world. And your background experience isn't the same. In other words, we shouldn't expect when we, when we go to these parties, when we develop something called world philosophies or global philosophies that the kind of thoughts that we will encounter will will will be the same. There will be local differences there will be different points of emphasis that's not to say there are commonalities and I'm not making the kind of radical separatist claim that these are cannot talk across cultures, but we have to accept the reality of difference and not see that difference as a way of excluding some and not others from a widening of the conversation, which is what I see the globalization of philosophy as fundamentally about a widening of the human conversation. Now, when we look back in Western culture to the whole question of the origins of philosophy. We'll see that there are basically two main strands there's the those who have argued that philosophy has begun independently different in different places. Africa, India, the West and so on Greece. I do argue very very specifically for the Greek origins of philosophy the word philosophy of course is philosophy, the love of wisdom. And I've given here just some examples on each side of writers and thinkers who have argued on the from these two different points of view. I would say that in recent centuries, since this that debate arose, it was those on the left, who argued for the pluralistic origins of philosophy, who tended to be in the ascendancy. And that's not been the case in more recent times and certainly throughout the 20th century. We've seen this idea that philosophy began in one particular place in Greece at a particular time, the specificity thesis if you like, or the. That has come to dominate 20th century accounts of the history of philosophy and if you look at some of the key textbooks for instance which is often a way of tracking what what the kind of general perception within the academic circles are. There was overwhelmingly a tendency to locate the beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece. And of course this is part of a longer tail of European exceptionalism. The idea that Greece is the birthplace of philosophy that's the birthplace of many of our ideas of democracy. This involves of course a very, very specialized or specific way of approaching philosophy, seeing it as something that only really developed, or developed in its most perfect form if you like, as some might put it in Greece. This is often been portrayed as, as the triumph of logos the spark of reason of logical argumentation over ancient mythos myth. And of course this is conceptualized in characterizations of Socrates. And the fact that he got into a great deal of trouble for questioning aspects of the mythological aspect of the gods and focused upon the importance of drawing out wisdom through dialogue through the Socratic dialogue. I want to tell you that this story, which is quite modern in many respects is itself an origin myth for philosophy, and it's something that philosophy should investigate should it should be part of the remit. That's something I have something to say about. In regard, I draw your attention if you're not already aware of it of the interesting article by Robert Bernasconi who's who's written quite a bit about philosophy and race and philosophy. Where he makes this ask this particularly pertinent question. Like he says, of the apparent tension between the alleged universality of reason. And the fact that it's up holders are so intent on localizing its historical instantiation. And he goes on. I'll just put the longer quote here because I think this draws out some of the implications that that he would see from this. He says one cannot understand why there has never been a serious debate about the origin of philosophy, unless one understands what is at stake in the question. Even if the history of the discipline and the conception of the discipline that history supports that history supports is not racist in designs. The question must still be addressed as to whether it is racist in its effects. So philosophers experience themselves as excluded, in part because of the systematic diminishment of the achievements of their group. Philosophers almost everywhere are implicated. The problem must be addressed not just in research, but also at the institutional level in each and every department. And of course I want to focus in this talk on that last point upon addressing that, excuse me, at the institutional level. So let me say a few things just to kind of pull this down into some specifics that we can then pull apart and discuss later of how I conceptualize global philosophies at the University of Kent. How does global philosophies as as as it's called or was called that's something we can get into. How is it differ from a traditional philosophy degree. So let me outline ways in which I think it's an attempt to be different. Firstly, perhaps somewhat obviously is the global remit of the degree. That would be explicitly cross cultural and comparativist in orientation. Those of us who work or are disciplined within religious studies will know of the writings of Max Mueller, the Indologist, and his famous axiom which he took from adapting Goethe that in the study of religion, he who knows one knows none. This idea that to truly understand something you must look at, you must make the cross cultural move you must look at instantiations of it outside of one particular example, which he was putting forward Mueller as a kind of basis for a science of religions, a science must be, you must be able to test the hypothesis you must be able to take a have other examples to kind of test what you're studying. So there's a global on the cross cultural dimension to that. Secondly, I very much argued a Kent that had to be a historical element to this process that there had to be a sense in which we were engaging philosophical ideas, but also engaging in the global history of ideas. One of my colleagues in philosophy felt that there was a strong separation here, and that's for although I think that's partly an illusion. There's quite a lot of history of philosophy in philosophy degrees, traditionally. But the idea that there's a kind of separation of method and work here was summed up in the idea that the belief that what we were doing in a religious studies department. Was a kind of history of ideas, we were kind of describing different points of view presenting them. Whereas what they're doing in philosophy is they're directly engaging with truth questions with questions of philosophy as opposed to history of ideas. The distinction is overly drawn but but for me it was important to highlight the fact that this degree would have would be also history of a global history of ideas. It's also important when using words like global that you recognize also the importance of the local. So what I tried to embed in this degree was attention to the cultural social linguistic and historical context of ideas, something that can perhaps be summed up in the, the idea of the social construction of knowledge. So I thought that the ideas don't just exist in the abstract that they occur in particular places in particular times. And that those thoughts are thought through the medium of particular languages, a point that is sometimes not considered, let's say in traditional philosophical discussions. And then the fourth aspect of this that I thought was important to embed in the degree was a certain reflexivity. The idea that if you were studying this degree, you would be engaging critically with issues of definitions of boundaries of the categories that you use. And also would be asked to reflect upon the question of translation. What goes on when you translate something, particularly when you translate a set of ideas or concepts that are embedded in a particular institutional form and language. As we all know, when you translate something to put it rather simplistically, you add something but you also take something away because it's a translation. And so part of the idea there is, is to be reflexive to be aware of that, that, that, that process that transformation, and that those definitions that we use the categories that we use and the translations that we use were part of the thing that we are studying. They are up for discussion in a kind of open-ended way. And that what we're doing when we're teaching students how to do this is we're making them reflect upon those fundamental conceptual tools that we are using. Now I'm mentioning this because when I assume it's the same at the University, at SOAS, but at the University of Kent when you are developing a new degree, you have to map it. It's program aims to a set of subject benchmarks. And so in developing this degree, I mapped the global philosophy's degree in relation to three different areas because I felt that this, and I'm mentioning this because I think this captures something of the phenomenon of the degree and what it's trying to do. So the three subject benchmark statements that I drew upon were philosophy, fairly obviously, but also languages, cultures and societies which allows for the historical and the translational and the hermeneutic questions that I see part and parcel of this sort of degree. And then thirdly, area studies because anyone who's studying world philosophies or global philosophies would have to be involved in the study of specific regions. So those were the three, the three kind of defining benchmarks in the kind of administrative process of developing this degree. And it will be interesting. I don't remember what what you did at SOAS in terms of the benchmarks but when we get to the discussion it will be interesting to know which benchmark statements you used. So in developing this what did I see as the kind of distinctive components of that degree of the global philosophies degree. Well, philosophy often presents itself as, or at least philosophers present what they're doing as the examination of fundamental or first principles. So you might do science, you might be studying religion, you might be studying the mind. But what philosophers do is they, they are studying that but they're also studying the fundamental assumptions and principles underlying those fields. I see that as a constitutive aspect of what a philosophical approach is about. One of the things that I found strange and this relates back to Bernosconi's point is that what we, while we'll, we see courses on philosophy of religion or philosophy of mind philosophy of science. What we don't see and I think philosophers might try to argue that this is because it's implicit in what they do but I'm not sure that it is in practice. As we don't see the philosophy of philosophy. We don't see that first stage examination of the very principle of what philosophy is foregrounded within the subject. What we often find is that students are introduced to philosophy and, and the different ways of doing it but they're introduced to it often in a historical way. And that historical way usually embeds a canon of who are philosophers and who aren't. And because that canon is usually heavily defined by European civilization. It tends to embed a set of assumptions about philosophy which are strongly linked to the European tradition and to that tradition which locates itself in Greece, for instance. If you start, if you say that the first philosophers were like Thales, the pre-socratic thinker or you start looking at Plato and Socrates, you're already, even if you're not explicitly doing that, you're implicitly passing on a set of assumptions about what philosophy might be in its first principle. And so I, I felt that a degree such as this has to foreground, or as I would like to see complete the philosophy project, because the philosophy project is incomplete, if it does not investigate itself, and its own foundations. So the philosophy of philosophy is itself an aspect of that process that's one way to put it anyway. In terms of what world philosophies or global philosophies entails, I just briefly want to outline two models. There are other ways you can conceptualize this, and I'm sure we can complicate this, but for the sake of the discussion. The first one, the first model of world philosophy I would describe as adjunctive. It's liberal, multicultural, in its intention, which is to extend, essentially, Western philosophical discussions. I would often come across, quote, open-minded philosophers in various departments of philosophy and institutions I've worked in, who were interested in the work that I was doing. And what it's talked to me about the philosophical questions as they saw it. And it would soon become clear to me that, for them, this was about finding correlates of their own sets of conversations within, in my case, Indian traditions, and then translating them into the terms of that conversation, and then engaging in a discussion. And this is, at some certain level, a kind of laudable thing, an extension of discussion and so on. But there was rarely a reflection upon the issue of the translation of those materials into the Western linguistic and conceptual framework. And this relates to what I considered to be a superior paradigm, which is to see world philosophy as a transformative exercise. That is, it involves an expansion of what philosophy means. And that expansion means something that is between, and perhaps beyond, specific traditions of thought. So, from that point of view, when you bring Indian philosophical ideas, let's say, into a discussion that is about a particular issue, the way in which that's approached, the linguistic differences, the historical and cultural and institutional factors that form those different discussions will create something different from those two. And that's much more than a kind of adjunctive idea of world philosophy. That's where one really is attempting to open up conversations and transform them in the process. And this project is very much part of what I would call the decolonization of wisdom. And I just wanted to mention, this is one of my favorite quotes from Michel Foucault, Foucault, in many regards, doesn't represent a good example of a post-colonial or decolonial thinker, and I'm not very much into that. But this quote, which is from an interview that he had in Japan in 1978, I find quite an intriguing and an interesting one. This is what Foucault says. He's asked the question, by the way, can, he's in Japan, he's being asked whether Asian thought can help the crisis of Western thought. The question is the leading question to start with, but it's one that he accepts the premise of, and he replies in the following manner. It's true. European thought finds itself at a turning point. This turning point on an historical scale is nothing other than the end of imperialism. The crisis of Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism. This has produced no supreme philosopher who excels in signifying that crisis. And he goes on, for it is the end of the era of Western philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of Europe, or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe. To say I'm not holding up Foucault as particularly a good example of someone who fulfills that project. I just find his analysis interesting because what he's suggesting is that the impasse, the crisis as he sees it of Western thought is precisely linked to the fact that the West is no longer supported by the pillars of empire. They disappear first in the military and political contexts, but they also, their underpinning of claims of intellectual superiority are also lost in that process. And in that process, the Western philosopher is exposed in the parochialism of the original claim that the West has or invented philosophy. In my own work, I have been interested in this process of translating the love of wisdom, and particularly the question of who gets to decide what is it that we call philosophy. And so in a number of works in different kinds of ways, there are different ways to approach what I've written, I guess. But one of them is to consider the ways in which traditions of thought become classified as isms or religions when brought into discussion with European modes of thought. So many of the universalizing or globalizing intellectual traditions of the pre-modern world are the ones that have been classified by us in the West as religions or isms. Here are some examples, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam. All of the above have been translated into Western Christian, arguably in some cases post-Christian paradigms, through this concept of religion. And what I've tried to do in various works from Orientalism and Religion Onwards is try and highlight that and unpack ways in which, through that categorical move of placing them within the category of religion, this separates them from what the West would call philosophy, science, medicine, politics, because of course in the classic or if you like Westphalian worldview, that there's the separation of the secular and the religious. And so there are certain domains that are seen as public, philosophy, science, medicine and politics, and certain domains that are seen as private religion being a clear example. And if we don't question this separation, which is a separation that I feel quite strongly at an individual level, because I've always thought of myself as a philosopher, but I've never been institutionally recognized as a philosopher. I've always been located within a religious studies department. And so that's where I'm disciplined by the institution. And so it's always been a struggle to have conversations with other people who call themselves philosophers because they don't consider what I'm doing to be philosophy. So it's something that I throughout my career felt quite personally, but also I think reflective of a much larger issue about the classification of non-Western cultures and traditions. And of course the kind of bottom line, the outcome of this is that it's through the unquestioning use of these separations that modern so-called secular Europe has been secured as the center and the focal point of world history. You get people like Dipesh Chakrabarti arguing that history essentially is mostly written as a kind of Xerox or a photocopy of European history which is then adapted to fit regions. So you have Indian history, Korean history and so on, which are essentially repeating some of the categorical assumptions of European historiography, but adapted to the region. But without thinking through the whole idea of what it might be to write a history from that region rather than of that region. So that brings up the question of what counts as world philosophy, the whole question of boundaries and definitions. And at one level, of course, it's relatively straightforward given what has been said to say what would count as world philosophy. It's, for want of a better phrase, global intellectual thought, the various philosophical traditions or intellectual traditions of the world. You might argue there's question begging there, you're already deciding that that's called philosophy. But certainly to expand philosophy and onto a world stage, examples, Greco-Roman, European, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Jewish, Christian, Egyptian, African and so on. These are the kinds of things that one would imagine encountering within a world philosophy degree to bring it down to that kind of curriculum level. But if you base the construction of the degree upon the second model that I outlined, the transformative model, then world philosophy is not a case of narrowly finding correlates or mirrors of western modern western philosophical discussions and traditions or even a Christian theology. We have to, if you like, cast the light much further than that because we can't assume that the particular cultural, historical, institutional conditions under which philosophy emerges as a distinct discipline in the west will have occurred elsewhere. And so we have to be prepared to cast our light quite widely. Now in trying to develop what this degree was about, which is again something that a degree that remains up for discussion, even within itself. I took, again, very much reflected my own youthful experience. As always when developing undergraduate degrees I think it's important to reflect what was I thinking when I was 17. I'm probably unusual. I suspect we all are as academics from, from most people in this regard. But when I decided to go to university I decided to do, I wanted to do philosophy. But I was worried because I looked into it that what counted as philosophy, when I looked at the courses seemed very, very Western. And I developed an interest since I was about 14 in what at the time I would have called Eastern philosophy. And I wanted to learn more about that. And so I learned even at that stage that if I wanted to study that I couldn't go to a philosophy department I had to go to a religious studies department. So I ended up doing a joint degree I did philosophy and religious studies. And so I'd be able to have the kind of in depth study of Western philosophers in the philosophy part of my degree. But then if I wanted to look at anything non Western, then I could cross the corridor and do that in religious studies. But the, the kinds of questions that drove me to want to do a degree in philosophy, I discovered were not really discussed very often in in the philosophy courses that I was doing. We weren't discussing fundamental questions of meaning and identity. We would discuss quine and logical forms and we would discuss qualia theories of perception philosophy of mine we would we would look at ethics questions, but questions about fundamental identity. What what what is my life about. What's the meaning of it where does meaning come from these kinds of questions whilst philosophers in the West talk about them aren't necessarily those that are foregrounded in philosophy degrees. So that turned me also towards the religious studies department because of course in religious studies those questions are very much part of the discussion. And so in terms of folding this in. I decided that the study of world philosophies at Kent at least should involve reflections upon world myth and literature. That we should look widely with a broad spectrum in trying to find philosophical ideas and thoughts. What humans have thought about the nature of the universe of the human of life and meaning of gender and sex relations of ethics of community of our relationship to nature. So these things attitudes expressions of them can be found within what we would call mythological material. And so I folded that in to the degree. Now one might argue that's that's there's some issues there and I'm happy for us to discuss that but that was a decision that I, I made, we can discuss that. We broad remit for this degree at Kent we had for want of classifying this we had philosophies logos but also myths or mythos as as the things that would be studied. So the questions that came up and again this is where one is also thinking locally and institutionally was how to relate to a broad series of cultural phenomena that might not necessarily be, let's say, always focusing upon the cognitive within my department at Kent, half of my colleagues were not really philosophers they worked within what you might call the sociology of religion. And, and so the question would be, there was a very practical question of how do you deliver this degree in a way that matches the staff that you have. And, and so this brought up the question which I think is also one worth reflecting upon for anyone developing degrees such as this is whether you should include the study of rituals and social institutions. It's, it's one thing to extend the discussion to looking at myths stories if you like. But also, much of how people express their sense of who they are or their relationship to other to animals or nature or to, or to each other in terms of gender and so on are embedded in rituals and social institutions. And so perhaps that's also a part of a broadened out philosophical remit. And that's, that's one for reflection. Of course, global philosophies at Kent was about the study of worldviews, both ancient and contemporary. The kind of remit I felt for that was what, what is it, what is it that has oriented people sense of human identity and meaning, both historically. And today, in the early 21st century, I feel more probably than at any point in the history of British higher education, when developing a, an undergraduate degree. We are forced by circumstances to think upon that. In terms of relevance and market. It's a fairly always a bad idea. You won't hear me say that very often. But in this context, it is, it is good to reflect upon what, what, what speaks to people what will speak to 17 and 18 year olds. In terms of meeting their interests of the life that they're living and the world that they're entering into. And that means a focus upon the contemporary. So just looking at ancient worldviews or what has often been classified as the world religions, I consider that to be part of the remit of what global philosophies will be about. I think it's also about looking at the forms of human identity and meaning construction that are prevalent in the modern world. So consumer capitalism, scientific rationalism, atheism, these are these are all ways in which people define their sense of who they are, either through the life that they practice or through explicit adherence to a particular view. So for me. I think this is also true for religion as I understand it. Part of the remit of such a degree would involve the examination of capitalism of scientific rationalism of atheism as aspects of ways in which people think about who they are and what the world is about. And then I just wanted to say a few things about the, the importance of the world or the global aspect as I say draw things to a close. For me, one of the reasons I chose the name global rather than world. You can decide on whether you think that's good idea or not was I wanted the degree to include within it. Some reflections on the nature of the global. And of globalization itself as a, as a term that requires understanding and interrogation, because it's, it's also the case that when people talk about globalization, they usually think of it as a very contemporary phenomenon. But I think that it's worth considering the, the argument, the idea that that what we now call the world religions are often the partially globalized ideologies and belief systems of the previous era. The spread of Buddhism from India across become a pan Asian movement and in the modern period, beyond that is an example of a kind of partial globalization. One of the reasons why, you know, we, we study, and why I study Buddhism is partly because of its success in that regard so we can come to understand something of notions of the global and of globalizing processes through looking at those traditions. In other words, part of the import of the world, the world of the global aspect would be the study of previous globalizations. Examples the spread of Buddhism the Roman Empire that the missionary spread of Christianity of Islam, the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, of course, the American Empire. And these, these moments, these historical moments, these, these trends, these processes, I see as part of the remit of the degree, but I also wanted to mark what I thought was significant about this, this degree. The two fundamental levels for the level of the of the individual student and at the macro level so at the level of the individual student in that degree the idea is that we would also study now the contemporary what would be folded into that would be what I think many students who become interested in such degrees are driven by, which is their own individual search for existential meaning around the world. I mean that's certainly I think one of the dimensions of my own choice to choose the degree that I did and I think that we still have within student within our student body students who are on that kind of quest. Part of what this degree offers for them. But also at the macro level. It's the study of now, in terms of reflections upon the global, as it is now on the socio political global media politics, the spread of global capitalism the rise of digital technologies. These kinds of communities that are forming in that context. What are the new philosophies and ideas that are linked to these new technologies and these new movements. These kinds of ideas and these kinds of modules already in existence at Kent and I'm sure you have some at so as to, but they were not considered philosophy necessarily but but within the remit of this degree. They were considered them part of the, the whole process. Of course there's a, there's a practical aspect to this. If you're building something like world or global philosophies. You have, you have a challenge which is not available. What do you have in terms of academic staffing modules that are already in existence. How can you draw upon other departments as they're classified to build this rather ambitious, I have to say project but let me let me briefly tell you what I did at Kent. Just so you have a sense of how I tried to create something out of very little at the University of Kent. So Kent what happened in the degree is that at the beginning in stage one students would do to core courses. They would call the global search for meaning. And in that that was really an introduction to the degree to the kinds of things that I've been talking about to the idea of philosophy to the idea of the study of myth. Maybe the study of ritual though that would come in the second module. And that would of course vary according to the staff involved, but would basically be exploring this very broad frame of exploring what it is for how humans have made sense of themselves and the world that they live in. And then in the second semester they do a core course called Ethics Society in the Good Life. This was the module where some of my sociology of religion colleagues could contribute. And there it's looking at different notions of what it is to lead a good life and that again that can be these courses are created as shells in that modern way in which we do this with different outcomes and so on, so that different staffing components can work within that dependent upon conditions like sabbatical remember when people had sabbatical. And so, so there would be reflections on the good life ethics and society in different cultural contexts. Feeding into that, I folded into this some courses that weren't core for the degree, but were core for another degree that I developed at Kent which was a degree in Asian studies. And so students would would either do an introduction to South Asian traditions or an introduction to East Asian traditions. We didn't have the resources to be able to expand beyond that in terms of other traditions and other cultures. But it was important to embed within this the idea that you couldn't go through this course without some kind of at least early level engagement with, in this case, Asian traditions. And then, and then when students moved into stage two, they would have a core course called, it's not called that anymore but it was called understanding global philosophies. And essentially what this was was a theory, a method course for global philosophies it's it's how might you do this thing that I've just been talking about for an hour. And so that was one of the theoretical hermeneutic political cross cultural issues involved in that. And I, I put there the kind of extended description of what that module was about but but as you can see it was quite broad. Again, reflective of a kind of pragmatic need to allow for different staff members contributing their different expertise. The focus there was not upon a reflection on different cultural traditions of thought, but upon the very kind of nitty gritty for me theoretical categorical and methodological issues that are involved when you move your study into a cross cultural space. I mean that that might be seen and I think it is as quite bare bones the rest of the degree was constructed out of modules that were taught at the University of Kent in a variety in the philosophy department in religious studies department courses on African history. Sociology courses on media and on China and so on so that so there was, there was a wide remit of modules that were pulled in at that point but this became the kind of spine of the degree. So let me finish my remarks with some notes of caution and the tale of defeat because essentially what when I developed the degree program in global philosophies at Kent. Probably at arguably the worst time ever to introduce a new humanities degree, because we are, as you will all be aware, suffering a kind of crisis of the humanities in in a higher education environment that has been marketized. And with state with with government regularly making statements suggesting that perhaps humanities aren't like the best degree to do maybe you should do stem degrees instead. And so in that context, the fundamental question which I think so as is is much better place than Kent was is the question of does the institutional platform. match the scale scope and vision. So it's all very well at one level having this kind of grand vision of of what philosophy might be in a globalized context. But if the institution cannot support that, ultimately, through a variety of factors, not just academic staff specialisms but also at the basic level of humanities programs are shrinking. And then, you know, that that's that could be a killer issue and I should say that, as far as I'm aware, the degree as not being presented to students for 2021 access I looked. I left Kent but I looked at the UCAS page and I couldn't find find it for 2021, although it's there for 2020, which doesn't surprise me because it's very difficult to find a space for something called global philosophies. You've necessarily got the, if you like, brand recognition of philosophy when you also have a degree in philosophy being offered independently within the same institution. And that brings me to the second note of caution, which is the politics of intra intra institutional competition, who gets to use the label philosophy. And has had has the advantage of not having within itself a freestanding philosophy department, which enabled that space to, if you pardon this way of speaking about it to be colonized by religious studies. I didn't have that advantage at Kent, where there was already an existing philosophy degree and understandable anxieties about my attempt to introduce something that might be seen as a challenge to that degree. And that was one reason why I was not allowed to use the word philosophy. I had to pluralize it to philosophies. And I found that some, some, some of my colleagues would suggest that they'd have some students who they would consider less interested in the analytic more interested in the spiritual. And they would say, oh, well, maybe you want to do global philosophies because maybe this isn't the right place for you. But, but so there is an issue there of, of intra institutional territory. But of course, in this time that we live in bottom lines and the economic environment are crucial. And fundamentally, anyone who's had to do this in any British institution knows that the fundamental question that's asked of the academics is, is there a market for such programs. That's always something that one has to foreground in getting these things accepted by institutions. It will be lovely if we could be driven by the academic vision but there's also the the kind of pragmatic market based approach. I would argue, I mean, so as has been successful in this regard and I'm interested to hear more about that. But I would argue that actually one of the challenges that I'm about to mention is actually a demonstration that there is a market for these degrees. And that's the question of cultural politics. And so as I think had some backlash about this when the degree was introduced in places like the Daily Mail and so on, with claims about ignoring the white philosophers and so on. But what we've seen since then even more is a backlash against processes of decolonization going on within culture with we. There's a kind of, there's the black lives matter movement which is an incredibly important movement and moment, but there's also the reaction to black lives matter which we're seeing particularly in. And I thought it was particularly in American and British societies but I also noticed recently discussions with in France about what they saw as the importation of American theory in the form of critical race theory and decolonization approaches, which is ironic because of course, anybody who works in those fields knows that even though those kinds of debates are quite well developed within Western within the American Academy, many of the fundamental theorists are like Christopher, or French, like Gustave, Franz Fanon, Foucault, Derrida and so on. And so, but, but what this reflects is a kind of reaction against what American conservatives are called cultural Marxism or critical race theory we've even seen the politicians criticizing critical race theory. And I note, I think today, a government minister saying that to focus upon colonialism in school teaching in Britain would be, you know, adding on too many subjects a dilution of quality and so on and this kind of resistance to these kinds of developments and decolonizing trends. But for me, that in itself, those controversies actually demonstrate the cultural relevance of these kinds of approaches and these kinds of degrees, because they reflect not only the shifting geopolitical context of our time, but they're also now hot button issues within our society and our culture. So, that's, I think I'll stop there and that will give us a chance to have any questions and discussion that might come out of that. Thank you so very much, Richard. I mean, I think we had a lot of information that got us thinking from all directions. Very rich and very carefully developed. Thank you so much. Sean was right about the quality of lecture we're going to get today and we did get it. So, without Western Time, who like questions and comments to a match, please use the raise hand feature and go ahead with your questions. So, yeah, let's begin with Val. Hi, thank you. Thank you so much for this extremely interesting talk. My question is more, I guess, philosophical. And I mean with the, with the issue of like using the word philosophy or like philosophies plural and I mean, so thinking about kind of like an ideal world situation right in which like other than other philosophical traditions are taken seriously in their own right as proper principles but on the same footing as the kind of Western tradition stemming from the Greek world or whatever. I mean, is there a use in that world for the word philosophy. I mean, even today right in in the kind of very narrow way that we use the word philosophy to look at the Western tradition. There's already an extreme dilution of that term right I mean philosophers who are working in philosophy of science do very very different work from philosophers who are working on critical theory and so to what extent is this even useful now, but in the broader sense of like looking at other traditions who actually do philosophy differently right the use of that I think is maybe comes into question. We see the point of, you know, we don't live in that ideal world. And so there is a need for using this term philosophy just, you know to create a sense that actually these are valid traditions that just look at things differently. It doesn't mean that they're not that they're lesser than the Western tradition and so on and so forth. So, yeah, sorry if this is a bit confused. I've been thinking about this recently and yeah I would love to hear your slightly clearer thoughts on this. Thank you very much. Thanks Phil. No, I think that that's very clear. Yes, I think that the question of what counts as philosophy is for me something that should absolutely be at the foreground of this kind of project. And it's something that probably would you would never come to a definitive answer to, because there are different ways in which you can respond to the question I mean you could say for instance, as some have. Well, you know, philosophy refers specifically to this thing, philosophy that the Greeks invented. It's a particular kind of way of doing things of thinking. And, and it only happens in the West. Unless it's exported in that kind of way. And whilst that can be seen as a kind of ethnocentric construction of philosophy is a position that one can take, because one can say, because I'm assuming that one isn't necessarily saying there. There, there is no interesting, let's say abstract intellectual systematic thinking that went on outside of the West. If you're making that claim that you're making an ethnocentric, perhaps even racist claim, but if you're, but if you're simply saying there's something in the West that's very very particular and specific and it's this kind of Greek based origin tradition of critical reflection. You could make the case that that's very, very, because if you don't do that, then you have to give up the universal claim that philosophers often make that that philosophy is about the search for wisdom, wherever it occurs. And so, I think there are different ways in which you could you could kind of approach the split that question as long as we're clear about the implications of how we define philosophy. And I think that because it's a definitional question. We always have to look at the context of the discussion. I can follow someone down different lines of argument about whether there is such a thing as Indian philosophy. There is Indian systematic thought. But I can equally say, was there anything like darshana or anviksiki which is kind of analytic investigative reasoning in Sanskrit traditions, is there such a thing in the West. And so we can engage in that kind of discussion, but we have to keep in mind. Not only the definitional question but the politic of it because of course one of the reasons why we want to hold on to the idea of philosophy is about cultural prestige. The way that philosophy has been used to present, particularly when it's used in a kind of ethnocentric way to say the West has philosophy to make often to make some kind of claim that well it's only in European forms of thought that the kind of highest forms of rationality have been expressed we find this for instance in in Hegel at certain points in what he's saying, and, and other other thinkers. So this in that point of view we have to also recognize the history in that, of course theology was originally the queen of the sciences in in the medieval university, but in the modern university after the humboldt, in a sense of a university philosophy was established as the queen of the sciences. I would argue that today in contemporary Britain. Business studies is probably the queen of sciences in terms of the most dominant model for and success as well. But still there's this cultural prestige associated with the idea of philosophy as long as there's cultural prestige and a claim about higher forms of thinking, then I think it's perfectly acceptable for us to say, hold on, there are forms of thinking that we could call philosophy beyond Euro American thought. Thank you, could I could I do a quick follow up on that. Yeah, is that okay with the so as part of things. Thanks. So actually, I'm working at the moment on kind of potentially kind of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian origins of Greek thought. And something that I struggle with a lot is kind of unlearning that Western bias I have had quite like a traditional philosophic education. So kind of thinking about things like epistemology and in a very kind of like boxed up way. And so I find that oftentimes I'm perhaps like reading into these earlier traditions, these Greek notions. So, I mean, do you have any, I don't know, practical tips like this on like how you can unlearn this Western bias or this Western way of thinking about what philosophy is perhaps. I would say that I'm not sure we can ever unlearn them in that kind of pure way, but we can complicate them. And so that's why for me the whole question of the, the kind of lexicon of technical vocabulary that we use to interpret these different text traditions myths, whatever. We have to be aware that they are lenses that we're wearing that have been formed in particular ways after their own traditions. And often when we're doing this in the Western Academy we're doing this through the medium of of of English, for instance, not always but European language certainly. And so always having that in the foreground of your study so you're not just studying the ancient material that you're studying you're also being reflexive about the framework that you're using to engage with that and thinking about that. That would that would kind of be my basic advice on that. Thank you Richard. I think we'll take two questions at a time. Yeah. So you respond once to two questions here. So let's have them, Beth and Mohammed, your hands have been up for a while. I was just wondering, considering there was already a course for philosophy at the University of Kent, what was your thinking behind making a separate course instead of innovating the current course, and whether the ideology you referred to with the MPs was perhaps this being mimicked in the university hierarchy and that there's no space in the current course to innovate. Mohammed. Yeah, I was just wondering, so like in science, physicists won't compete with biologists for the title of being a true scientist so why is there this sort of notion in philosophy where there's only one true type of philosophy. Okay, thank you. Those questions actually dovetail with each other. I would say that the reason why I introduced the degree. Well, I'll give you the kind of pragmatic economic side of it is that the religious studies degree was getting less and less applicants. But my, but what we taught within that degree was very, very philosophical material across different cultural traditions and periods of history, but was not recognized as such, because it was classified within this box called philosophy, but we also had a philosophy department which was quite comfortable with the, I think with the way in which it's defined and its current parameters and was and is resistant to the implications that perhaps it was ethnocentric. And so I was not going to get much traction institutionally by going the route that you suggested. So the route that I went was just was to say well let's do something a little bit different. You do your philosophy thing. You know, fine, you know, you've got students for that will do our philosophy thing. My, my suspicion was that that would, if it was successful would have been a takeover because I because because if it was me and I, as I said try and put myself in the position of what I was thinking when I was 17 and applying for degrees. The degree that I was developing was exactly the degree I would have wanted to have studied, but it was not available. And so what what's always happened throughout my time as a scholar of religion in small religious studies departments is that we have picked up lots of students in the system who find out that religious studies isn't the weird strange Bible study that they thought it was. And, and so we would always get a lot of philosophy students who would switch and do a religious studies degree. So based upon that anecdotal evidence I thought if I built a degree, which foregrounded and named itself as doing this that that would capture those people an earlier stage. You know, you're always in these contexts working in, in terms of these territorial bases, which are what departments really are in that kind of context to answer Mohammed's question. I'm going to give a good answer to this but but maybe other people would would would give a good answer to this but I think it's the role philosophy has played in certainly the last few centuries. As being seen as the pinnacle of human intellectual reflection. There's a kind of hierarchy of like higher level reflection and philosophy has often been seen as the highest level of reflection of systematic rationality if you like. There are claims of rationality that you then particularize, whether it's to this is this is rationality and this isn't, or these people have this ability or this tradition of thought and these people don't. Then you get involved in cultural politics, which, which in the period in which this was happening, of course gets folded into colonialism and the justification of colonialism. And if we have the highest form of rationality and it's expressed through this thing we call philosophy, which Socrates did and then the Europeans did it maybe maybe the Muslims did it for a while but for instance that there's often this kind of idea that the Muslim culture. acted as the kind of postal workers for you for for philosophy so that they took what Aristotle and Plato said carried it around for a few centuries and then passed it back to the Europeans, who then use they used it and developed it and so on. The kind of model suggests that philosophy has been deployed as a technology for justifying colonial superiority of the West, and that's one reason why that has been a contested issue. Maybe other people have something to say on that. Let's hear from Andrew and then Michael. Thanks Richard very much for your talk and apologies for coming in a bit late. I just have a question on. It might be a bit about the adjunctive side you talked about, which is kind of, oh, oh, so you're doing that over here too, and it kind of seen one's own values spread out. And in specifically in terms of terminology. So thinking about what are the what are the limits of using specific terminology that we might find within our own traditions to describe. Activity that we might find similar other traditions. So what's what's the limit of terminology there. So I'm thinking, for example, you know, a classic thing might be like Plato's aido sometimes that's compared with Samania and Sanskrit enough to excuse my pronunciation I'm on a Sanskrit specialist. So what's the limits of kind of using key terms from our own traditions. And the second related question would be about time and focus so in this when we think about more than one tradition, do we do injustice in the sense of not giving time for literally just thinking about Samania for a few weeks, as opposed to kind of trying to desperately compare two or three different traditions in one session and I think that's my anxiety as a lecturer sometimes actually is not giving justice that that's needed to be so those are kind of the two related limits of terminology, and on related note, kind of giving giving time to ample time for various traditions in this comparative type model. So that's, yeah, there's my two questions. Let's take those two questions and then, or, yeah, that's okay. Thanks Andrew. They're very good questions and I don't think they have. For me I don't have definitive answers on them, but I do have something to say on them. And I guess, one of the challenges here is trying to think systematically and get students to think systematically in a modularized system of knowledge. You know, we're always, we're always packaging things within a certain number of weeks within a semester. And I don't want to underestimate the impact that has upon deep reflection. And I don't think that's just about global philosophies I think that's about the kind of kind of education that we push model of education we pushed into. So there will always be that question of, you know, how do we find the time to kind of get into the in depth meanings of some money or whatever the concept is in a kind of way that we find definitely responsible let's say we're always having to cut corners to be broad. So I don't think there's a definitive answer that in that framework on the question of terminology limits of terminology. Again, I think it's a question of all way of never resting comfortably with the translated terminology that we are using. It's not that we can't use it but we have to keep always coming back to the question of, this is a translation of a term or a concept or a practice that's. And we have to pull pull that back so in other words there's always a footnote to the use of the, of the terminology. And I would also I also someone who's, I quite like Talal Assad's idea in genealogies of religion he talks about the inequality of languages. And the fact that in the modern Academy for instance, Sanskrit is unequal to English English is a hegemonic linguistic medium. And so when we're dealing with traditions and languages that are not the dominant languages that we're using. Then he argues that we have to maintain a certain kind of scandalous element in the translation. The translation has to maintain the otherness of the original, just to constantly remind us when we're using the term that this doesn't easily translate into the lexicon of the words that we're using. And I, and I, and I quite like that as a kind of methodological reminder of of holding on to that kind of scandalous nature of the original language. Thank you. My Kelly, I think I can go ahead now then. Thank you and I really enjoyed that talk I think it was really interesting it was a nice way to kind of, as we're coming to the end of my degree at SAS, it's a nice look back to see, you know how it came into being which was really, really quite nice actually. So my question is twofold. So firstly, do you think that the making of philosophy into this institution, particularly by by the British government at the moment. And by that I mean locating it kind of in this conversation this very anxious conversation about identity, critical race theory. If you think that locating it there is making it actually more difficult to expand and and the project that we're trying to do with what philosophy is. And secondly do you think that we've run the risk in what philosophy is a global philosophy is becoming just this critical commentary on the analytic tradition and and how would you kind of counteract that in any courses that you would construct. Okay. Thanks Michael. Yes, I quite like these are the word anxious there because I think I think it is there that there's a lot a lot of anxieties in that and I'm someone who actually thinks it's important to express anxieties and hold on to anxieties when we're dealing with these kind of complex issues and issues of power imbalance and cultural translation and so on. On the first question, which I took to mean something like this. Is this a kind of a dangerous kind of not exactly a blind alley but a dangerously narrow way of going if we focus, if we kind of link this to discussions of critical race theory reactions to black lives matter decolonization is that was that your question is this is much clearer in my head when I read it down. More along the lines of is it more so that we're being shoehorned by states that very much want to politicize changing disciplines like philosophies into an attack on Britishness and attack on the status quo as we know it. It's actually not us expanding the discipline that's becoming a problem but rather that we are creating or we are a kind of response or a trigger for the anxiousness that people feel around Brexit or around. I would, from my own experience I would say that I don't experience this as a reaction to recent government statements I've been working in this field for over 25 years thinking about these kinds of questions. What's surprising to me is that this has become a sufficiently noticed by political figures on the right that they are to use a phrase that's used quite often now weaponizing it in a kind of cultural politics. And of things like cultural Marxism which is apparently the and deploying that in certain kinds of ways, in a way that I, I may be wrong here but but I saw this as something that developed initially in the US amongst Republican groups, and then has caught on in British context I thought it was Anglo American but then I noticed that this is also happening in in France and no doubt elsewhere. So for me I don't see it as a reaction of the reactions the other way round. Finally, I've gone my entire year, my entire career without any politician noticing anything I ever wrote or said, finally politicians are actually commenting upon the kind of area that I've been working in. And I found that a little bit perplexing but I also think that that they are, that's also capturing a moment that there are there are shifts going on their geopolitical shifts going on. Brexit is an example, a complex example of British reaction to to its own empire and its own history and how how we make sense of that how we narrate who we are in a post imperial context. I'm always surprised how long it takes for these things to enter into the public consciousness. And that's why I was interested in the Foucault point because I think that what Foucault was essentially saying was that the European Empire is a British Empire ended just after effectively after the Second World War. That's, that's quite a long time ago from the point of view of an individual human being. But it takes it seems to take many generations for the impact of that culturally to start to unfold and I see Brexit as part of a reaction to that unfolding impact of the fact that Britain no longer rules the world. And it's not going to go back to being ruler of the world. And how you come to terms with that and there are of course different reactions. So, so I see the reaction is going on, not from the academics as from the politicians who are now seizing upon what academics are saying on that. And then your other your second question was about whether whether we end up engaging in too much critical commentary and not enough philosophy is that I think there is a danger of doing that too much. I mean you could. I mean I could spend an entire course talking about the issues of translating certain Indian philosophical terms into Western ones without actually talking about the Indian traditions. And that's why I think that the it's important that there are courses that focus on the primary remit of those courses is let's get into the nitty gritty of these particular traditions and practices and so on. But I don't think I think we need to be aware of these kind of methodological and critical lenses, but in some courses there would be foregrounded a lot, and in some they would be there but they wouldn't be necessarily, you know, always on the on the front page. Thank you I phrase my question poorly but that organization as a philosophy in this cultural debate we're having hours. Thanks for that. Thank you. I am. And then Missy. Sorry, I think I'm struggling to pronounce your name. Max is fine. Thank you so I know and then you go ahead. Hi, Richard. I have to say it's a pleasure to meet you. I cite you all the time in my essays, and it's wonderful. It's very strange and wonderful to be able to put a face to the King colon. So yeah, as you have many times before you've wonderfully put, given me words to explain, you know, conflicting feelings that I've had in readings that I've done and concepts that I've studied so today it's been that idea of transformational philosophy. I wish I had this terminology a couple of weeks ago I was writing an essay about this for Elvis. But yeah so I wanted to ask you about. I mean, I really appreciate how optimistic you were at the end of your talk, you know, bringing up black lives matter but I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about the, you know, the realities of this so I cannot see how in today's with with the marketization of universities happening in a very real way that is affecting, you know, the academics. It's so close to my heart. It doesn't seem like it's enabling space for this transformational philosophy to grow and prosper. And, you know, ideally overtake whatever the usual, you know, old colonial version of philosophy that persists in every other UK university. So I just, how can it happen with our academics not losing their poor minds in in the social structure that we've got in in this marketized system I just can't bother me because I mean everyone's getting asked, you know, as you said these departments are shrinking it seems counterproductive to put energy into changing. It's like shoveling the snow while it's still snowing I suppose and because I'm thinking about my career of course, and I would love it was my dream to be an academic but it's seeming so difficult, and I'm wondering whether my energy is more targeted, it'd be more targeted use of my skills to try and change the structure of, you know, the world and the government to enable transform transformative philosophy to blossom. Shall I respond to that? Maybe, Mr. Milian, let's ask a question. Yeah, actually, my question is also related to this. First of all, it's a great speech I really enjoyed the speech and I really enjoyed people who push the boundaries of philosophy. To be back to, at a source, I did my PhD there, and now I'm teaching Chinese philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. One thing that I noticed when I started teaching here is that actually students are really enthusiastic about non-western philosophies. So my point is that we are talking about there is no market for this kind of modules or this kind of courses, but are we really sure there is no market? Or it's a political problem and the market is there, but there is resistance, even to try to taste the market. So in the end, my question for you is how do we change the politics of philosophy at Warwick University? Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Max. Thanks for that. Again, thanks. It's really good that these dovetailing these kinds of questions. On Anya's point, I feel your pain as someone wanting to move into an academic career or considering it in the current kind of climate because you're right. I kind of left it on a slightly optimistic note, but we are looking at the harsh realities. We're looking at a kind of constriction of humanities, the marketisation of universities. And so actually, I want to support you in like your ideas of direct political engagement. Why not? But on the other side of that, I do think, and this is also trying to answer Max's early point, was that this, it's not a purely bleak outlook. And there are a number of reasons for that. One of them is that there is a increasing awareness of issues like Black Lives Matter, decolonisation and so on in the mass media now is allowing the terms for a cultural conversation, which universities, even university managers cannot ignore. And as somewhere like SOAS, which has a very diverse ethnic group of students, the voices of those students in saying, you know, why am I only ever hearing about dead white males and so on. There is an important powerful voice in a marketised context, because students are, the consumer is always right. We might not like that model, but that's the model that we're placed within. So I'm quite optimistic in the sense that responding to Max's point, I actually think that within the younger generation, these kinds of issues are much more natural to think about. I mean, notions of acceptance of different forms of sexuality, of different kinds of gender formations, of people of different ethnic groups. Of course we're equal. Why would we not be equal? That kind of baseline idea within younger British generation, for instance, I think, means that these kinds of questions, when they suddenly encounter, what you mean philosophy, I don't get to hear about what Black Africans or Indian people thought about anything, why? These kinds of questions come up because of that shift, I think. But there are two other aspects of this. One is that universities, perhaps not in this particular moment because of the pandemic and Brexit, but even with Brexit, the managers are constantly talking about internationalisation. And what they often think of this in terms of is making lucrative links with Chinese universities or something like that to get recruitment numbers up. But there is a side of that, which is about the internationalisation of curriculum. And the kind of thing that World Philosophies at SOAS is doing is a brilliant example of internationalisation. So within the institutional framework of universities, that's a voice that can kind of capture some traction. But then finally, I think the very problem creates a reaction. And I think that the very fact that universities have been marketised so much, and we live in such a marketised, instrumentalised society, I think, maybe I am naive in this regard, but it means that there will be some people, some young people, who respond to that by saying, you know what, if I'm going to go to university and I'm going to have to pay fees for it, I'm damn well going to do something that I'm interested in. And that gives me some to fill this kind of spiritual vacuum that I get from everything else that's out there. So I'm really going to do this as a kind of vocational thing. And more and more people feel commodified. There will be people and our people who say, no, I'm not having this. I'm going to kind of explore these things because, you know, I'm a rounded human being, not just a worker in the global economy. So I actually think that marketisation as it speeds up, creates, I think, a kind of possible market ironically for people who are against or resistant to that. So I don't know if that answers. So I think that that's my response to Max's point as well. Are we sure there's no market. I think that I think that there is and I think that somewhere like SOAS is ideally placed to, if of any institution in the UK and probably around the world to kind of pioneer this this kind of project. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Thank you for your questions. Asha. Thank you, Richard. That was really great. Really good to hear. We're talking about your program development at Kent and you're kind of listing the various difficulties that were faced and kind of getting it off the ground and getting that kind of cooperation and so on. It struck me that perhaps, I mean, you in some ways you cover it when you talk about that, you know, there's this kind of backlash. I think I would kind of push you to be a bit more specific about it. And that is that philosophy itself is a racist discipline. Racist by omission for sure. But racist in its preoccupations in its faculty in its reliance on its canon. It's total failure to address the racist comments made by philosophers, at least from the Enlightenment onwards where at least we have a concept of race and so on and you know when we had that big debacle with the daily mail, kind of saying that we were, you know, removing all white philosophers from the curriculum, etc. My point back to that was actually what's more problematic. I want to include people of color on our curriculum, or the fact that philosophy departments do not under any circumstance include any work by anyone from any other philosophical tradition, let alone what color they are. I'm kind of wondering my question. So this is this is a question rather than a comment is what is to be done to tackle the racism of philosophy as kind of one of the major stumbling blocks to enabling world philosophy to become philosophy to become normative to become just the way philosophy is done. I'm just pushing me on that regard. I think I think again this partly depends. This can depend on on circumstances. So, for instance, if you're working in an institution where the philosophy department is much bigger and much more powerful and recruiting a lot more students than say, a religious studies department. You don't really have the power to for that kind of full frontal direct challenge. I mean, just in terms of strategy, it's just not going to work, because it's going to also alienate colleagues who in other regards might be seen as working in, you know, in synergy with you. Right, but I, but I think so as a slightly different because you didn't you didn't you don't have that issue you don't you have you have sure you have issues of having to resist those those kinds of ideologies and those beliefs but but but you don't have an institutional department within so as that's pushing back all the time saying hold on a minute, we're doing the philosophy, get off our territory. I think that that can be. It depends on on the context. I would say that the problem with philosophy departments, almost universally is that they are racist. Even if it's a form of racism that most of them are not prepared to engage with. And it's often a kind of lazy lazy racism, because they've not been challenged. So, not at Kent, but another institution that I worked at where there was a philosophy department. I was, I gave a talk about expanding philosophy many years ago. And one of the professors in the philosophy department said, didn't go to my talk but said, but knew I'd given it and said why do you. Why do you think it is that philosophy departments don't teach Indian philosophy apart from the obvious reason and I said, what's the obvious reason and he said, we don't have time. You know, we've got all of these other thinkers to look at we don't have and it's the same argument that the Tory minister made about colonialism we haven't got. I've got the space in to consider this and that's because they consider this a kind of marginal add on to the real stuff, rather than something that actually transforms your understanding of what you're doing. So, I would say that what we really have to do and there are some people who've written written about this, you yourself, myself and other people is actually confront them more and more with the realities of that kind of soft incipient racism, because then they have to defend themselves and then once they start putting out their arguments and then realizing that their arguments don't hold much water, then, then, then we might see some traction but it's a difficult one because as I say you can end up alienating colleagues. Thank you, Richard. Beth, you have the last question, but before that I just wanted to bring Richard's attention back to what you said about philosophies, self-critic, the philosophy of philosophy, what is often called meta philosophy. I think, I think even in the West, it only exists in the very strict sense of analytic philosophy, remember Vigestine and even recently Timothy Williams's 2007 book on philosophy of philosophy is still very much in that although he's a critic of the analytic philosophy is very much in that analytic tradition, but I was just thinking is it not therefore very, very important that in designing a program on world philosophies or global philosophy that we begin at least the students first of all introduce to a module of meta philosophy or philosophies, self-critic, you know, and really play around that concept of philosophy and see exactly in what working definition it means all through that program. I think it really got me thinking where you mentioned we really don't engage with philosophy itself, you know, we just have this assumption and presupposition that we know what we are talking about. I just wanted to hear your thoughts about that. Thanks Elvis. Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And I think that for me, if I if I could kind of build a program that wasn't based upon like fitting certain colleagues in certain courses and so on. I would absolutely start off with a with some kind of discussion of what philosophy is. I would go to different cultural places and time periods. And I would foreground that question of, you know, what is this thing called philosophy. And I would foreground it not in the form of I'm informing the student what philosophy is so you know what you're going to study for the next three four years. But in letting them know that this is a question they will continue to think about throughout their degree that there's no clear answer and I'm not introducing them to a canon I'm introducing them to a problem. And so that that's how I would I would approach that approach and I think one way to do that is precisely to hone in on the question of where did it begin, because that can open up that that kind of discussion. So that is. Beth, go for it. Hi, I'm going to go first. How do you respond to the this relates to the last couple of questions. How do you respond to the idea that to make what is regarded within this call as a better concept of philosophy but the way that the people on this call have expanded philosophy in universities with these degrees and considering as we've said that humanities are being asked so much in higher education. Would you perhaps consider that we could use the platform of higher education to inform lower levels of education and a level and GCSE where those core subjects are a bit more secure within GCSE and a level to perhaps change that to them. That's actually more achievable than getting individual universities to innovate their degrees. Yeah, I mean, there are some hurdles there and back in the 60s, talking in terms of religious studies now. There was a time when because of changes going on in British society recognition of greater multiculturalism migration of diaspora communities into Britain after the war. There was a kind of recognition that the old way of doing the study of religion was a bit too Christian bit too theological and that perhaps there might be a space for a kind of multicultural multi religious space and that's where the University of Lancaster Department of Religious Studies and the University of Kent were both founded in that 1960s moment where there was a there was an opportunity to say look the way we're studying this doesn't necessarily map the demographic of British society. We need to kind of expand this out. But that that was an interesting moment because at that time in the 60s. Those who decided on school curriculum were still in conversation with academics in higher education. I think the challenge today is there's, there's a separation and universities aren't listened to by government ministers. They don't look to universities to necessarily define school curriculum in that way what we find is we find government government ministers increasingly interfering, bringing their own like agenda of what they think a good education is without necessarily bringing in certainly in our area, people who work in that field so there's a question of isolation, political isolation for universities there. But I agree I think if you if you can insert those at an earlier stage in the curriculum, then, then that is so much better because of course, my experience in recent times with 9k fees is that the student applicant body, sometimes be quite conservative and quite understandably so I mean it. People might say well I'm not going to go and do a degree in that subject because I don't know what it's about. I never heard about this at school. So I'll do English or history or something like that. If we can embed those ideas earlier, then people will become aware of them and they're much more likely to apply to university to study them and put pressure on institutions to internationalize. But the question is how you, how you, how the institutions get more traction with politicians in terms of being involved in those curricular discussions. As a tiny follow up if that's okay. I think it's an interesting thought that perhaps the inclusion of non Western ideologies be almost a requirement as much as a certain grade a level to get into university. But they talk about Western philosophy philosophy being the basis of knowledge and then everything is additional like you were saying, but it's almost like half of your knowledge is not there so I wonder if there is a position that universities could have that while they say, you have to know this this and this and be at this standard of education to come to university. You also have to have a more informed knowledge, not just that specific. I think that's absolutely right and I think that the, that there could be more done there and I think that the kind of model of universities as a kind of factory for people who are then going to work in global capitalism doesn't even fulfill itself because if you really want your graduates to become CEOs of international globally relevant companies let's say if that's the kind of aim you're looking for, then they need to be globally trained as citizens as well. They need to understand what it is to think in different cultural contexts and so on. And I think we probably could do more as academics in making that case for the humanities in that kind of globalized space. Thank you Richard. I know I don't know what time it will be there or just wonder if you could quickly respond to one more question. Alex raised it in the chat. Alex, would you like to just ask verbally. Should I read it out to some. It was about them labels use of labors German Indian European. So let me just see if I can get a question. Yeah, so if I may write a question about him. I have a question about a few of the labels that are commonly used as you meet that labels are that labels are important for content at least indirectly, like many of us you use you speak of Indian European German French. It is a philosophies. There are of course, these are of course names of current geopolitical entities with German philosophy one could perhaps try to speak of German speaking philosophy to capture anything from Kant. Yeah, to Vigestan and all of that. I've had that would work for terms like European or Indian. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts on this, or perhaps a pragmatic solution. Yeah, thanks for an amazing lecture. Thanks. Yes, I mean, again we're caught here in a space between a modularized framework of knowledge where you have to present and market modules in a particular kind of way so so if I'm teaching a course on what I might describe as Indian philosophy. In the description you'd realize that I'm not looking at the entirety of Indian philosophy because no one could in a modular structure. For instance, why is Islamic thought, not very often taught in a course on Indian philosophy, whereas, you know, there have been Islam has been an important part of Indian culture for very, very long time. So these kinds of regional cultural kind of divisions. I mean, I, for instance, what I teach is really a kind of in Indian philosophy courses is really a kind of high Sanskrit sort of scholastic literature. And I think it's important to show that you're doing that in the description and also to question the terms of that at some point within the course. So for instance in my Indian philosophy course at Kent I spend the first three weeks talking about what philosophy is more Indian philosophy is for we even get into any of the nitty gritty. But you also have to be aware of the fact that the students might not necessarily opt for a course that's called high Sanskrit classical intellectual thinking, but they're looking for something that they understand is called Indian philosophy. And so we're constantly caught with these labels which are there to kind of convey a certain fudged idea that people will understand. And then it's in the context of the course I think where it's our responsibility to complicate that label. Thank you very much. Richard, we really want to express our sincere gratitude to you that you honored us and you made yourself available for the first edition of this world philosophy lecture series, although we gave you quite a short notice, but you did read justice to the topic and everyone benefited one way or the other from it. Thank you so very much. Thank you all for coming and for sharing your questions, your comments, both verbally on the chat. We'll be looking forward to seeing you on April 30, which will be the second edition and with another speaker and another thing. And it will usually inform you through the usual channels as well. Thank you all for being here and wish you a beautiful weekend ahead. Take care everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you Richard that was fantastic.