President's Welcome Remarks  

President's Welcome Remarks  

On behalf of the SACP Executive Board, let me extend our warm welcome to all of you to our 2010 annual meeting.  

Recently Simon Critchley, chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, posted an inaugural article in the New York Times online forum "Opinionator," a forum for contemporary philosophers. Instead of talking about what is philosophy, the author raised the question "What is a Philosopher?" In this article, Critchley recalls the story of the "first philosopher," Thales, falling into a well when he was looking intently at the stars. A witty servant girl laughed at Thales - that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet.

This story, says Critchley, shows that philosophers are commonly conceived of as laughing stocks, absent-minded buffoons, and the butt of countless jokes. "We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly." Indeed, many comments of Critchley's article are of this kind: A philosopher is "A blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn't there (?)." Philosophy is "a route of many road[s] leading from nowhere to nothing." "Half the time, philosophy is a heroic attempt to grapple with the fundamental questions of human existence. The other half of the time, philosophy is meaningless word games with no connection to actual human existence. And hardly anyone can tell which is which."

One might expect Critchley to say that in fact philosophers, as lovers of wisdom, are not stupid and utterly impractical as they are commonly conceived. After all, the other half of the story of Thales, which Critchley did not mention, is that when challenged to prove the utility of philosophy, he made a successful prediction of the Milesian olive season and made a big amount of money out of it. Interestingly, Critchley did not go this direction. Instead, quoting Socrates' distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, he says, "[T]he basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back."

Sure, there are many meaningful topics for philosophers to spend years and years to ponder. But do we have endless time at our disposal? The theme of this conference, "Philosophy and Our Common Future," calls into question this assumption. The world we are living in is so full of pressing crises that nowadays many people are talking about the end of the world at their ordinary dinner tables. Climate change, global financial crisis, religious and ethnic conflicts, communicable diseases, to name just a few, have put the entire world and our planet in danger, and many damages we are bringing to this planet are not reversible! Roughly 150 species are rendered extinct every day, and at least 50 per cent of the living languages in the world will be wiped out by the end of this century. No previous generations have been able to affect the world as much as we do, and yet none of the generations is more vulnerable than we are.

These crises belong no less to philosophers than to anyone else. Most, if not all, of the alarming problems we are facing can be attributed to human behaviors rooted in various philosophical ideas, notably those which came from the modern enlightenment time. The situation calls for philosophers to take seriously the question about where we are and what we are doing, with a sense of urgency. If philosophy wants to maintain its honor as the pursuit of wisdom, we philosophers have to confront the question about our common future. We simply don't have endless time to spend.

Today, philosophy has a widespread reputation of being irrelevant to life and to our future! In another recent online article in Inside Higher Ed titled "The Crisis of Philosophy," Jason Stanley of Rutgers University pointed out the elephant in the room. He wrote: the questions that philosophers' concerns "seem antiquated and baroque. Its central debates seem disconnected from the issues of identity that plague and inspire the contemporary world. Its pedantic methodology seems designed to alienate rather than absorb. Whereas humanities have transformed into actors, using their teaching and research as political tools, philosophers have withdrawn ever more to positions as removed spectators, and not of life, but of some abstracted and disconnected realm of Grand concepts."

Does the author ask us to explore what is wrong with this kind of practice of philosophy, which only stares at the stars intensely, but has absolutely no interest in "predicting the olive season," so to speak? No. Quite the contrary, the author argues that there is nothing wrong with philosophy. The crisis is rather due to the humanists today who have tried to play the role of being arbiter with the "unfamiliar groups" - by which he meant other "societies, cultures, nations, religions, genders, and races." "Philosophy stands apart from this emerging consensus about the purpose of the humanities," he says, and justifiably so, in his opinion. It is the fault of the humanists who failed to respect and appreciate the unique philosophical method and the timeless concepts such as "knowledge, representation, free will, rational agency, goodness, justice, laws, evidence and truth," things that are worth studying, whether relevant to life or not, in a radically de-contextualized and ahistorical manner.

While the issue can certainly be debated, it does look quite odd that, as a lover of wisdom known for critical reflections on assumptions, a philosopher could take this kind of philosophy practice itself for granted. Can the crises of today's world be traced back to the timeless ideas and the methodology as to what it means to do philosophy? Western enlightenment values and assumptions have played important roles in pushing the world into where we are currently. They occupied the dominant position in the past two hundred years, and as such, they have been taken for granted as universal truths. With the Western enlightenment background, the world has developed significantly, with great achievements; but it is also under the same background that the world is treated as an aggregate of meaningless objects for humans to manipulate and control, and development is equated with the force of production or the amount of consumption. Shouldn't we say that the biggest topic for philosophers to examine is the very practice of philosophy itself, and how it gives rise to these consequences?

As the Chinese proverb says, one cannot see the true face of a mountain when you are inside the mountain. Doing Asian and comparative philosophy is an excellent way for reflecting on the way in which mainstream Western philosophy has been engaged. At the same time, we are all aware that unfortunately the field of Asian and comparative philosophy has been marginalized as something exotic, but not serious philosophy. The question about "the legitimacy" of non-Western philosophies has kept haunting scholars in these fields for well over a century, and leading higher learning institutions in the West have characteristically placed scholars of Asian and comparative philosophy in departments of religious studies or Asian Studies, and seldom in philosophy. The recent disappearance of Asian philosophy positions at the University of Michigan, Stanford, and U.C. Berkeley, which left students pursuing a Ph.D. in the field fewer places to go, have triggered a heated discussion about the future of comparative philosophy itself.

The situation seems rather gloomy. However, looking at the bigger picture, we are seeing the dawn of a new era. The rise of Asia as a global economic and political power is changing the entire world order. In the past, substantial changes of economic power have never been a mere economic phenomenon. They were always accompanied by profound changes in culture and political realms, including philosophy. The rise of Asian power in world economics has huge implications as to what we do also. As British journalist Martin Jacques says, "The Western world order has - in its post-1945 idiom - placed a high premium on democracy within nation-states while attaching zero importance to democracy at the global level. As a global order, it has been anti-democratic and highly authoritarian." Along with the rise of Asia as a world economic power, "The huge mismatch between national wealth on the one hand and size of population on the other that has characterized the last two centuries will be significantly reduced. ... [A] global economic regime based on the BRICS (namely Brazil, Russia, India and China), together with other developing countries, will be inherently more democratic than the Western regime that has previously prevailed" (Jacques, When China Rules the World, 377). Coming along with the rise of Asia, people will be forced to take Asian cultures and their philosophical basis more seriously. Within this new context, the stronghold of the narrowly conceived philosophy practice can no longer ignore Asian philosophical traditions. History is calling Asian and comparative philosophy to center stage for redefining our era conceptually, and those of us in this field of study will be called upon to meet the needs.  

This conference is held at a very particular juncture in history, and I hope it will serve as an important preparation for this emerging new epoch. We are very glad that at this conference, there is a significant increase of student participants. If not for the financial crisis, we would have quite a few more. Though I would like to think that our student essay awards have played a role in it, I have to say that the small number and the amount of awards make the financial incentive rather insignificant. The genuine interest and enthusiasm for Asian and comparative philosophy among the student attendees is evident and truly gratifying.

Let me congratulate the winners of the student essay awards, Emily McRae of University of Wisconsin, Joseph John of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Andrew Lambert of the University of Hawaii, and thank everyone who submitted your papers for the contest. The review committee was very much impressed by the high quality of the student papers we received. This made our choice of award winners a tough job, but it was truly a good problem to have. 

In order to promote more cross cultural dialogue and comparative study, the planning committee tried its best to organize our panels according to issues that different traditions all face instead of dividing our panels according to different traditions. Indeed it would be ironic if our name is called "Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy" and yet we are ourselves encapsulated into small compartments according to different traditions. We hope this new approach will work out well.  

Let me end my welcome remarks by wishing everyone a great time and wishing our conference a great success. There is no future if we do not live at each and every present moment. On the other hand we can make the future brighter by having a successful conference today!  

 

Peimin Ni 

SACP President, 2010-2011

June 10, 2010

 





Peimin Ni 

SACP President, 2010-2011

June 10, 2010