[Buddha-l] The arrow: its removal and examination

[Tom Head]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> Everything becomes complicated: what to have on comprehensive exams, 
> which
> languages to required, which courses to require of everyone. One worry (in 
> the USA at least) is that if students of Indian philosophy take all the 
> Sanskrit they need and read a dozen or so indispensable Indian philosophers, 
> they will not have the time to read all the Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, 
> Hume, Kant, Hegel and Putnam a person should read if she wants a job teaching 
> in a philosophy department.
>   
Leave it to a Mississippian to propose what is in effect a 
segregationist argument, but doesn't this just go towards the view that 
if we distinguish between English and American and world history and 
literature, then we should do the same with philosophy?  I have never 
understood why an M.A. in Philosophy implies that you have studied 
European thinkers but not Asian or African thinkers.  It seems almost 
comically provincial.  If a department is unqualified to teach anything 
but the dead white men of European and American philosophy, then 
fine--it should offer degrees in European and American philosophy.  But 
it really shouldn't offer degrees in European and American philosophy, 
call them philosophy degrees, and leave it at that, or if it does, its 
administrators should expect these kinds of problems to arise as a 
matter of course. 


Cheers,

TH