Josh Platzky Miller

One way to scry the future of philosophy is to look at its past. However, the history of philosophy – both as a field of academic study and in more popular literature – tends to tell a rather narrow and parochial story. This story predominantly focuses on Europe to the exclusion of almost everywhere else. The shift away from such a bias has already begun, especially in the specialist history of philosophy literature, but there are still deeply Eurocentric assumptions built into the most influential general histories of philosophy available today. One invisible assumption, still widely adopted, is that there is such a thing as “Western Philosophy”. As we will argue, the history of philosophy – both in Europe and globally – would be better understood if we abandoned the idea of a “Western Philosophy”. To see why, we start with the most widespread narratives about philosophy’s past.

The idea of ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of a legitimation project for European colonialism, through to post-second world war Pan-European identity formation and white supremacist projects. Thus argues Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African public intellectual, schoolteacher, trade unionist, and activist-theorist. In his 1953 address to the Teachers’ League of South Africa, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation, Kies became one of the first people to argue explicitly that there is no such thing as ‘Western philosophy’. In this paper, I introduce Kies as a new figure in the historiography of philosophy with important insights, relevant today. I outline his three key arguments: that ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of political mythmaking, that it is a recent, largely mid-twentieth century fabrication, and that there is an alternative to ‘Histories of Western Philosophy’, namely ‘mixed’ or entangled histories. I show that Kies’ claims are supported both by contemporary scholarship and bibliometric analysis. I thus argue that Kies is right to claim that the idea of a distinctive, hermetically sealed ‘Western Philosophy’ is a recent, political fabrication and should be abandoned. We should instead develop global, entangled historiography to make sense of philosophy and its history today.