Ron Bontekoe

Written by an international assembly of leading philosophers, this volume offers students, teachers and general readers a rich and sophisticated introduction to the major non-Western philosophical traditions - particularly Chinese, Indian, Buddhist and Islamic philosophies. African and Polynesian thinking are also covered by way of historical and contemporary survey articles.The text is organized around a series of central topics concerning conceptions of reality and divinity, of causality, of truth, of the nature of rationality, of selfhood, of humankind and nature, of the good, of aesthetic values, and of social and political ideals. Outstanding scholars present essays that articulate the distinctive ways in which these specific problems have been formulated and addressed in the non-Western traditions against the background of their varied historical and cultural presuppositions.

The Nature of Dignity argues that, given what evolutionary biology tells us about human nature, we need a new understanding of what is involved in the exhibition of personal dignity, since Kant and other Enlightenment figures whose ideas of dignity have shaped our own were wrong in several of their key assumptions. The required new conception of dignity is then developed on the basis of insights gleaned from history, political-economics, literature, film, hermeneutical ethics, and evolutionary biology

In Truth and Method, Gadamer largely agrees with Dilthey's reasons for, and sharp distinction between, the Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften. This, however, leads Gadamer to misrepresent the methodological practices of the natural sciences; to fail to appreciate that in the natural sciences personal judgment and tact—or a “feel” for the discipline—are indispensable to the discovery of “truths.” In this respect, however, he is not to be faulted too severely, for the role played by personal judgment in the natural sciences was only just beginning to be recognized by mainstream philosophers of science at about the time that Truth and Method was published.

There is a serious danger involved in taking the idea of the "philosophical tradition" too narrowly. Many readers of this journal will be familiar with the dangers of cultural exclusion—in particular with the long-standing tendency of many Western philosophers to reject out of hand the legitimacy of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophy, on the grounds that these Asian modes of thinking do not appear to address the same problems that Western philosophers are interested in, in the same kind of way that Western philosophers prefer to approach these problems. This culturally myopic view of what is entitled to be called "philosophy" is deplorable, and needs to be resisted, but it probably helps to remember in this...

After examining some of the reasons for the powerful attraction which metaphysical speculation has, until recently, exerted upon philosophers, I consider the arguments which have been used, in this century, to discredit the metaphysical enterprise. In particular, I focus on that family of arguments which has arisen as a direct result of our recognition that human understanding is inevitably conditioned by the situatedness of individual human beings--by their situatedness within a language, within a culture, and within an epoch. The idea that the "historicality of human understanding" renders the pursuit of truth futile is traced through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend. This idea is then refuted with the help of insights provided by Michael Polanyi, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hilary Putnam and Larry Laudan. Finally, having demonstrated that the pursuit of immanent, revisionary metaphysics is not, so far as we can tell, blocked by any essential incoherence in the world's nature, or by any irremediable blindness in ourselves, I present a moral argument for returning to metaphysical speculation