Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, livre ebook

Winner of the 2016 Frantz Fanon Prize for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association
In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant—a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gérando's Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast's and Thaddä Anselm Rixner's systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over "pantheism."
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Kantian School and the Consolidation of Modern Historiography of Philosophy
2. The Birth of Comparative History of Philosophy: Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie
3. India in Friedrich Schlegel’s Comparative History of Philosophy
4. The Exclusion of Africa and Asia from the History of Philosophy: The Formation of the Kantian Position
5. Systematic Inclusion of Africa and Asia under Absolute Idealism: Friedrich Ast’s and Thaddä Anselm Rixner’s Histories of Philosophy
6. Absolute Idealism Reverts to the Kantian Position: Hegel’s Exclusion of Africa and Asia
7. The Comparative History of Philosophy in August Tholuck’s Polemic against Hegel
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index