This week the hedgehog and the fox are in the company of philosopher Julian Baggini and we are in pursuit of no less a question than how the world thinks – in just over half an hour.
Comparative philosophy is a discipline generally left outside the mainstream in the West. Departments of philosophy, which are really departments of western philosophy, rarely look outside their own tradition to see what thinkers from China, or Japan, or the Islamic world to name but three traditions with long histories and rich literatures, have to say on any given question. As though the question of the West’s supremacy had already been settled and philosophers from elsewhere could only be of interest to anthropologists and cultural historians.
Julian Baggini disagreed and has been on a sort of philosophical quest of his own to explore how the world thinks. His methods, I imagine, would win the approval of thinkers from a wide variety of traditions: he read widely, he travelled, he met people, he asked questions and he listened.
His comparative philosophy is not competitive; he’s not seeking the one true way, still less homogenizing everything in some philosophical blender. His aim is more realistic, certainly more subtle. It is to discover to what we can learn, how our thinking can be enriched by attending to a tradition other than our own. By shifting the frame, tilting the lens, pondering what our way of doing things might have ignored.
Julian says that working on this book was the most rewarding intellectual journey of his life, so when I visited him at home in Bristol recently, I began by asking him to tell me about the motivation for that journey. You can find out more about his book on his publisher’s website.