World Philosophies Transformative Conversations on a Future that is Open

Abstract

The shift towards world philosophies within the academic philosophical landscape is part of the “global movement towards intellectual decolonization.” This critical corrective endeavour and its correlative task of restoring the philosophical enterprise its richness and diversity is taking place against the backdrop of waning belief and intellectual loyalty in the efficacy of a single dominant tradition. By expanding the circle of intellectual engagement to include the various traditions of philosophy, the world-philosophies approach gestures towards a future that is not only open but emancipative. The courage to acknowledge different traditions, philosophical genres, and conceptualizations of the enterprise not only transforms the terms of conversation, but it unshackles the collective creative powers of human imagination. For those who have suffered exclusion, philosophy must dispense with rigid orthodoxies and instead celebrate “the plurality of reason” in the sense of that “intellectual disposition to reflect, to criticize and to ask infinite questions” as it expresses itself in the variety of philosophical traditions at our disposal in this world.