Participant Non-Concluding Postscripts
The "Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Philosophy in a Multicultural Context" conference is now behind us. It was UC Santa Cruz's pleasure to host this conference. It was a delight to witness a packed room, strong presentations, and sustained, energetic level of discussion throughout the day. Thank you to the participants and audience members for making this conference a success!
This conference was an experiment. Apparently, it was a successful experiment. Now, we didn't quite address the title question of the conference directly: Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Below please find postscripts (or short handouts/papers) from the conference panelists on this question, and its various sub-questions:
i. Does philosophy universalize about values, rights, cognition, language, etc., or is it sensitive to historical, geographical, and cultural context, or both? If both, how so?
ii. Are (should?) the methods of reason or logic be outside of culture, or are they themselves inflected by culture?
iii. What is philosophical methodology in general, and how might multiculturalism affect it?
We hope to continue this important conversation, with YOUR input.
Thank you,
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther (rgw@ucsc.edu)
Institute for Humanities Research,
Philosophy Department,
Humanities Dean's Office,
Cowell College,
Impact Media Group,
College 8,
Merrill College,
Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
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Mohammad Azadpur
San Francisco State University
Philosophy, for ancient and medieval philosophers, was a way of life and it aimed to liberate the philosopher from enslavement to empirical causality (biological, psychological and socio-cultural) by situating him in the space of reasons, the space of spontaneity. The emancipatory transition was a contest that had to be won by hard struggle, and it was as much a logical exercise as one of sensitivity to context (historical, cultural, and otherwise). I do not propose a romantic reversal of direction to retrieve this notion of philosophy by abandoning our current one. I do, however, suggest that we calibrate our advances in working out the contours of the logical space of reasons by bringing them into alignment with the technologies of self (-transformation) that grounded traditional philosophy. This orientation is complicated by the multiculturalism characterizing our increasingly globalized context; this complexity ought to be embraced so as to diversify and enhance the initiations into the logical space of reasons, the space of spontaneity and autonomy.
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Daniel Guevara
UC Santa Cruz
It seems obvious that there are certain values that are universalizable: e.g. justice, dignity, friendship, love. What's difficult is giving uncontentious specific examples that illustrate the universal value in these, difficult because of the way the culture (among many other things) influences our sensibility. So my answer is that we are free to universalize but are bound by culture (and other contingencies) to regularly make mistakes about what in particular is universalizable or not.
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Scott Lokey
UC Santa Cruz
When confronted with the question, “Free to universalize or bound by culture,” as a biochemist I lean toward the former. Maybe it’s the structure of DNA, elegant in its simplicity and yet information carrier for all the complexity of life on our planet, that drives my tendency to universalize. But this simple underlying unity expresses itself in myriad, intricate diversity, exploding the universal into species, groups, and individuals, each with its own form, history, and context. And it is only by illuminating these differences that we are able to identify commonalities. The universal and the particular are intertwined, one feeding back on the other.
But what about the mode of inquiry itself? If science generates knowledge that is universal, i.e., not bound by culture (and I think that it does, but that’s another topic for another conference) what about philosophy? Does the “Western analytical” tradition have a privileged place in the curriculum over other historical threads of philosophical inquiry? If science is a lens through which we inspect and dissect the world, philosophy is more like a mirror, through which we inspect ourselves in all our variegated idiosyncracies, historical, cultural, and individual. The larger the mirror, the more variety it can reflect. In the same way that cell biologists identify fundamental processes by investigating many varieties of species and finding molecular-level commonalities, opening the philosophy curriculum to a non-tokenistic study of non-Western traditions may facilitate a reflection on “conserved” values and systems of thought even as it explores wholeheartedly and unapologetically the myriad particulars defined by culture and history. So my answer to the question, “Free to universalize or bound by culture,”…Yes!
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Helen Longino
Stanford University
In my talk I related the challenge posed to me by a student from a different philosophical tradition than mine. My point was to show that 1) even when one tries to articulate a philosophical position that is sensitive to contextual matters, the philosophical impulse to universalize comes through and 2) what seems universal to its author can seem parochial and culture bound to one from another cultural/intellectual tradition.
After all, I am trying to give an account of “knowledge”, and even though I emphasize the contextual nature of knowledge, I try to do so from a purportedly neutral, analytically impartial position. But is it really? We are certainly free to (try to) universalize, but can we ever successfully do so? My own suspicion is that the best we can do is engage in dialogue with other traditions to find points of commonality and difference and to discover how our own cultural commitments may be expressed in our analyses. In the meantime, we have to proceed as best we can, but in awareness of our possible limitations.
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Carlos Montemayor
San Francisco State University
Something that characterizes the best philosophical texts is their universality: they appeal to different cultures across times because the topics they address are perennial (e.g., truth, beauty, the good life, etc.). But an equally important characteristic of these texts is their enormous cultural relevance, as paradigmatic cases of human creativity and engagement with a specific set of cultural realities. Contemporary philosophy inherited the topics that make it a universal form of inquiry, but it has lost its capacity to influence culture, in the deep and meaningful way that it used to. I think this should worry contemporary philosophers. Although I have no specific answer to the question of the conference, I do think it presents us with an urgent and formidable problem that philosophers should address.
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Bo Mu
San José State University
"How to Look at Distinct Approaches: Universal or Situational Approaches?"
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Amir Najmi
Google
"We Need a Philosophy of Engagement"
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Vanita Seth
UC Santa Cruz
Perhaps it is not universalism but our understanding of multiculturalism that should be interrogated. I would suggest that to argue against universalism is not to defend a crude relativism that posits all cultures, myths, religions, traditions, histories as unavailable for critique. Rather, it is the analytical categories of values, culture, myth, religion, secular tradition and history that merit critical attention. The presumption that such categories are meaningful, that they offer a neutral lens through which to know the world, that they themselves do not mediate and predetermine how we engage with the world and the knowledge that we produce, is what needs to be interrogated and challenged.
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Ronald R. Sundstrom
University of San Francisco
The theme of this conference is in the form of the question, are we “free to universalize or bound by culture?” From the standpoint of one committed to multicultural issues and concerns (which I would frame as questions regarding social and global justice that involves ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identity). The question I wonder about is: “Are we so “bound by universalization” that we must minimize or underplay the context, context, embodiment, and political commitment?” Must we abide among, and reproduce, ideas that are without flesh and context? Randall Collins, in his tome, The Sociology of Philosophies, declares that “Intellectuals are people who produce decontextualized ideas. These ideas are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone concretely putting them into practice (19).” Working from a concern for culture and related commitments to historical contextualization and social and methodological pluralism, the social and political philosophy that I admire seeks to turn Collin’s formula on its head or inside out. It is from the local and from practice we begin to learn, and from which we might arrive at the general or universal. This is in keeping with practices in the contemporary humanities and the human sciences, and with philosophy that seeks to substantially to engage and interact with history and the social sciences.
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Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir
San Francisco State University
Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Neither. Knowledge is always situated, as feminists, anti-racist theorists, and others have been reminding us for quite some time. Good philosophy, therefore, takes account of this situatedness in its theorizing. But what that means for the various topics we philosophers attend to is an open question and has to be examined individually.
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Justin Tiwald
San Francisco State University
For philosophers, one of the stronger forms of multiculturalism holds not just that we should take other cultures seriously, but that we should take their philosophical problems seriously. And from here it is just a short step to the conclusion that we should engage in a great deal more of what is nowadays called "comparative philosophy," putting the philosophical views and arguments of other cultures into dialogue with our own.
Other cultures have philosophical problems as assuredly as our own does, and in certain respects cultures are better defined by the philosophical problems they struggle with than by any shared set of views or practices. In Confucian cultures, for example, one of the deep problems is how to reconcile moral autonomy with deference to tradition and to the judgments of moral and political authorities. There is no consensus among Confucian thinkers in this area, but all of them are alike in treating it as a tremendously consequential philosophical issue. The struggle to determine what kind of autonomy can be had in a state of deference, and what shape that autonomy would take, captures well what it means to be a reflective person in Confucian cultures. It captures a feature of the cultures that no other discipline can grasp so easily and with such fruitful results as philosophy can.
There are, of course, important questions about the ways in which philosophical concepts and methods can be universalized, and perhaps there are still unresolved questions about whether they can be universalized. But to some extent these look past the more fundamental questions. How and to what degree concepts and methods can move across cultures depends greatly on how and in what respects the motivating philosophical problems move across cultures. And they do. In a multicultural setting like that which we have in the U.S., we cannot help but take up the philosophical problems of other cultures, the only question is whether we take them seriously.
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Manuel Vargas
University of San Francisco
"On the Value of Philosophy: The Latin American Case"
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Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther
UC Santa Cruz
"Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Multicultural and Public Philosophy: A White Paper"
