The mission of the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy is to advance projects that draw on both western and non-western philosophy. The word “comparative” is not used here to loan authority to one set of ideas by showing its resonances with those deemed less obscure. Nor is it to “sociologize” philosophy in search of general laws of human cultural and intellectual development. Rather, the comparative approach we advocate is to essentially exercise the fullness of a global intellectual toolset towards the project of philosophical inquiry.
The work we endorse will frequently attempt to (re)construct, in contemporary terminology, the argumentation of a pre-modern Asian text or passage. Such endeavors will often seek to locate alternative ways of looking at age-old problems and reveal the assumptions hidden within a particular idea or method.
In history, works of comparative philosophy have sometimes exhibited more about the unconscious assumptions of the explicators than they have about the views they sought to explicate. We acknowledge this fact and its demand for humility. Yet we side with Wilhelm Halbfass who poignantly said, “The dialogic situation is still open” (India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, SUNY, 1988).
