Legitimacy Debates, the myth of ‘Western Philosophy,’ and the Contribution of Ben Kies
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For several centuries, numerous philosophical traditions have been subject to ‘Legitimacy Debates’ about whether they are ‘really’ philosophy. This has long taken place about African Philosophy (see e.g., Momoh 1985), but also for philosophy that can be classified as Chinese (e.g., Defoort 2001; Lee 2018), Indian (e.g., Guerrero, Kalmanson and Mattice 2019), Islamic (e.g., Diagne 2018), Latin American (e.g., Vargas 2007), and Indigenous/First Nations (e.g., Muecke 2011). In each case, philosophy proper is taken to be ‘Western Philosophy’, supposedly a millennia-old bastion of logic, argument, and reason (Bernasconi 2003). ‘Western Philosophy’ itself is never called into question, only whether other traditions live up to its standards (Allais 2016).
