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Doing Philosophy Comparatively. By Tim Connolly. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. x + 232. isbn 978-1-7809-3839-4.
In Doing Philosophy Comparatively Tim Connolly has accomplished an admirable feat: the first comprehensive and systematic introduction to comparative philosophy, written in a lucid and accessible style. Although it is designed to be used as a text- book for an introduction to a comparative philosophy course, this excellent volume will prove extremely helpful to anyone who is interested in this area of philosophic pursuit. As a practitioner of comparative philosophy, I benefited from reading this book because it gives a panoramic view of the field, provides answers to some of my questions, and piques my interest. I have been informed and enlightened.
The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the nature of comparative philosophy and its central concepts-comparison, tradition, and culture (p. 7). In the second part, Connolly discusses three major problems of comparative philosophy-i ncommensurability, one-sidedness, and generalization-as well as their solutions or remedies. The last part introduces four main approaches to comparative philosophy: universalism, pluralism, consensus, and global philosophy.
The central question of the opening chapter of part 1 is whether there is such a thing as comparative philosophy. Connolly begins his discussion of the nature of comparative philosophy by critically examining several definitions of philosophy without settling on any of them, and he then proceeds to give a definition of the discipline. Is there such a thing as non-Western philosophy? This question is no less significant than the title question because if the answer to the former were negative, could there be comparative philosophy? So the fate of comparative philosophy seems to hinge on the answers to these two questions. A discussion of the question as to whether there is such a thing as comparative philosophy may strike the reader as a bit unusual, even for a philosophy textbook, because an introduction to philosophy rarely, if at all, discusses the question whether there is such a thing as philosophy, although it may address the question whether "philosophy is dead." We are told that there are two main objections calling the very existence of comparative philosophy into question, both of which seem to involve the charge of redundancy. One objection claims that...