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 µÚÒ»³Ô¹ÏÍø 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).
