Why You Had Not Heard of Them

None of the material in this book is new.

Du Bois published double consciousness in 1897. Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. Ubuntu is older than the written record of the region.

So the question of why a philosophy education can omit all of it is not a question about availability. It is a question about how canons form, and that is itself a philosophical question worth asking properly.

A canon is not designed. Nobody convenes and votes. What happens is a long accumulation of individual decisions, each reasonable in isolation: this is what my teacher taught me, this is what the textbook covers, this is what the exam requires, this is what my colleagues will recognise, this is what there is a good translation of.

Repeat that for several generations and the accumulated decisions stop looking like decisions. They look like the subject.

That is the mechanism, and its most important feature is that it requires nobody to have excluded anything. A curriculum can end up with a shape nobody chose and nobody would defend if asked to defend it directly.

There is a second mechanism, and it is less innocent.

Some traditions have been excluded by definition, on the grounds that they are religion, or wisdom literature, or culture, but not philosophy. That move settles a question by stipulation rather than by argument, which is a strange thing for this discipline in particular to do.

And it fails its own test. The Indian schools in the previous book conducted formal debate under explicit rules about valid inference and fallacy, across two thousand years of written commentary. If rigour is the criterion, they meet it. If the criterion is something else, the something else should be stated out loud so it can be examined.

Now the uncomfortable part, which a book on this subject cannot honestly leave out.

This library had fifteen philosophy books before the recent additions. They covered Europe thoroughly, from the Greeks to the twentieth century, with ancient, medieval, modern, existentialist, political, analytic and feminist thought all represented. They gave East Asia one book. They gave Africa nothing at all. They reduced India to two lessons, both on Buddhism, which is the heterodox school.

Nobody made that decision. That is what you get by following the standard curriculum, which is precisely how the mechanism works: the shape arrives without an author, and looks natural because it is familiar.

Which leaves the question of what to do, and here I want to be careful, because there is a way of responding to this that costs nothing.

The cheap response is a footnote. Add a paragraph acknowledging other traditions, mention them in an introduction, express regret about the scope of the syllabus, and change nothing about what is taught.

The expensive response is books. Actual lessons, with the same number of questions and the same length of essay and the same seriousness of argument, taking positions that can be disagreed with, placed alongside the others rather than in an appendix.

That is the test of whether an omission has been treated as an error or as a matter of taste, and it is a test that applies well beyond a curriculum.