The belief in a sin­gu­lar, coher­ent “West­ern tra­di­tion” in phi­los­o­phy has led to a very insu­lar, Euro­cen­tric view in phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, as Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Nor­den write in a New York Times op-ed. “No oth­er human­i­ties dis­ci­pline demon­strates this sys­temic neglect of most of the civ­i­liza­tions in its domain,” they argue, “The present sit­u­a­tion is hard to jus­ti­fy moral­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, epis­tem­i­cal­ly or as good edu­ca­tion­al and research train­ing prac­tice.” In his fol­low-up book Tak­ing Back Phi­los­o­phy Van Nor­den argues that edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions should “live up to their cos­mopoli­tan ideals” by expand­ing the canon and teach­ing non-West­ern philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions.

One phi­los­o­phy edu­ca­tor, Peter Adam­son, pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the LMU in Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, has tak­en up the chal­lenge of teach­ing glob­al philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions through his pop­u­lar pod­cast The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, with series on the Islam­ic World, Africana, and India. With expert co-authors and guests, Adamson’s pod­casts help us nav­i­gate cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal dif­fer­ences with­out water­ing down the sub­stance of diverse bod­ies of thought.

These sur­veys of non-West­ern tra­di­tions aim to be as exhaus­tive as the pod­cast’s cov­er­age of Clas­si­cal, Lat­er Antiq­ui­ty, and Medieval peri­ods in Europe. We’ve fea­tured Adamson’s pod­casts on Islam­ic and Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in an ear­li­er post. Now we revis­it his series on Indi­an phi­los­o­phy, which has grown sub­stan­tial­ly in the inter­val, from thir­ty-two to six­ty-two episodes, divid­ed into three categories—“Origins,” “Age of the Sutra,” and “Bud­dhists and Jains.”

Indi­an Philosophy—Origins

Indi­an Philosophy—Age of the Sutra

Indi­an Philosophy—Buddhists and Jains

Very broad­ly, much Indi­an phi­los­o­phy can be under­stood as a cen­turies-long con­flict between the six ortho­dox Vedic schools (asti­ka) and the het­ero­dox (nas­ti­ka) schools, includ­ing Bud­dhism, Jain­ism, and Car­va­ka, a mate­ri­al­ist phi­los­o­phy that denied all meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. While some strains among these schools of thought can be asso­ci­at­ed with indi­vid­ual names, like Kana­da, Patañ­jali, or Nagar­ju­na, much ancient Indi­an phi­los­o­phy “is rep­re­sent­ed by a mass of texts,” as Luke Muehlhauser writes in his short guide, “for which the authors and dates of com­po­si­tion are most­ly unknown.”

Adamson’s free pod­cast sur­vey of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy makes for enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive lis­ten­ing. You can down­load every episode in .zip form at the links above. Or find links to the indi­vid­ual episodes right below. To keep up with trends in the study of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in Eng­lish, be sure to fol­low the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy Blog. And for an excel­lent list of “Read­ings on the Less Com­mon­ly Taught Philoso­phies (LCTP),” see this post by Bryan Van Nor­den here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image by Thier­ry Ehrmann via Flickr Com­mons

Some­times when con­front­ed with strange new ideas, peo­ple will exclaim, “you must be on drugs!”—a charge often levied at philoso­phers by those who would rather dis­miss their ideas as hal­lu­ci­na­tions than take them seri­ous­ly. But, then, to be fair, some­times philoso­phers are on drugs. Take Jean-Paul Sartre. “Before Hunter S. Thomp­son was dri­ving around in con­vert­ibles stocked full of acid, cocaine, mesca­line and tequi­la,” notes Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, Sartre almost approached the gonzo journalist’s habit­u­al intake.

Accord­ing to Annie Cohen-Solal, who wrote a biog­ra­phy of Sartre, his dai­ly drug con­sump­tion was thus: two packs of cig­a­rettes, sev­er­al tobac­co pipes, over a quart of alco­hol (wine, beer, vod­ka, whisky etc.), two hun­dred mil­ligrams of amphet­a­mines, fif­teen grams of aspirin, a boat load of bar­bi­tu­rates, some cof­fee, tea, and a few “heavy” meals (what­ev­er those might have been). 

These details should not undu­ly influ­ence our read­ing of Sartre’s work. Like Thomp­son, no mat­ter how phys­i­cal­ly debil­i­tat­ing the booze and drugs might have been for him, they didn’t seem to cramp his pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or intel­lec­tu­al vig­or. But his one and only expe­ri­ence with mesca­line almost sent him careen­ing over the edge, and cer­tain­ly con­tributed to an impor­tant motif in his work after­ward.

While work­ing on a book about the imag­i­na­tion, Sartre sought to have an hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry expe­ri­ence. He got the chance in 1935 when an old friend, Dr. Daniel Lagache, invit­ed him into an exper­i­ment at Sainte-Anne’s hos­pi­tal in Paris, where he was inject­ed with mesca­line and observed under con­trolled con­di­tions. “Sartre does not appear to have had a bad trip in the clas­sic sense of suf­fer­ing a major and pro­longed pan­ic attack,” Gary Cox writes in his Sartre biog­ra­phy. “But it was not a good trip and he did not enjoy it.”

The most ill effects came after­ward: “His visu­al fac­ul­ties remained dis­tort­ed for weeks.” Sartre saw hous­es with “leer­ing faces, all eyes and jaws.” Clock faces took on the fea­tures of owls. He con­fid­ed in his part­ner Simone de Beau­voir that “he feared that one day he would no longer know” whether or not these were hal­lu­ci­na­tions. They were, how­ev­er, not the worst after­ef­fects. As Sartre told polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor John Geras­si in a 1971 inter­view, crabs began to fol­low him around. He described the expe­ri­ence as “a ner­vous break­down.” The crabs fol­lowed him “all the time,” he said, “I mean they fol­lowed me in the streets, into class.”

I got used to them. I would wake up in the morn­ing and say, “Good morn­ing, my lit­tle ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time, or I would say, “OK guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and qui­et,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolute­ly still, until the bell rang.

This went on for a year before Sartre went to see his friend Jacques Lacan for psy­cho­analy­sis. “We con­clud­ed, “ he says, “that it was a fear of becom­ing alone.” While he had pre­vi­ous­ly con­fessed a fear of sea crea­tures, espe­cial­ly crabs, that went back to his child­hood, after the mesca­line trip, crabs fea­tured promi­nent­ly in his work, as Peter Royle shows at Phi­los­o­phy Now.

We find sev­er­al ref­er­ences to crabs in his short sto­ry col­lec­tion The Wall and in his famous essay “Exis­ten­tial­ism is a Human­ism.” Samir Chopra quotes crab pas­sages in Sartre’s first nov­el Nau­sea. (“At first I avoid­ed them by writ­ing about them,” he told Geras­si, “in effect, by defin­ing life as nau­sea.”) “In one of his short sto­ries, ‘Ero­s­tra­tus,’” notes Royle, “Sartre cre­ates a char­ac­ter, Paul Hilbert, who looks down on human beings from a height and sees them as crabs.” The most strik­ing use of the “crab motif” comes from his 1959 play The Con­demned of Altona, in which the pro­tag­o­nist Frantz imag­ines that by the Thir­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, humans have become crabs sit­ting in judg­ment of the peo­ple of the Twen­ti­eth.

Crab images, Royle argues, “point to impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal ideas,” includ­ing “the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ignominy inher­ent in the con­cept of free­dom itself” and the “rep­re­hen­si­ble ‘crabs’ who decline to assume their free­dom” and thus scut­tle around mind­less­ly in groups. Crus­taceans con­tin­ued to haunt the philoso­pher. While the effects of the mesca­line even­tu­al­ly dis­si­pat­ed, “when he was feel­ing down,” writes Cox, Sartre would get the “recur­rent feel­ing, the delu­sion, that he was being pur­sued by a giant lob­ster, always just out of sight… per­pet­u­al­ly about to arrive.”

One of the “great, dark­ly com­ic fea­tures of Sartre folk­lore,” the huge, invis­i­ble lob­ster invites much spec­u­la­tion about Sartre’s men­tal health. But per­haps it was only the mon­strous embod­i­ment of his own feel­ings of mau­vaise foi, giv­en vivid form by a lin­ger­ing psy­chotrop­ic hang­over and a dai­ly diet of uppers and downers—a reminder of the “anx­i­ety, anguish, dread, appre­hen­sion, fear of pain, fear of death… [and] fun­da­men­tal absur­di­ty of exis­tence.” As Royle writes, Sartre, always fond of puns, “could only have been intrigued” by the French word for lob­ster, homard, which sounds like “homme-ard,” a coinage that might sug­gest some­thing like “a bad man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Con­cepts of Free­dom & “Exis­ten­tial Choice” Explained in an Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Stephen Fry

The Draw­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In the intro­duc­tion to his sweep­ing His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy, Bertrand Rus­sell wastes no time get­ting to a def­i­n­i­tion of his sub­ject. “The con­cep­tions of life and the world which we call ‘philo­soph­i­cal,’” he writes in the first sen­tence, “are a prod­uct of two fac­tors: one, inher­it­ed reli­gious and eth­i­cal con­cep­tions; the oth­er, the sort of inves­ti­ga­tion which may be called ‘sci­en­tif­ic,’ using the word in its broad­est sense. … Phi­los­o­phy, as I shall under­stand the word, is some­thing inter­me­di­ate between the­ol­o­gy and sci­ence.” (Rus­sell makes a sim­i­lar argu­ment, in slight­ly dif­fer­ent terms, in the essay “Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic.”)

Although this dis­tinc­tion between broad­ly “the­o­log­i­cal” and broad­ly “sci­en­tif­ic” think­ing may not map direct­ly onto the mod­ern schism between “Con­ti­nen­tal” and “Ana­lyt­ic” phi­los­o­phy, a com­par­i­son still seems high­ly rel­e­vant. Though some con­ti­nen­tal thinkers may not wish to admit it, their cat­e­gories and modes of reasoning—or intu­it­ing, reflect­ing, spec­u­lat­ing, etc.—derive from the­o­log­i­cal thought denud­ed of its spe­cif­ic reli­gious con­tent or beliefs. Or as philoso­pher Thomas R. Wells writes at his blog The Philosopher’s Beard, the con­ti­nen­tal pro­ceeds from a “direct con­cern with the human con­di­tion, its ambi­tion, its reflex­iv­i­ty, its con­cern with the media as well as the mes­sage.”

The ana­lyt­ic, on the oth­er hand, strives for “uni­ver­sal scope, clar­i­ty and pub­lic account­abil­i­ty…. It tries to sys­tem­atize knowl­edge” and approx­i­mate sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods of inquiry (which also once mixed freely with the the­o­log­i­cal). Both approach­es can move too close to the poles Rus­sell identifies—can move too far away, that is, from phi­los­o­phy and toward the obscure and pure­ly mys­ti­cal or the inhu­mane­ly, unre­flec­tive­ly ratio­nal. Per­haps one way of think­ing about the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy is as a dance between this play of oppo­sites, with each approach offer­ing a cor­rec­tive to the other’s excess­es, some­times with­in the same thinker’s body of work.

But before apply­ing such abstrac­tions, we should con­sid­er the ways phi­los­o­phy devel­oped as a dis­ci­pline dis­tinct from the hard sci­ences and theology—and from art, psy­chol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, physics, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, eco­nom­ics, etc. “Once upon a time,” notes the video at the top—a com­pre­hen­sive “map of phi­los­o­phy” made by Carneades.org— “Phi­los­o­phy was any­thing you can study. Every­thing in the realm of study was a type of phi­los­o­phy.” The break­ing off of oth­er fields into their own domains hap­pened over the course of sev­er­al hun­dred years. Nonethe­less, “phi­los­o­phy still had its fin­gers in all of those oth­er pies.”

One can think philo­soph­i­cal­ly about anything—philosophy can “put dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines on the same play­ing field to talk to each oth­er.” It is, the video’s intro­duc­tion declares, “the glue that holds all of acad­e­mia togeth­er” (hence, the top aca­d­e­m­ic degree, the Ph.D., or “doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy”). For rea­sons of his own train­ing, the video’s cre­ator, who sim­ply goes by the pseu­do­nym “Carneades,” leans more heav­i­ly on the ana­lyt­ic side of things, neglect­ing or only light­ly touch­ing on much of the con­ti­nen­tal thought that flour­ished in the wake of Hei­deg­ger, Hegel, Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and oth­ers. (Fur­ther up, you can see a video focused on one spe­cif­ic school of moral philosophy—Consequentialism. See more such videos at the Carneades.org YouTube chan­nel.)

Carneades admits his bias­es and blind spots and wel­comes cor­rec­tions from those bet­ter versed in oth­er tra­di­tions. To his cred­it, he includes Native Amer­i­can, African, Latin Amer­i­can, Afro-Caribbean, Poly­ne­sian, Japan­ese, Islam­ic, Tibetan, and many oth­er glob­al philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions in his exten­sive map—traditions that are usu­al­ly com­plete­ly ignored or deemed “unphilo­soph­i­cal” in oth­er such sur­veys. His sen­si­tiv­i­ty to glob­al thought may have some­thing to do with the fact that he is not based in a West­ern aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment, but in West Africa, where he does human­i­tar­i­an work.

See a com­plete table of con­tents, with links to spe­cif­ic sec­tions, for the lengthy “Map of Phi­los­o­phy” just below, and an image of the full map just above (pur­chase a hard copy here). Carneades’ inten­tion to bring “these ideas back to the mod­ern ago­ra from the Ivory Tow­er” is a noble one. If you agree, and find these videos infor­ma­tive and intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing, you can donate to or become a patron of his efforts at the Carneades.org Patre­on page.

Table of Con­tents:

00:00 Intro­duc­tion
01:44 Log­ic and Philo­soph­i­cal Meth­ods
02:14 For­mal Clas­si­cal Log­ic
04:55 Non-Clas­si­cal Log­ic
06:35 Infor­mal Log­ic
08:00 Philo­soph­i­cal Meth­ods
10:20 The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy
13:30 Philo­soph­i­cal Tra­di­tions Around the World
20:55 Aes­thet­ics
22:35 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy
23:34 Social Phi­los­o­phy
25:00 Moral The­o­ry & Ethics
28:08 Epis­te­mol­o­gy
30:34 Meta­physics
34:13 Phi­los­o­phy of Sci­ence
37:35 Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion
40:17 Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage
41:58 Phi­los­o­phy of Mind
43:49 Phi­los­o­phy of Action
44:57 Full Map

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

350 Ani­mat­ed Videos That Will Teach You Phi­los­o­phy, from Ancient to Post-Mod­ern

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness