We post copi­ous resources for the study of phi­los­o­phy on this site, such that you can obtain a full col­lege-lev­el sur­vey under­stand­ing of the sub­ject on your own by tak­ing the many free class­es, lis­ten­ing to the many free lec­tures and pod­casts, and read­ing the many free texts, ebooks and com­men­taries you’ll find here. But sev­er­al of our posts have met with a sim­i­lar read­er objec­tion: where is the East­ern phi­los­o­phy?

The ques­tion could also be put to almost any aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment of phi­los­o­phy. One answer I’ve often heard dis­miss­es it alto­geth­er. Phi­los­o­phy, some say, devel­oped in the West, first in ancient Greece, then in Rome, the suc­ceed­ing Chris­t­ian empire, and the sec­u­lar age that fol­lowed. It is a Euro­pean pur­suit and tra­di­tion. Oth­er cul­tur­al­ly par­tial crit­ics, who wish to appear enlight­ened, are will­ing to con­cede that “the world’s Mus­lims,” as Richard Dawkins tweet­ed a few years back, “did great things in the Mid­dle Ages,” at least pro­vid­ing a crit­i­cal bridge between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Scholas­ti­cism.

Islam­ic philoso­phers like Avi­cen­na and Aver­roes kept in dia­logue with the Greeks after Europe had for­got­ten them, and pre­served the only work of Aris­to­tle we have. But that was then. What have they done for us late­ly? Atti­tudes like this, argues phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Peter Adam­son, are prej­u­dices with lit­tle basis in fact, and part of the rea­son for a dearth of high-qual­i­ty, acces­si­ble East­ern phi­los­o­phy resources in Eng­lish. Adam­son, who has made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the study of phi­los­o­phy online with his pod­cast, His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, fills in the gap with his series on Islam­ic and Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in sev­er­al parts.

For­ma­tive Peri­od—25 episodes

Phi­los­o­phy in Andalu­sia—25 episodes

East­ern Tra­di­tions—25 episodes

Begin­ning with phi­los­o­phy in the Islam­ic world in Episode 171, “East­ern Tra­di­tions,” at the top, Adam­son cov­ers “influ­en­tial thinkers of the twelfth cen­tu­ry like Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Suhrawardī, focus­ing on their lega­cy in the East­ern realms of cen­tral Asia and Per­sia, mov­ing on to the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and end­ing with devel­op­ments in twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry phi­los­o­phy.” Against dis­mis­sive claims like Dawkins’ that these cen­turies were “a time of intel­lec­tu­al and sci­en­tif­ic decline in Islam­ic civ­i­liza­tion,” Adam­son argues they were “in fact a time of remark­able achieve­ment in fields like log­ic and astron­o­my as well as the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines of phi­los­o­phy.” See all three parts of the Islam­ic Phi­los­o­phy series above.

Adam­son shares the intro­duc­tion to Indi­an phi­los­o­phy, just above, with NYU’s Jonar­don Ganeri, and the two lay out a case for the tra­di­tion as “pri­mar­i­ly a way of life and search for the high­est good.” As usu­al, Adam­son brings on guest schol­ars and pro­vides a list for fur­ther read­ing on the podcast’s site. And as usu­al, his his­tor­i­cal frame­works are rig­or­ous and very well-researched. This series breaks into two main cat­e­gories (below). The sec­ond part of the series focus­es on the devel­op­ment of a for­mal tra­di­tion, the “sūtra (lit­er­al­ly ‘thread’)… a genre of writ­ing in which ideas were set forth in brief, apho­ris­tic form. Var­i­ous sūtras were tak­en as author­i­ta­tive and foun­da­tion­al for numer­ous schools of Indi­an thought, which devot­ed fur­ther com­men­taries to the sūtras.”

Ori­gins—17 episodes

Age of Sutra—15 episodes

As he has done with many of his oth­er series, Adam­son has adapt­ed the Islam­ic Phi­los­o­phy pod­casts in book form, Phi­los­o­phy in the Islam­ic World: A his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy with­out any gaps, Vol­ume 3. His even-hand­ed­ness and eru­di­tion make this series a joy to lis­ten to, though he’d also encour­age us to read the philoso­phers he dis­cuss­es, if pos­si­ble. If you’re new to read­ing phi­los­o­phy, or to Adamson’s pod­cast, you’d do well to read his recent­ly post­ed All 20 ‘Rules for His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy,’ which he has brought togeth­er in one place as “guide­lines encap­su­lat­ing what I see as good prac­tice in study­ing the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy.” (Rule 8: “Read the whole text.”)

Many of these guide­lines rub up against the cur­rent ortho­dox­ies, assump­tions and, frankly, snob­beries of some con­tem­po­rary aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy. Among these, “Rule 14: Take reli­gion seri­ous­ly” and “Rule 15: Be broad­mind­ed about what counts as ‘phi­los­o­phy.’” And for those who not only dis­miss but also embrace entire cul­tures’ philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions for one defin­ing reason—Indian thought is “spir­i­tu­al” or “non-vio­lent”; Islam­ic thought is “tol­er­ant” or “intolerant”—Adamson offers Rule 18: “don’t essen­tial­ize.” As becomes clear on even a cur­so­ry lis­ten to the pod­casts in these series, what we tend to believe about “non-west­ern” phi­los­o­phy oper­ates far in excess of what most of us actu­al­ly know about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Learn The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 247 Pod­casts (With More to Come)

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

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

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

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

Very broad­ly speak­ing, all phi­los­o­phy con­tains with­in it dialec­ti­cal ten­sions: some ideas seem ennobling and con­sol­ing, oth­ers unset­tling and alien­at­ing. Every school, move­ment, and indi­vid­ual thinker deals in some mea­sure of both. Some­times we feel unset­tled because of his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al dis­tance. When Socrates talks about slav­ery or cen­sor­ship in mat­ter-of-fact ways, for exam­ple, we might be star­tled, but his audi­ence didn’t see things the way we do. When it comes, how­ev­er, to the Exis­ten­tial­ists, the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal milieu of these thinkers may resem­ble our own close­ly enough that state­ments which shocked their read­ers still shock most peo­ple today.

Take one of the big­ger ques­tions like, oh, the mean­ing of life. “We under­stand our lives as being mean­ing­ful,” says Hank Green above—brother of John Green, the oth­er half of the Crash Course edu­ca­tion­al team. We might find pur­pose and ful­fill­ment in a num­ber of things, from reli­gion to art, sports, careers, and pol­i­tics.

Exis­ten­tial­ists, Green tells us, would say that “any or all of these things can give your life mean­ing.” Con­sol­ing, eh? “But at the same time,” and here comes the down­er, “they say none of them can.” These thinkers may be spread out over time and space—from the 19th cen­tu­ry Den­mark and Ger­many of Kierkegaard and Niet­zsche to the 1950s France of Sartre, De Beau­voir, and Camus. But Exis­ten­tial­ist thinkers share at least one com­mon trait: anti-essen­tial­ism.

As Green explains, clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy offered the com­fort­ing expla­na­tion that every­thing con­tained an essence: “a cer­tain set of core prin­ci­ples that are nec­es­sary or essen­tial for a thing to be what it is.” Not only do chairs and tables have essences but so do human beings, they thought, and “your essence gives you a pur­pose.” Still a very wide­spread and com­mon­place belief, we can prob­a­bly agree, and one peo­ple rarely think about crit­i­cal­ly unless they’re hav­ing… well, an exis­ten­tial cri­sis. So far so good when it comes to grasp­ing the essence (sor­ry) of Exis­ten­tial­ist think­ing.

Green goes astray how­ev­er, when he gets to Niet­zsche, whom he claims embraced Nihilism, “the belief in the ulti­mate mean­ing­less­ness of life.” Not only did Niet­zsche vehe­ment­ly oppose nihilism as self-defeat­ing, but he feared the con­se­quences of its spread, even if he some­times saw it as an inevitable prod­uct of moder­ni­ty. Anoth­er impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion when study­ing so-called Exis­ten­tial­ist thinkers is that they them­selves were deeply trou­bled by their trou­bling insights. Kierkegaard turned to a rad­i­cal form of Chris­tian­i­ty, Camus to an intro­spec­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism… and per­haps the most famous Exis­ten­tial­ist, Jean Paul Sartre, came to embrace doc­tri­naire Marx­ism.

But first, he for­mu­lat­ed the most quotable max­im of Exis­ten­tial­ist thought: “Exis­tence pre­cedes Essence.” From this, he drew a con­clu­sion both trou­bling and con­sol­ing: “It’s up to each of us to deter­mine who we are. We have to write our own essence through the way we choose to live.” But this lib­er­at­ed con­di­tion is absurd: it means we are ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble for every­thing we do, even when we have no idea what’s going to hap­pen when we do it, or any larg­er pur­pose for doing it at all. Whether ardent­ly reli­gious like Kierkegaard or ardent­ly athe­ist like Niet­zsche and Sartre, Exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­phers who stared into the void found there all of the bound­less free­dom and ter­ri­fy­ing ver­ti­go we came to asso­ciate with the neu­ro­sis of the mod­ern human con­di­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Crash Course Phi­los­o­phy: Hank Green’s Fast-Paced Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy Gets Under­way on YouTube

What Is an “Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis”?: An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains What the Expres­sion Real­ly Means

Simone de Beau­voir Defends Exis­ten­tial­ism & Her Fem­i­nist Mas­ter­piece, The Sec­ond Sex, in Rare 1959 TV Inter­view

Exis­ten­tial­ism with Hubert Drey­fus: Four Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

“A run­away train is head­ing towards five work­ers on a rail­way line. There’s no way of warn­ing, but you’re stand­ing near a lever that oper­ates some points. Switch the points, and the train goes down a spur. Trou­ble is, there’s anoth­er work­er on that bit of track too, but it’s one fatal­i­ty instead of five. Should you do that?” Here we have the trol­ley prob­lem, which since its first artic­u­la­tion in 1967 by Philip­pa Foot has become the clas­sic exam­ple of an eth­i­cal dilem­ma as well as per­haps the best known thought exper­i­ment in all of phi­los­o­phy.

This expla­na­tion of the trol­ley prob­lem comes from one of the Har­ry Shear­er-nar­rat­ed BBC- and Open Uni­ver­si­ty-made ani­ma­tions pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The short video above takes a dif­fer­ent approach, not just using a chil­dren’s train set to illus­trate it but then putting the famous ques­tion to the child him­self.

“Uh oh, Nicholas,” says the two-year-old’s father from behind the cam­era, “this train is going to crash into these five peo­ple! Should we move the train to go this way, or should we let it go that way?” The ele­gance of the tod­dler’s solu­tion, imple­ment­ed with­out hes­i­ta­tion, must be seen to be appre­ci­at­ed.

The father, E. J. Masi­cam­po of Wake For­est Uni­ver­si­ty, research­es “the effort­ful men­tal process­es that seem to sep­a­rate humans from oth­er ani­mals: resist­ing temp­ta­tions and impuls­es, rea­son­ing and deci­sion mak­ing, think­ing about and sim­u­lat­ing non-present events, and mak­ing plans for the future.” Among his pro­fes­sion­al goals, he lists work­ing toward “a the­o­ry of the human con­scious­ness” by uncov­er­ing “how con­scious thought con­tributes to human func­tion­ing in light of its appar­ent lim­i­ta­tions.” He’s tak­en on a prob­lem even hard­er than the one with the trol­leys; per­haps young Nicholas, what with his demon­strat­ed gift of “think­ing out­side the box,” invalu­able in the philo­soph­i­cal dis­ci­plines, can offer some assis­tance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

9‑Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life and the Uni­verse

Are You a Psy­chopath? Take the Test (And, If You Fail, It’s Not All Bad News)

The Epis­te­mol­o­gy of Dr. Seuss & More Phi­los­o­phy Lessons from Great Children’s Sto­ries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.