In its pejorative sense, however, a neophiliac fixates on what is novel or contemporary to the point of wilfully ignoring or forsaking whatever is traditional or established for the reason of its being older. In its positive sense, a neophiliac is someone enthused or interested by what is new, someone with a marked taste for novelty. Each prejudice reflects and feeds a more general sort of metaphilosophical myopia, a narrow vision that fails or refuses to see the richness and value of the philosophical enterprise in its many forms as manifested in different times and cultures. ![]() A xenophile impugns the Western philosophical tradition, and only sees value or interest in the philosophies of other cultures, the further away the better. A neophile supposes that philosophy is only really worthwhile if it directly engages with, or is rooted in, the prevailing concerns or issues of the contemporary world. ![]() I will take the prejudices of neophilia and xenophilia in turn, but it’s worth emphasising that their common feature is a sort of myopia, an unwarrantedly narrow fixation on an aspect of philosophy to the exclusion of the others. But it’s a problem if they finish their first-year still thinking that, not to mention if they graduate with that same Eurocentric conceit in place. It’s understandable if students start a philosophy course thinking that this enterprise started in Greece and ended in British and American universities. I am thus assuming that one important aim of a philosophical education is to try and correct failings like closedmindedness and a narrow intellectual imagination. By taking seriously these prejudices, we can ensure that our well-intentioned efforts to diversify our curricula in the direction of the “non-Western” traditions do not backfire by entrenching prejudices that we ought to be uprooting. In what follows, I want to describe some of their main manifestations and ask what, if anything we might do to resist them. I worry that curricular diversification efforts can tend to feed and entrench a complex pair of prejudices that I will label neophilia and xenophilia. Do they approve of them? If so, for what reasons? How will studying a diversified curricular affect their emerging understanding of the aims and nature of philosophy? And, more importantly, what sorts of biases or prejudices might students have that our curricular diversification efforts might inadvertently intensify? Over time, my answer to that last question has become rather pessimistic. However, they got me interested in the attitudes that students have towards curricular diversification projects. Such assumptions are false, since those dead figures and allegedly dusty topics really do interest me. Moreover, because I teach “trendy” subjects, students often attribute to me problematic metaphilosophical convictions – a scorn for the canonical figures of the Western tradition, for instance, or disinterest in done-to-death topics like scepticism about knowledge or the problem of evil in theistic religions. Partly through teaching these subjects, however, I’m aware that students are often attracted to them for less than perfect reasons. In previous years, I also taught a history of philosophy course that included topics and figures from the African, Islamic, and Japanese traditions. I currently teach Buddhist and classical Chinese philosophy and a module on the phenomenology of illness, alongside guest lectures on various topics in contemporary applied philosophy. We should take due care to ensure that their stated preferences are not being corrupted by preconceptions and biases.īefore we get going, I am, for the record, an enthusiast for – and, indeed, practitioner of – the diversification of undergraduate philosophy curricula. After all, it is partly for their sake that we invest energy in curricular diversification efforts. These will include certain prejudices or habits of thought on the part of students. ![]() ![]() That means, in practice, taking seriously the factors that can spoil diversification efforts. If we are to diversify undergraduate philosophy curriculum, then we ought to do it well.
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