Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.12

THE SPEAKER

Simon Glendinning is Professor of European Philosophy and Head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His early career was focused on the movement of Phenomenology in European Philosophy. However, since his appointment in the European Institute in 2004 his work has shifted from European Philosophy to Philosophy of Europe. He has written a number of essays and articles on this new theme, and is currently completing a two-volume book entitled Europe: A Philosophical History.

ABSTRACT

In European “philosophical history” human history is the unfolding of the reason in Man in time. No form of humanness is outside this history. But not all forms of humanness are at the same stage of its development. And some human groups, as both Hegel and Husserl explicitly affirmed, have not yet even stepped onto “the stage of history”. Europe, by contrast, is supposed to have entered a new and “higher stage” in virtue of its origin in Greek philosophy. But what of philosophical traditions other than the one that has its birthplace in ancient Greece? What about Indian philosophy or Chinese philosophy? Until the late twentieth century many European philosophers completely rejected the idea that these traditions should be understood, strictly speaking, as “philosophy” at all. In this lecture I will explore the reasons behind that rejection – and reject them in turn. There are, I will argue, other ways for philosophy to be practiced than those that have developed in the European tradition, thus opening the philosophical space for new encounters between “West” and “East”.