World Philosophy: The Importance of India

World philosophy involves bringing together two or more of the world’s three main endogenous philosophical traditions (the Indian, Chinese, and Western) in order to make philosophical progress. My own take on this possibility involves combating Western skepticism about Chinese thought and demonstrating that ideas from China can serve as a course correction for largely mistaken Western views about the mind in particular. The West sees cognition and emotion as separable, but Chinese thought subscribes to the idea of a heart-mind where these elements are vitally interconnected. And we nowadays are in a position to support the Chinese view against the Western. All thinking and reasoning involves belief, but given that confidence that p is strong belief that p, belief and confidence lie on a single scale of increasingly positive epistemic feeling. If confidence involves feeling, so do belief and mental activity in general. Further, yin and yang understood in modern generalized terms as receptivity and directed purpose respectively can be used to understand all the cases where cognition and emotion come together. In compassion receptive yin empathy coincides with purposeful yang motivation to help. Yin and yang are (necessarily) complementary in this and a host of other cases involving the mind or, better, heart-mind. So Chinese categories can take us philosophically further with the idea that cognition and emotion cannot be separated. This is an instance of world philosophy, but the West isn’t interested in such a thing, and the domination of Marxism in China would make it difficult for it to establish roots there. But Indian philosophy has a tradition of philosophical interest in more than one world tradition, and Indian philosophers have now set about establishing an International Society for World Philosophy at the University of Toronto.