Winning over the gap lovers

Wow! A full blog response - talk about the royal treatment! Certainly I intend to come prepared with a ready made list of examples to future tutorials - having to try and come up with them on the spot is surprisingly difficult. Doing this is somewhat complicated by the fact that I've been unable to find out anything about him online. All I know about his tastes in the history of philosophy are that he thinks Schelling is underrated and that he seems to think Descartes has predecessors in his discussion of the mind-body problem. His ability as tutor to choose the topic of discussion whenever he wants doesn't help either...

How one goes about addressing skeptics will depend on the reasons for their skepticism. I'll offer a way of addressing a general criticism I've encountered, and give two examples of skepticism, each with apparently different motivations, both of which have come up when I have attempted to engage Western philosophers in discussions about Indian philosophy. 

My favorite of the Indian philosophers is Sankara. It's not difficult to show that he made arguments similar to Western philosophers from Plato - Sankara proposes basically Meno's paradox when discussing our ability to know Brahman - to Descartes - Sanakara makes arguments about doubt requiring the existence of a self. Pointing those things out seems to help address those who claim to be concerned with cultural relativism. 

One philosopher complained that Sankara, and much of Indian philosophy in general, seems too wrapped up in theological or soteriological concerns. In this case, the philosopher making the complaint was a Descartes expert! I had to stifle a laugh, and point out the irony of this being his concern. Just this much seemed to be sufficient to suggest to him that he was being parochial.

I've also seen similar concerns about Indian philosophy being too "mystical." This leads me to wonder why similar concerns aren't raised about the pre-Socratics, or Neoplatonists, or even German Idealism? This is to say nothing of thinkers like Cantor, or L.E.J. Brower. But complaints of mysticism also seem to use that term in very fuzzy ways. It's not always clear whether the concern is the relevant philosopher reporting so-called mystical experiences, or with that philosopher drawing what might be called mystical conclusions. Mystical experiences strike me as nothing more than empirical claims, like any phenomenology. Mystical conclusions often rely on these experiences, but may or may not follow from a careful consideration of the description of the experience. These, hwoever, are logical or epistemological concerns. Couching those kinds of concerns in terms of mysticism doesn't seem helpful, and it certainly isn't sufficient to leave an entire culture's philosophy out of our discussions.

Here's my first stab at an answer: People who are 'skeptical about the value of "minor" figures in the history of philosophy, and also of non-Western (for instance Chinese) philosophy' should consider the following question: Are you interested in the history of philosophy or in confirming your prejudices? By analogy, you might think of the strategy you'd pursue to solve a crime: Would you just go for the 'obvious suspects' or also consider the figures hidden in the dark? - The point is that we have good reason to treat history like a crime scene: we don't (yet) know who was responsible for what or whose thought triggered what. If we just go for the obvious suspects or the great figures, we're unlikely to learn anything.

The work done by the white male men in Athens cannot be surpassed or replaced. It is outstanding forever and ever. Not because they were white male men from Athens. But because of the unsurpassable insights they brought to humankind. And because, somebody always has to be the first. If not Athens, then some other place in some other civilization. Could have been India or China as well. But it was not to be. Once the wheel is invented and you have seen it, you cannot invent it a second time. You only can improve it or invent other things using the wheel. Also the ancient Greeks did not invent a second time what was invented before them, for example the art of writing. The invention of writing will always be with the Near East. Is this now "Near-East-centrism"?

To avoid so-called "Eurocentrism" etc. I suggest a totally different approach: I suggest to emphasize that the civilizations of Antiquity do not exist any more. There are no ancient Greeks any more today. We are not identical with them. (And who is the "we" assumed by the anti-Eurocentrist ideology? Canadians? Australians? South Africans?) We (we human beings, who else?) are all "only" heirs. And everybody can make himself such an heir. Nobody is prevented to do so. We are all human beings.

The same is true for other break-through insights, e.g. Immanuel Kant, who is, if you have not noticed yet, dead. "We" are not Kant. We only inherit his thoughts. We? Yes. We all.

I also cannot see the "great man" approach in this. The Greek philosophy is a development over centuries, by many men (and even some women, if you look very closely). Also Kant is not a "great man" if you know the development of philosophy. And of course the periods of a traditionalistic type of religiosity are less valuable in their philosophic production. Not worthless, not at all, but inevitably less valuable. There is no justification for relativism. Some things are  simply more important than others. (If you now think of "European" things, then you have not read carefully what I said.)

A lot of "minor" figures are viewed as such due to contingent circumstances and the investment costs of understanding them properly. Scotus and Ockham are prime examples. I'm not sure there have been any sharper, more powerful, and more imaginative philosophers than these two. They are both enormously influential. But to read them involves (minimally) getiing used to a formal architecture which is quite foreign and offputting at first. This allows a quick invalid inference from "this is hard for me to understand" to "this is not worth understanding" to "this is just rehash and rubbish".

I once pointed out to a contemporary metaethicist that his arguments were a lot like Scotus' and he looked at me like I was eating a cat (mixed with condescension).    

I completely agree with this strategy -- of shifting the focus from the person to the philosophical question. However, I also think it can be useful to ask the person who focuses on 'major' figures to engage in a bit of historiographical reflection: What does the PWFMF take to  distinguish major from minor figures? Is that distinction well thought out? Should we apply the same distinction to writings in contemporary philosophy? Philosophers are so flat-footed with historiography, seemingly taking  a kind of naive Hegelianism as the only way of thinking about intellectual history.

Thanks for all the responses guys. Some of these points are just plain sound advice, while others (amongst whom I would highlight Neil, Kris, Aaron and of course Peter in particular) have offered useful insights into nature of the phenomenon in question. Franke's comment also raises important points along these lines for which I am thankful, but since he also takes a somewhat different stance in relation to my original question, I think offering the following as points of rebuttal to help clarify my own position.

I do not believe that whoever comes first should receive the overwhelming attention of historians to the exclusion of anyone else. Firstly, in some cases the same or very similar phenomena can arise independently of each other, and in such cases I feel we can better understand the phenomena by looking at its multiple origins. Philosophy seems to be such an example, having arisen independently in (at the very least) Greece, India and China. Even if the Greeks came first, I believe that studying the Indian and Chinese traditions as well can help understand what philosophy is, what value it offers, how it relates to human nature, and so on. Secondly, even one something is simply 'imported' from one tradition to another, the newer tradition can still offer interesting innovations and also further insight into the nature of the phenomena in question. The import of Greek philosophy into the Islamic world offers a good example: aside from the philosophical innovations made within the Islamic tradition, the debate it engendered over the usefulness of philosophy for Islam offers an interesting case study for the question of the extent to which philosophy transcends culture. Ironically enough, I would actually offer Franke's example of writing as a good point of comparison. Writing first emerged in Sumeria, yes. But it also emerged independently in (at the very least) China and Mesoamerica. And of course other cultures made interesting innovations after importing writing, the introduction of the alphabet being a well-known example. Quite clearly, if historians of writing were to focus on the Sumerians to the overwhelming exclusion of the Chinese, Mesoamericans, and Phoenicians, then historiography would be impoverished as a result. This, I would argue, is the current situation with regards to philosophy, and I would argue that the consequences are just the same.
All this ignores of course, the question of whether the Greeks really were the first, and I'm not so sure. The earliest Upanishads, for instance, probably predate Thales. And at any rate, I at least believe that philosophical thinking is sufficiently tied to human nature that to refer to any one person or culture as inventing whole cloth is a priori implausible. A recent work by Marc van de Mieroop – Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia – provides a good illustration of how such thinking can be too simplistic.
In my original comment I referred to the historiographical tendency I'm criticising as a 'great man' approach to history. I use this phrase on the basis of a few parallels with the much criticised approach to political and social history. First, a great man approach leads historians to downplay the importance of broader social trends that make possible and shape the great men. In historiography of philosophy, an example of this would be to study Plato and Aristotle, without given serious attention to questions about the religious, social and political context that made philosophy possible and innovative in fourth-century BCE Athens, or for their texts to survive the many centuries since. Second, a great man approach leads historians to distort the historical narrative by studying periods only through the lens of an influential, but not necessarily representative, great man. In the podcast we've seen this most notably occur in the case of medieval scholasticism, where the common impression of the period as being an attempt to rationalise Christianity and reconcile it with Aristotelianism is surely derived from the tendency of historians to treat Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas as its only worthwhile representatives. Third, a great man approach leads to focus on details about the details about the great men that are rather unimportant for actually understanding history. While this tendency is perhaps the easiest to identify the case of great man political history, I'll concede that this is my most controversial contention in the case of the history of philosophy. What I have in mind is something like the way that the Cartesian Circle is usually taught. In a standard class, the issue of the circle will be brought up while going through the relevant sections of the Meditations. An essay question will then be set asking whether Descartes' argument really is circular. A student will then research for their essay by trying to find any writings of Descartes' that they think might be relevant, and consult a host of secondary literature written by people who have done the same. Such literature essentially sees the writers offer their own view as to why Descartes' argument is not circular, how he adequately responded to the issue in the Objections and Replies, and so on. (I trust that readers can easily think of examples from other philosophers following the same structure). All of this seems perfectly natural from the perspective of the great man approach, but it is very odd if one is to approach history thematically. From the issue of studying epistemology, how much does it really matter what Descartes' own response to the accusation of circularity is? Surely the more interesting questions are to do with what an ideal response would be, whether such a response is possible, or how prominent the issue is within epistemology generally. What strikes me as the most interesting question about the Cartesian Circle is that of its relationship to what Roderick Chisholm has called the problem of the criterion – but such a question is much less likely to come up.
I certainly agree with Franke that not all eras or places should receive equal attention. Clearly, philosophy in fourth-century BCE Athens deserves more attention than philosophy in fourth-century CE Athens. I would disagree, however, that the period between 200 and 1500 can accurately be characterised as one of “a traditionalistic type of religiosity”. At the very least, it baffles my mind that anyone could think that Aristotle has contemporary relevance while denying the same status to the scholastics.

Update: the lecturer (who is not the tutor I mentioned, but seems to share the same view on the period) spoke about the course's gap in class yesterday. She mentioned that she knows too little about the period, and said it would be interesting to hear an expert on medieval or Late Antique philosophy give a defence of its value. While disclaiming any claims to such expertise, I offered to write up and send her a 1-2 page summary of the period that defends its value to philosophy generally and to the course in particular, which is on metaphilosophy. It's quite likely that I'll follow up by doing something similar for non-western traditions.

When I finish writing it up, I'd like to be to link to it from here so anyone interested can offer feedback. Obviously, a 1-2 page summary of such a large period will necessarily be woefully inadequate, but I do think some contribution from others might at least make it less woefully inadequate.