Journey · 9 stops
Who Decides What Counts as Knowledge?
How do we know – and who decides what counts as knowledge? Arguments from India to the Andes.
Stops
Stop 1 of 9: Akshapada Gautama
Is critical argument a Greek invention? In India, the Nyaya Sutra attributed to Akshapada Gautama lists the valid means of knowledge – perception, inference, comparison, reliable testimony – and the rules that separate honest debate from mere wrangling. For more than a thousand years, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain thinkers argue with one another on this shared ground.
Stop 2 of 9: Dharmakirti
Dharmakirti, the leading Buddhist epistemologist of the seventh century, accepts only two of those means: perception and inference. Testimony – even that of the Veda – is valid only insofar as it can be checked by reason, and real is only what has causal effects. His contemporary Kumarila, a Mimamsa philosopher, defends the authority of scripture against the Buddhist logicians, and the two answer each other; their dispute is carried on for centuries, as far as Tibet.
Stop 3 of 9: Saadia Gaon
In tenth-century Baghdad, the same question arises in another faith and language. Saadia Gaon, head of a Jewish academy and writing in Arabic, names four sources of knowledge – the senses, reason, inference and reliable tradition – and argues that revelation and reason teach the same truths. Reason is not the enemy of tradition but its test.
Stop 4 of 9: Lu Jiuyuan (Lu Xiangshan)
In twelfth-century China the debate takes a different turn: not whether reason is reliable, but where principle is found. Zhu Xi teaches the patient investigation of things one by one; at the Goose Lake Temple in 1175, Lu Xiangshan objects that principle lies in one’s own heart-mind. Wang Yangming will later take up his side.
Stop 5 of 9: Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan)
In Korea, where Zhu Xi’s learning had become state orthodoxy, Jeong Yak-yong goes back behind it. Virtue, he argues, is not an inner principle to be uncovered but is acquired by acting well toward others – and he reads not only the Confucian classics but also Christian writings that had reached Korea from Beijing. In exile he writes a manual on how officials should serve the people.
Stop 6 of 9: K. C. Bhattacharya
Under colonial rule, the question of knowledge becomes a question of freedom. Around 1930 the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharya speaks of “Swaraj in Ideas”: political independence is not enough if the mind stays colonised and Western concepts are adopted without critique. Kwasi Wiredu would later call for the same thing in Africa: conceptual decolonisation.
Stop 7 of 9: V. Y. Mudimbe
V. Y. Mudimbe asks how Africa became an object of European knowledge. Missionaries, anthropologists and even Tempels’ well-meant Bantu Philosophy built a “colonial library” that spoke about Africans rather than with them. Africa, in this sense, was invented – and African philosophy has to work through that library in order to speak in its own voice.
Stop 8 of 9: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Such writing back had begun long before. Around 1615 the Andean author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala sent the king of Spain a chronicle of almost 1,200 pages with nearly 400 drawings: a history of the Andes, a record of colonial abuse and a plan for good government. The manuscript lay forgotten in Copenhagen until 1908.
Stop 9 of 9: Aníbal Quijano
Aníbal Quijano names what links these stations: the “coloniality of power”. With the conquest of America, he argues, the idea of race became the axis of a global order of labour and knowledge, in which Europe defined what counts as reason. The journey ends with an open question – whether, as Dussel, Lugones and others propose, philosophy can become a dialogue among many traditions on an equal footing.
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