Cross-Cultural Dialogue in Early Modern Philosophy

This course will examine several points of encounter between early modern European philosophers and non-European philosophical texts. The goal of this examination is to discover what we can learn about European philosophers by reading them alongside these sources (this course is, emphatically, no substitute for a course in the history non-European philosophy). We will follow Francois Bernier, atomist philosopher Pierre Gassendi's protégé, to the Mughal court of India, where he encountered the flourishing Navya-Nyaya school of rationalist philosophy and translated Descartes into Persian. We will read works by Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, a Mexican philosopher of European origins, alongside extant Aztec philosophical texts she encountered. We will try to figure out what German philosophical giants Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff found so fascinating in Classical Chinese philosophy. Finally, we will read Hume alongside Buddhist texts that were available to him in his university library, which express views that resonate strongly with his. From this somewhat unorthodox viewpoint, I hope to cast early modern philosophers in a new light unobstructed by artificial barriers, alongside the tangles of history within which they lived and wrote.