Philosophy and the Universal: An Intercultural Issue

Deadline: 31.03.2023

How universal is the concept of the “universal”? It is certainly one of the foundational philosophical concepts and, among others, the metaphysical notion that Western philosophy has relied upon to convince itself of its own universality. And yet the concept has been understood differently throughout history and across philosophical disciplines – from metaphysics, logic, ethics, politics, to the philosophies of language, law, and religion. Importantly, the flourishing of intercultural thought has forced philosophy to question the universality of its concepts and of its own practice.

Many traditions have dealt with the claim of universality, and various arguments have been advanced to establish or dismiss the existence and application of universals. This is because the concept of the universal involves issues which are not simply theoretical and speculative, but also geopolitical, interreligious, and social. It is thus inextricably linked to the question, however contemporary, of the presuppositions and consequences of globalisation. As François Jullien notes, in process of globalisation instances of cultural ideas are made into absolutes which can be globally understood, thus separating them – and consequentially our understanding of them – from the cultural contexts and the linguistic constraints in which they originally emerged. For example, if concepts such as “being,” “brahman,” or “tao,” despite their respective meanings, come to perform functions that could be judged analogous or homeomorphic (Raimon Panikkar) from a global or universal perspective, we cannot continue to neglect the irreducible gap (François Jullien) which makes them incommensurable to each other and which would make each of their claims to universality unjustified.

As Jacques Derrida has noted at the end of the 20th century, metaphysics is nothing but a “white mythology” whose fundamental concepts are just a collection of worn-out metaphors. Yet the most urgent task of philosophy is not simply to deconstruct these concepts, but also to fathom the depths of their situated meanings so as to remodel and pluralize them, especially in the case where philosophy is unwilling to let them go as the qualifying traits of human thought in general. Recently, philosophers like Carlo Sini in Italy, François Jullien in France, and Franz Wimmer in the German speaking world have explored the consequences of this intuition, observing that philosophy has been slow to realise that the claims of the universal can no longer be taken for granted. Can the concept of the universal no longer be universal?

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Trópos. Rivista di Ermeneutica e critica filosofica

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