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The word "philosophy" has usually meant "western philosophy" in academic use. Eastern thinkers aren't a major component of the western academic tradition. Therefore, the use of the word here is in line with conventional usage. You are welcome to get on your high horse about the conventional usage, but you might want to start with the thousands of universities that teach "Intro to Philosophy" without touching on Chuang Tzu or Buddhism.

Your counterexamples aren't particularly good, because it seems likely to me (arguing without proof) that the majority of written philosophy that survives to the present day is part of the western tradition. MS Windows is but a tiny minority of the world's operating systems, for example.

And I will repeat, there is nothing about this site that particularly limits it to western philosophers. It's a data model, and data can (and probably will) be added - in fact, open or semi-open access to the data set would be one of the best additions. Then you could add all the non-western philosophers you like, and the connections between them. I'd argue your criticism is more like complaining that the corner diner shouldn't say "good food" because it doesn't serve sushi, and sushi is good food too. Absolute inclusiveness is an unreasonable goal, because it's an impossible goal.



Your arguments, simplified, are 1) "we don't need to include other philosophy, because we only teach western philosophy", 2) "it seems kind of like all written philosophy is western, so your example is bunk", 3) "somebody can eventually add some other culture's philosophy to this page so we don't need to change it at all right now".

They should either change the title of the page, or include all other philosophy. But the current state is at the very least incredibly lazy and misleading, and at worst, insulting.


You should read Bluestrike's comments about the lack of Arabic philosophers, downthread. That's how you make a point of incompleteness, not just politically correct yelling.




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