Comparative Philosophy and the Liberal Arts: Between and Beyond—Educating to Cultivate Geocitizens

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, I critically engage the meaning of creating multicultural, diverse communities on Liberal Arts campuses through comparative philosophy with a feminist orientation, speaking to theory on undergraduate liberal arts education, my own research and teaching. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks remarks that the “call for a recognition of cultural diversity, a rethinking of ways of knowing, a deconstruction of old epistemologies, and the concomitant demand that there be a transformation in our classrooms, in how we teach and what we teach, has been a necessary revolution—one that seeks to restore life to a corrupt and dying academy” (29–30). Teaching comparative philosophy can be pivotal in this revitalization of the academy and can also contribute to one of the fundamental goals of education in the liberal arts in particular—that of educating world citizens or “geocitizens,” who are prepared to make significant contributions to the multicultural world we live in. I draw on Japanese philosophy, through Watsuji Tetsuro in particular, and on Luce Irigaray's feminist philosophy as well as on current scholarship in liberal arts education to suggest that comparative philosophy can play a pivotal role in fostering the development of ethical geocitizens.