Intercultural philosophy as the era grasped in thought

Abstract

Intercultural philosophy is regarded as a result of the 20th century philosophy development. The fact that this kind of philosophy is of great im-portance became clear due to the modern geopo-litical changes, primarily the collapse of the co-lonial system and globalization. Intercultural philosophy is shown to have grown out of com-parative philosophy, which went through the three main stages of evolution: 1) it was believed that only Western philosophy should be consid-ered as the “true” one; 2) there were different attempts to create a “synthetic philosophy”; 3) it was finally recognized that non-Western philos-ophies are autonomous and significant. It is argued that intercultural philosophy is not an alternative to philosophical comparativism; ra-ther, it is its new form developed under the cir-cumstances of the challenges of globalism, a kind of philosophical reflection which is not limited to national or civilizational boundaries. At the moment, intercultural philosophy is de-veloping from its manifestation (in the works by J. Ganeri, A. Chakrabarti) to affirmation as an independent trend. There are several ways of the development of intercultural philosophy. The first one implies justifying an intercultural ap-proach in philosophy based on the belief that there are many philosophical traditions and no one can be absolutized. The second way in-volves elimination of “cognitive modesty” (R. Mall) to study philosophical ideas and concepts elaborated in other cultures (H. Lenk, H. Paul). The third way is to recognize the multiplicity of culturally rooted philosophies and to establish an intercultural polylogue, which is helpful for everyone who participates in it. This way may lead to discovering new, previously unknown solutions to universally significant problems.