WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Abstract
This article is about the history of Western philosophy from its development
among the ancient Greeks of Classical antiquity to the present. The idea of ‘Western
Philosophy’ is the product of a legitimation project for European colonialism, through
to post-second world war Pan-European identity formation and white supremacist
projects. Thus argues Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African public intellectual,
schoolteacher, trade unionist, and activist-theorist. In his 1953 address to the Teachers’
League of South Africa, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World
Civilization, Kies became one of the first people to argue explicitly that there is no
such thing as ‘Western philosophy’. In this paper, I introduce Kies as a new figure in
the historiography of philosophy with important insights, relevant today. I outline his
three key arguments: that ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of political mythmaking,
that it is a recent, largely mid-twentieth century fabrication, and that there is an
alternative to ‘Histories of Western Philosophy’, namely ‘mixed’ or entangled
histories. I show that Kies’ claims are supported both by contemporary scholarship and
bibliometric analysis. I thus argue that Kies is right to claim that the idea of a
distinctive, hermetically sealed ‘Western Philosophy’ is a recent, political fabrication
and should be abandoned. We should instead develop global, entangled historiography
to make sense of philosophy and its history today.