Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy.

Another valiant attempt to confront the "Other." Or, at least, that was the rationale behind the seminar that led to this volume, held in Honolulu in 1984 under the auspices of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy. Larson makes much, in his introductory essay, of Foucault's famous laughter at certain "unusual" Chinese classificatory systems. Given the breathtaking range of problems and methods illustrated in the seventeen contributions to this volume, this reviewer thinks Foucault's laughter was a little premature.

Certain kinds of problems are "in the air." Raimundo Panikkar, before judging "comparative philosophy" an "impossibility", links it, suitably enough, to that old bugaboo, Western hegemonic discourse--"to the thrust toward universalization characteristic of western culture. The West, not being able any longer to dominate other peoples politically ... tries to maintain ... a certain control by striving toward a global picture of the world by means of comparative studies" (ibid.).

But do all the papers in this volume so conveniently self-destruct as does Panikkar's? Fortunately, no. Some do not even mention Foucault. Some even hold out hope of there being something out there to "understand." Henry Rosemont, however, practices something like overkill (has he come to the right conference?), when he attempts to deny "relativism" as a valid philosophical paradigm. But I do wonder, if and when I grasp Confucius as a "homoversal" thinker, will I have also denied in him the very root of my wonderment (whether or not I laugh)? Karl Potter adopts metaphor as the device best adapted to reconcile systemic incongruities--thus reducing the problem of philosophical Weltanschauungen to one of languages. And, of course, all languages are irreducibly different (untranslatable), as well as universally the same (translatable), hence essentially "metaphors." Fritz Staal illustrates this thesis by pointing out that "philosophy" (comparative or not) is itself a term not "translatable" outside the context of its origin (Aristotle and the medievals inspired by him)--which seems to imply that what is going on in...