This link will get you into the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.You can get some free articles outright, go further to get a free trial and,if you have an Athens password provided by institutions you can gain access to the whole text.It has some interesting articles on African thought.As often happens in the organization of knowledge in Western thought,the work is organized partly in terms of key themes in philosophy,but it also goes ahead to present various cultural-continental,natio
Some philosophical works are organised in terms of such categorizations of Western thought, such as works on Continental [ European excluding British ] philosophy.The practice of some publishing houses,and of many writers,however,is to issue works in philosophy the majority of which assume that a discussion of central philosophical themes does not need to show any knowledge of perspectives developed outside the contexts of mainstream Western thought,unless the writer is discussing what are known as World Philosophies, or esoteric Western thought,which do not seem to be understood as necessarily a part of the general intellectual conversation but belong in a niche of their own.Some academic publishers and some Western philosophers are publishing books that do it differently,however.Oxford
Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations (Harvard UP 1981) draws,to some degree on the philosophical backgorund from his Jewish ancestry as well as Classical Indian Asian thought.In the 19thn century Schopenhaur and Emerson showed a knowledge of Indian thought. Graham. Harveys Animism: Respecting the Living World integrates solidly non-Western and Western perespectives.
The most impressive examples I have come across that explores the full range of contemporary science and technology-from biology to astrophysics to rocket science- in relation to conceptons of being and consciousness inspired by non-Western cultures,inc;luding developing a form of cosmic animism are the novels of David Zindell, Neverness and the Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy.His work is truly futuristic in concretising imaginatively interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches to knowledge that represent a possiblity at the moment but which are yet unrealised at the scale at which he develops them.He also visualises these issues in relation to humanity's place in the cosmos,within the imagined context of interaction with non-terrestial sentient beings.
Will the growing economic and political power,reinforced by military strength, of China and India,and the economic clout of Japan contribute to a redrawing of the implicit and explicit canons of what it means to be well educated,particularly aa a scholar in the humanities?Will their ascendancy contribute to demands to integratate their own endogenous approaches to knwoledge in the discussion of central themes in philosophy?
