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[Expositions 12.2 (2018) 27–38]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
	

The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  

 

MICHAEL S. KOCHIN 

Tel Aviv University  

 

 

Bryan Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy1 is a polemic, literally an extended op-ed, 

arguing that American philosophy departments should allocate more resources and especially 

teaching positions to “less commonly taught philosophies,” especially those from outside the 

Anglo-European world. Let me say three things at the beginning: First, I have no objection to 

Van Norden’s goal. Second, I do not have enough familiarity with American philosophy 

departments to make informed objections. Since getting my Ph.D. in political science I have 

taught for precisely one year in the United States, in political science and Directed Studies at 

Yale. I spent a sabbatical year in Princeton’s alternative philosophy department, the University 

Center for Human Values, at the wrong end of Rockefeller Hall. While I studied philosophy 

and with professors of philosophy, in college, graduate school, and after, and I have published 

in philosophy journals, I am not within the discipline of philosophy. I have worked with and 

taught, and even published a little bit, on some of Norden’s “less commonly taught 

philosophies.”2 Nonetheless, I am cut off from full engagement with Chinese philosophy by 

knowing no Chinese, and with Arabic philosophy by knowing no Arabic. 

Though I agree that philosophic texts of all cultures should be included in the philosophy 

curriculum, I certainly do not share Van Norden’s vision that “in an ideal world, philosophy 

departments should make their own decisions about their curricula internally” (31). I think this 

would only be reasonable if the ideal philosophy department were entirely and completely self-

supporting and had no interest in preparing its late adolescent undergraduate students for 

professional study or nonacademic employment. Unlike Van Norden, I think that in these 

curricular matters the opinions of the outsiders who pay the professors’ salaries and hire their 

students should count for something, and my opinion no less than that of the average welder, 

politician, or professor of surgery. I do not know enough about American philosophy 

departments, or any philosophy departments anywhere, to know if they offer or require the 

right amount of any “less commonly taught philosophy.” So neither my agreement nor my 

disagreement on this point is worth more or less than that of any other colleague or taxpayer.  



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  28 
 

Third, for reasons I will explain later, I am worried about a potential toxic interaction 

between multiculturalism in philosophy teaching (which I favor) and identity politics.3 I think 

that Van Norden is too soft on identity politics, partly because he is deliberately obtuse about 

the danger that identity politics poses to scholarly standards and fair administrative procedures. 

I write this as somebody whose professional success has benefitted as much or perhaps more 

from the preference for “less commonly taught philosophies” and from identity politics than it 

has been harmed by them. 

 

There are two reasons why we might read a book: because we think it might help us achieve 

our purposes, or because it might help us clarify our purposes. We might hope for such 

clarification because the book holds out the promise of showing us new goals or purposes, or 

because it seems to present concepts that might be alternatives to those in which we have 

formulated our purposes to ourselves. To read a text philosophically is to read with a view to 

challenging or clarifying our purposes. Van Norden claims that “philosophy still reads classic 

texts with that is known as ‘a hermeneutic of faith.’” He goes on to explain that “those who use 

a hermeneutic of faith read texts in the hope of discovering truth, goodness, and beauty” (139). 

I would say, rather, that what is distinctive about a philosophic text is that its author aims to 

get his or her reader to interrogate and assess the meaning and worth of concepts such as truth, 

goodness, and beauty. Any text can be read philosophically, as part of a conscious and 

deliberate inquiry into our purposes and their worth, but some texts are philosophic texts, that 

is, texts whose authors themselves intend to make the reader question his or her purposes or 

concepts 

In some ways this book by Van Norden appears an unpromising occasion for thinking about 

how to read and especially how to read philosophically. Van Norden mostly seems to take for 

granted the disciplinary purposes of American academic philosophers, and this book, Van 

Norden tells us, is deliberately pitched at a less scholarly level than Van Norden’s usual 

attempts in his writing and teaching (xxiii). It often seems careless in expression and thought. 

Does “any Christian,” even those who read their Greek Bible in Greek, or Tagalog, know that 

“2 Corinthians” is to be read “Second Corinthians”? (97) And what are to make of Van Norden 

quoting Monty Python’s John Cleese as an authority for the claim that “among dictatorships 

philosophers have always been among the first people to be silenced” (137)? Heidegger and 

his (albeit non-Pharisaical) students flourished under Nazism. There was good philosophy at 

Moscow State under Stalin. Croce was persecuted by Mussolini, but Gentile flourished until 

he was murdered by self-described “anti-fascists,” and after a period of exile Ortega y Gasset 



29  Kochin 
 

returned in 1948 to head an Institute of Philosophy in Franco’s Spain. Arendt’s claims about 

the affinity of philosophers for tyranny seem more plausible,4 and perhaps Van Norden would 

agree, since he teaches not just at Vassar but at Wuhan in the PRC and NUS-Yale in 

authoritarian Singapore, instead of giving his full energies to educating students in democratic 

or “mob-ruled” America (see 4). 

 

To treat Van Norden’s polemic as an occasion for thought, and in particular, for thinking about 

how and what to read, it might be helpful to attend to certain binary oppositions that come up 

without being deconstructed or even handled especially deftly. The most important, and a 

recurrent problematic in comparative philosophy, is the binary wisdom/philosophy: the 

contrast, if there is one, between the sage and the philosopher (see 30). Philosophy, as we all 

know, means “love of wisdom,” and Plato’s Socrates is guided by the wise priestess Diotima 

in the Symposium to the claim that we love only that which we lack. If philosophers love 

wisdom (and not merely, as Nietzsche cracked, their own wisdom), they must be distinct from 

those who do not long for wisdom because they already have it. Garfield in his preface to 

Taking Back Philosophy attacks Nicholas Tambio’s version of the alleged distinction between 

philosophy and wisdom, but Garfield is more interested in scoring debaters’ points than in 

reconstructing (if only to deconstruct) the most defensible form of such a distinction.5 Van 

Norden in the main text seems blithely unaware of it.6 

The brings us to the binary religion/philosophy: Garfield writes in the preface that “we don’t 

have departments of wisdom traditions because we don’t value what we take them to be” (xvii). 

Notwithstanding Garfield’s remarkably intemperate and ill-informed remark, American 

universities do have departments of wisdom traditions—they are called departments of 

religion, faculties of theology, and schools of divinity (Van Norden acknowledges their 

existence on page 5.) Van Norden calls Confucianism and Taoism part of “a robust and diverse 

native spiritual tradition” in China (17). Yet Van Norden nowhere provides reasons for why 

Confucianism and Taoism belong to the Anglo-European category of “philosophy” more than 

they do to the Anglo-European category of “religion.” 

Van Norden’s notion of philosophy involves a stark binary division between natural science 

and philosophy. Natural sciences, Van Norden writes, “are successful precisely because they 

limit their inquiry to particular aspects of reality using particular methods” (135).7 In their 

original editorial (quoted in full at 9–10), Garfield and Van Norden assert that whereas “Non-

European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within 

European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American 



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  30 
 

and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are 

marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy,” yet “There are no comparable differences in 

how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.” Sharon Traweek 

claimed the opposite in her study of particle physicists in the United States and Japan, that 

significant differences exist in how experimental particle physics was pursued in 1970s 

American and Japan, and that these differences reflected deep differences between American 

and Japanese societies.8 Van Norden does not mention Traweek or any other sociologist of 

science or philosophy, though he has an index entry for Alex Trebek. 

In Taking Back Philosophy Van Norden does not assert (though he may well believe) that 

contemporary Chinese philosophy is understudied in America. Thus the more relevant question 

for what the book does claim is whether there is something important for contemporary science 

or mathematics that can be learned from the non-Anglo-European scientific and mathematical 

traditions whether contemporary or not. I have argued that Aristotle’s logic offers an analysis 

of assertions superior to that of modern symbolic logic.9 It would not surprise me if there is 

something relevant or challenging to say, contemporary observational astronomy, that an 

American astronomer can learn, or learn most easily, from scholarship on the Chinese or Indian 

observational traditions. 

One also needs to consider the binary philosophic texts vs. nonphilosophic texts. I agree that 

there is no substitute for reading a text philosophically (5), but at least as an application site for 

Austinian speech-act theory, one can read any text philosophically. I would not contend that 

my philosophical reading of Demosthenes’ oration De Corona makes that speech into a 

philosophical text.10 Surely philosophical interpretation of Confucius is as legitimate as 

philosophical interpretation of Shakespeare, but is Confucius a philosopher? And if so, what 

are the criteria by which Confucius or the author of the Analects are philosophers and 

Shakespeare is not? Van Norden argues at length, and rightly, that something that should be 

called philosophy existed in ancient China. Yet he is cagey or equivocal about when philosophy 

appears in China, and whether Confucius and Laozi are philosophers. They are not, according 

to Van Norden, “plainly philosophers” and are apparently not the best place to begin teaching 

Chinese texts if your goal is to bring out to students “what is philosophically important about 

them” (29). Van Norden does not discuss systematically, even to condemn, the thesis that what 

Confucius and Laozi offer is something possibly better than philosophy, namely, wisdom. 

 

I am not a philosophy professor in an American department, or in a position to dispute Van 

Norden’s scholarship on Chinese texts. I therefore want to add a more personal and 



31  Kochin 
 

autobiographical response to Van Norden’s theses on reading and teaching philosophy, from 

someone whose career has been worked out at the edges of Anglo-European academia and 

American academic philosophy with occasional forays into what Van Norden calls “less 

commonly taught philosophies.” My education gave me a different understanding of how to 

read philosophic texts, from any culture, than Van Norden seems to presume. 

I grew up and began my undergraduate career in the Far West of the United States, at the 

University of Washington in Seattle, that North Pacific portion of America from which East 

Asia was west—and in some ways was closer than the U.S. East. Unlike Van Norden, apart 

from two grandfathers who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, I have no deep family 

ties to American history. My mother is the child of immigrants and my father mostly the 

grandchild. Culturally they are both Lithuanian Jews, Litvaks, my father’s family mostly more 

assimilated and less observant of Jewish law than my mother’s. I had a somewhat fragmented 

traditional Jewish education, from age three to age twenty, combined with secular studies in 

Jewish schools and out of them. For me, a particular wisdom tradition, the Torah as interpreted 

by those whom Van Norden (perhaps following his Rabbi, Jesus) calls the Pharisees (123), was 

manifestly relevant. Other wisdom traditions, and the Western philosophical tradition, were 

not so plainly relevant or worth exploring. 

In Seattle I grew up to some extent with Asian-American children of varying origins and 

degrees of acculturation, though in those years, the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, my Chinese-

American acquaintances were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong 

Kong, or the children of “overseas Chinese” from the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia or the 

Philippines: very few or none had any direct experience of Communist China. When in 1986 I 

came to Harvard as a sophomore transfer student at 16, I was quite astonished to discover the 

blatant racism against Asian Americans expressed by some of the administrators. On the other 

hand, at Harvard those were the days of what Harvard’s Ezra Vogel saw as “Japan as Number 

One”: we, students and faculty alike, were impressed, fascinated, and even obsessed with the 

rising wealth and power of Japan, and as a senior I was one of almost 500 students to take a 

course on sixteenth-century Japanese history with the new white Australian professor Harold 

Bolitho. My teaching assistant in Samuel Huntington’s comparative democracies course was 

an exiled Chinese dissident and labor leader. Nonetheless, prior to the Tiananmen Square 

Massacre, which happened a few days before my graduation, I, like my fellow undergraduates, 

gave little thought to China.  

At Harvard I mainly studied mathematics, partly in the Philosophy Department, and political 

philosophy. My teachers of political philosophy were Harvey Mansfield, who encouraged the 



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  32 
 

study of Arabic philosophy, and Muhsin Mahdi, the preeminent modern scholar thereof.11 In 

the Philosophy Department in Emerson Hall I took a course on “the philosophy of life” with 

Robert Nozick (who made occasional references to Indian philosophy) and one on the 

metaphysics of possible worlds. I studied mathematics in Emerson Hall too, with the 

philosophy professors Hilary Putnam (my B.A. thesis advisor) and Warren Goldfarb (who 

examined me on my B.A. thesis). Goldfarb, who knew that I planned to leave mathematics for 

the study of political philosophy, offered me admission into the philosophy Ph.D. program, 

which I refused.  

My refusal was partly out of ignorance: even though I was personally close to a Stanley 

Cavell student, and had heard Cavell speak as respondent to Allan Bloom’s “Fellow elitists” 

lecture,12 I had no idea who Cavell was or what kind of things he did. But I did know that the 

approach to philosophic texts that I had learned from Mansfield and Mahdi was not pursued in 

the philosophy department at Harvard, or really anywhere in major American philosophy 

departments. In interpreting a philosophic work, I was taught by Mansfield and Mahdi to 

address the arguments in the context of the work as a whole and its intention. The goal of 

reading was to listen, Mahdi and Mansfield taught, to open oneself to the voice of a thinker 

from another time and place, not to quarry the texts for arguments that might be useful for 

political or scholarly purposes. One attempted to think with Plato or Hobbes or Maimonides or 

Alfarabi by trying to take into account what these authors themselves presented as worth 

thinking about. The way to do that, Mansfield and Mahdi taught, was by reading their works 

as wholes.13 By suspending one’s own judgment—not just about what was true but also about 

what mattered—in order to understand the author’s, every aspect of one’s own values and 

purposes was put into question, whether one had opened the Republic, Leviathan, Guide of the 

Perplexed, or The Attainment of Happiness for the first time or the fifteenth. 

At that time, the late 1980s, the only admissible approach within leading philosophy 

departments, especially in regard to the ancient Greek texts that interested me most, was to 

extract the arguments from the texts and analyze them as if they had appeared in the latest issue 

of Mind or the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and as if the authors of those texts had 

the same purposes and the same understanding of philosophy as American philosophy 

professors in top-ranked departments. Van Norden still acknowledges and in a way respects 

the prejudice for arguments as opposed to drama, metaphors, or myths as the test of whether a 

work or an author is truly philosophical (144–148). I have little doubt, though, that had I chosen 

to study in the Philosophy Department in Emerson Hall I would not have been barred from 

completing a Ph.D. on any philosophic text within or outside the Western canon. 



33  Kochin 
 

After Harvard I spent a year in Israel, nominally enrolled at Hebrew University, but mainly 

studying in a Talmudical college or yeshiva. While the students in my yeshiva were American, 

English, or Australian college graduates or college bound, the study of Jewish philosophical 

texts had no formal place in the curriculum. The curriculum consisted almost exclusively of 

Talmud and Jewish law, with a little Hebrew Bible on the side. While two of the teachers had 

Ph.D.s, those were in Semitic philology and linguistics, not philosophy. From within the 

perspective and purposes of the yeshiva, philosophy was not only marginal but questionably 

worthwhile. Jewish philosophy books were on the shelves in the study hall, but we were not 

taught them or encouraged to read them.  

The one practical thing I learned in Israel was that to maximize my chances for an academic 

post in Israel, my best bet was to go abroad again and take a Ph.D. in something that was not 

Israeli or Jewish. So in the Fall of 1990 I went to the Political Science Department at The 

University of Chicago. At Chicago I studied a lot of Plato and Aristotle, and some Alfarabi, 

Averroes, and Maimonides, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger; Greek, but no Arabic and not 

much German. In political science at Chicago, as elsewhere, Chinese and Indian politics were 

taught as a matter of course (I TA’d for Dali Yang and wrote my master’s thesis on the 

collectivization and decollectivization of agriculture in China and the Soviet Union with the 

Indian politics specialist Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and the sociologist of China William 

Parish—though I know neither Chinese nor Russian).14 

I also took a great many courses in the Committee on Social Thought. I studied Arabic 

philosophy there with Ralph Lerner, Hillel Fradkin, and Joel Kraemer (none of whom were 

philosophy professors), and German philosophy with Robert Pippin. The Committee also 

taught nonwestern literature (despite the legacy there of Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom, both of 

whom ridiculed the notion of a “Shakespeare among the Zulus”), though I didn’t study it, or 

much postclassical Western literature either. I spent a little time with the philosophy professors 

who taught Greek and even Jewish texts, but I did not find their approach to reading congenial. 

I got more out of reading Plato with the classicists Arthur Adkins and Elizabeth Asmis, and, 

though I was pretty thickheaded, from a course on feminist philosophy with Candace Vogler. 

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on gender and politics in Plato: the feminist scholars from 

reading whom I learned the most were the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Michèle Le Dœuff, 

and the legal scholar and advocate Catherine MacKinnon. 

In any case my education at Chicago avoided the narrowness and concern with pedigree of 

American academic philosophy that Van Norden both condemns and exemplifies. My 

education was also, except in the courses with Robert Pippin and Candace Vogler, lacking in 



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  34 
 

rigor or (it seemed to me at the time) any real feel for philosophic problems. As an 

undergraduate and graduate student, I read philosophy but not, mostly, with philosophy 

professors, and I learned to read (which was what was most important to me) but I did not learn 

much philosophy. 

I left Chicago for Tel Aviv University in 1995, and after a year there as an instructor spent 

two years at the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral student. My experience studying 

political philosophy with Clifford Orwin and Thomas Pangle and Canadian political thought 

with Donald Forbes recapitulated the strengths and weaknesses of my Chicago education. More 

important for my subsequent development was reading Josiah Ober, who presented a radical 

rethinking of ancient and therefore of modern democracy, and Toronto’s own Deborah Black, 

who argued that the medieval Arab Aristotelians had seen rhetoric and poetics as parts of 

logic.15 Influenced by Black and Ober I moved from political philosophy to the logical and 

ontological analysis of rhetorical concepts like character, vividness, and proof by example. 

My philosophical education began again in 1999 when I had my first encounter with Irad 

Kimhi, the greatest teacher of philosophy I have ever known. 

Through years of auditing classes and talking with Irad, as we call him, I finally gained a 

grasp of the basic development of philosophy from Descartes and Spinoza to Wittgenstein and 

Heidegger. I learned notions and methods that I could use to work out the analysis of rhetorical 

concepts that I had already begun. Irad also got me to read François Jullien, the French scholar 

of Chinese thought and philosophy. It is unfortunate that Van Norden doesn’t mention Jullien 

either in this book or in the bibliography on Chinese philosophy on his webpage, for Jullien 

brings Chinese thinkers to bear on fundamental questions of ontology, society, and politics. 

Jullien thus also helps us to get a better handle on both Chinese and non-Chinese alternatives 

to what Van Norden calls “individualistic metaphysics” (39).16 

Having been at the margins of economics, philosophy, and rhetorical studies my work since 

2008 has moved to the margins of American history. I am still trying to develop the ontological 

analysis of concepts and structures, but this time applied to international relations concepts like 

the balance of power, empire, and world order, and to the administrative and bureaucratic 

apparatus of foreign policy decision-making. It would therefore be unfair for me to blame my 

failure to discipline myself on the narrowness or other weaknesses of the discipline of 

philosophy in which Van Norden has pursued his career. 

 

Who are “we?” Van Norden writes that “we are doing philosophy when we engage in dialogue 

about problems that are important in our culture” (142). Yet Van Norden ever explains who 



35  Kochin 
 

“we” are or what “our culture” is, or whether university and university philosophy departments 

have or should have some role in transmitting or preserving it. Van Norden contends against 

Allan Bloom that one can take one’s bearings from the books of another culture than the one 

into which one was born, that there is nothing existentially significant for the individual about 

that culture that happens to be one’s own. Can “we” really furnish “our” soul out of any weighty 

book whatsoever? One possibility is that we might reject our tradition but fail to be fully 

initiated into another, and confuse professional attainments in a discipline—demonstrated by a 

long c.v.—with a well-furnished soul. To avoid that substitution of professionalization for 

personality, it might help to get clear on the similarities and differences between the use of the 

word “philosopher” in Plato’s Republic and the use in the Leiter Reports and the APA’s Jobs 

for Philosophers.  

There is also the issue of quality, which Van Norden addresses, but I think in an evasive and 

bloodless way, partly because that touches on the “third rail” of affirmative action, and partly 

because he wants more jobs for scholars of “less commonly taught philosophies” but doesn’t 

want to soil his nonacademic readers with the dirt on the hiring process. I can tell you from 

twenty years as permanent faculty in a political science department that anytime you decide 

that covering a subfield is important, that means that you are going to prioritize hiring 

somebody in that subfield over hiring somebody with the best work or the best credentials. 

That applies when the subfield that is to be covered is perceived as central as well as when it 

is to be covered in the name of “diversity.” But since that problem applies across all subfields 

I think it is not so sticky or ominous. 

More seriously, when we are talking about how much to teach “less commonly taught 

philosophies” the discussion often gets conflated with the question of who should teach them 

(see Van Norden 34). Do Chinese scholars have some unique authority in Chinese philosophy? 

Do Jewish scholars have some unique authority in Jewish thought? A paper of mine on Jewish 

political thought was accepted without peer review in a general journal of intellectual history 

because gentile scholars refused to evaluate it and thus intervene in what they saw as the 

province of their Jewish colleagues. The problem is not so much affirmative action in faculty 

hiring as identity politics in scholarly assessment. This is something from which every scholar, 

including myself, who has written on less commonly taught philosophies has benefited in one 

way or another, though we have also suffered from the narrow-mindedness that Van Norden 

condemns. In assessing Van Norden’s argument, we must keep in mind that diversity is 

sometimes purchased at the expense of other aspects of scholarly quality, or even at the expense 

of procedural fairness. Moreover, we do our colleagues no favors by assuming they accept the 



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  36 
 

worth—much less the conclusions—of the texts with which their upbringing or education has 

made them familiar. 

As I have shown, I am too much an outsider to the American philosophy profession to 

present or even to assess detailed recommendations such as Van Norden offers about what 

philosophy departments should do. I have three suggestions, though. First, teach your students 

enough Aristotelian logic (from the Arab Aristotelians’ “expanded Organon” that includes not 

only the Prior and Posterior Analytics but also the Topics and the Rhetoric) to understand that, 

while some truths are demonstrable, any claim worth making in politics is disputable. Second, 

make sure all future faculty hires are people who understand that since “ethics, political 

philosophy, and philosophical theology” are “inherently controversial” (Van Norden 135), no 

matter how well-refuted is some political or religious belief, there is almost certainly a fellow 

academic philosopher who is smarter, better informed, and with stronger professional 

qualifications who thinks that anybody who disputes that belief is wildly mistaken, not to say 

an idiot or a charlatan. Third, make sure anybody who passes their doctoral qualifying exam 

has been humbled by their encounters with philosophical scholarship both within and beyond 

what is commonly taught. Nobody should take pride in what they haven’t read.17 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Bryan Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, with a 

foreword by Jay L. Garfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 

2. See inter alia Kochin, “Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic 

Political Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (July 1999): 399–416; 

“Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss’ ‘Persecution and the Art of 

Writing,’” The Review of Politics 64 (Spring 2002): 261–283; reprinted (in Chinese) as 

the commentary to the Chinese translation of “Persecution and the Art of Writing” in 

The Collected Writings of Leo Strauss (Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2012).  

3. See Daniel Bonevac’s prophetic “Manifestations of Illiberalism in Philosophy,” 

Academic Questions 12.1 (1998–1999):14–22. 



37  Kochin 
 

4. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Heidegger 

and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

1978), 301–303. 

5. For an attempt to apply the wisdom/philosophy distinction systematically to exclude 

from philosophy a wide variety of what Van Norden would consider to be philosophic 

texts, see George Anastaplo, But Not Philosophy: Seven Introductions to Non-Western 

Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002). Anastaplo’s formulations are tougher 

to explode than Tambio’s. 

6. See, e.g., Van Norden’s use of “philosopher” and “sage” on 30. 

7. The strictly Kuhnian picture of natural science that Van Norden offers is deconstructed 

by Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 2000). 

8. Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics 

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 

9. Kochin, “From Argument to Assertion,” Argumentation 23 (2009):387–396. 

10. Kochin, “Time and Judgement in Demosthenes’ De Corona,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 

35 (2002):77–89. 

11. Mansfield and Mahdi taught me to think in terms of “Arabic philosophy” rather than 

Van Norden’s preferred “Islamic philosophy” or “Jewish philosophy,” because the 

latter terms beg the question as to whether the philosopher under discussion was a 

faithful Muslim or Jew.  

12. That lecture offers a somewhat different vision of multiculturalism in philosophic 

education, one that is still worth considering; Allan Bloom, “Western Civ—and Me,” 

Commentary (August 1990), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/western-

civ-and-me/. A slightly different version is collected as “Western Civ” in Bloom, 

Giants and Dwarfs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). 

13. Those who have read all of Leviathan, for example, know that Hobbes, like Confucius, 

thinks that social order rests not just on self-interested avoidance of punishment but on 

widespread acceptance of the proper teachings regarding the virtues and the sacred; 



The Cultures of Academic Philosophy  38 
 

contrast Van Norden 52 ff. with my Tel Aviv colleague Julie Cooper’s presentation of 

Hobbes on humility in Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).  

14. The revised version of that thesis: Kochin, “Decollectivization of Agriculture and the 

Planned Economy,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (August 1996): 717–739.  

15. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power 

of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Deborah Black, Logic and 

Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” and “Poetics” in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 

1990). 

16. I would recommend beginning with Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a 

History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Zone, 1999). 

17. Thanks to John-Paul Spiro, Daniel Doneson, and Anna Kochin for suggestions and 

corrections. 


