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[Expositions 12.2 (2018) 69–84]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

“Citizens of the Universe”: Bryan Van Norden and the Taking Back of 

Philosophy 

 

MIKEL BURLEY 

University of Leeds, UK 

 

 

Van Norden’s Manifesto 

Among the philosophers cited by Bryan Van Norden in the final chapter of his Taking Back 

Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017) is Bertrand Russell, who praised philosophical 

contemplation for its capacity to expand “not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the 

objects of our actions and our affections.” Such contemplation, Russell continues, “makes us 

citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest.”1 Like Joshua’s 

Israelite army at Jericho, Van Norden wants to destroy walls, but not in order to invade the city 

of a perceived enemy. Rather, by shouting and trumpeting the benefits of multicultural 

philosophizing, Van Norden is encouraging everyone with a philosophical interest (which may, 

in some sense, be every human being simpliciter) to tear down the barriers that prevent the 

broadening of philosophical horizons (159). The barriers, as Van Norden sees it, are principally 

those constructed by an ethnocentric “Anglo-European mainstream” (2), which tends, largely 

through ignorance and prejudice, to neglect or disparage philosophical traditions outside the 

Western canon. A consequence of this ethnocentrism is that “less commonly taught 

philosophies” (LCTPs) remain underrepresented among the teaching and research activities 

pursued in philosophy departments, not only in the Western world but also in certain non-

Western countries whose educational institutions gravitate towards the Western model. (As we 

know, “globalization” is all too often a euphemism for Western cultural imperialism.) 

Van Norden also wishes to defend the value of philosophy more generally against attacks 

from anti-intellectualist politicians—who treat the category of “philosophers” as a paradigm of 

useless good-for-nothings—and from loudmouth public intellectuals, especially scientists, who 

vaunt the superiority of science over philosophy, typically on the grounds that science is 

capable of disclosing genuine truths about the universe whereas philosophy amounts to mere 

idle speculation. So the burden of Van Norden’s manifesto is not only to reclaim philosophy 

from those who would allow its pursuit in academic environs to remain blinkered by a 

monocultural mindset, but also to rescue philosophy’s humanistic ideal from the 



“Citizens of the Universe”  70 
 

misunderstandings fostered by a cultural milieu in awe of the achievements of natural science. 

As Wittgenstein observed in the 1930s, philosophers are as guilty of falling prey to this awe as 

is anyone else, for many of them “constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and 

are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does.”2 Although Van 

Norden does not cite Wittgenstein on this point—and would almost certainly take exception to 

Wittgenstein’s vision of philosophy as “purely descriptive”—he does recognize that 

philosophers share a significant portion of the blame for the widespread perception of 

philosophy’s futility. Instead of continuing philosophy’s ancient legacy of inquiring into how 

one ought to live, professional philosophy in the modern era has become increasingly academic 

in the worst sense of the word. Card-carrying “analytic” philosophers have frequently busied 

themselves with authoring arcane thought experiments—or, more often, embellishing existing 

thought experiments with their own minor tweaks—which encourage hyper-specialization 

rather than opening up dialogues about what is important in human life. 

Along the way, Van Norden also takes a swipe at “Continental thinkers,” many of whom he 

considers to be typified by Jacques Derrida, who, in the opinion of Martha Nussbaum (among 

other non-Derrideans), leaves the reader hungering for something philosophically substantial 

beyond all the verbal dexterity and clever textual analysis.3 If one were inclined to wonder 

whether such second-hand dismissals of Continental philosophy are not overhasty, Van Norden 

might remind us of the warning issued in his preface: that he has sought to fulfil his editor’s 

request to inject some cheekiness into his prose, and in doing so has “not shied away from 

being openly partisan” and more “sardonic” than he would normally be “in the classroom or in 

a scholarly publication” (xxiii–xxiv). 

Though perhaps lacking in philosophical rigor, then, Van Norden’s book nevertheless 

presents arguments that demand to be heard. On the whole, I agree with him. Having devoted 

a good deal of my academic career—and of my life—to the study of philosophies deriving 

from South Asia (in addition to many deriving from Europe and elsewhere), I thoroughly 

concur that such study can be philosophically valuable and life-enhancing, potentially saving 

one from the perils of an overly narrow perspective on the world and on human modes of 

engagement with it. For the purposes of this essay, however, I shall focus on elements of Van 

Norden’s arguments that need, in my view, to be thought through more carefully than Van 

Norden is able to do in the relatively small space that his manifesto affords. I concentrate on 

two issues in particular. First, in the next two sections, I offer some reflections on the overall 

impression given by Van Norden that incorporating non-Western material into standard 

philosophy curricula is not a difficult task and that all it really requires is the will to overcome 



71  Burley 
 

a culturally myopic inertia. While I admit that the difficulties should not be overestimated, I 

also wish to highlight some reasons why they should not be underestimated either. 

Second, I pick up on a threefold distinction that Van Norden introduces in his final chapter, 

between what he calls a “hermeneutic of faith,” various “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and 

“relativism” (see 139–142). While potentially fruitful as a starting point, the distinction, as Van 

Norden articulates it, omits certain possibilities and oversimplifies others. Notably, it omits 

what I, following the Wittgenstein-influenced philosopher D. Z. Phillips, am inclined to call a 

hermeneutics of contemplation. Moreover, by characterizing relativism in the way that he does, 

but then asserting baldly that it does not deserve to be taken seriously, Van Norden seems to 

preclude, a priori, a number of philosophical viewpoints that, I suspect, he would not really 

want to preclude—such as the perspectivism of Nietzsche, the internal realism advocated in 

some of Hilary Putnam’s writings, and certain interpretations or appropriations of the Jain 

“doctrine of many-sidedness” (anekāntavāda). Even if, after due consideration, one rejects 

these viewpoints as philosophically untenable, that is a very different matter from refusing to 

take them seriously in the first place. 

 

“Bringing into Dialogue”: Underplaying the Difficulties? 

Taking Back Philosophy’s longest and most philosophically substantial chapter is chapter 2, 

“Traditions in Dialogue.” It is here that Van Norden provides specific examples of how non-

Western philosophical ideas might be discussed in relation to existing issues in the curriculum. 

Noting, for instance, that a philosopher such as Descartes merely takes it for granted “that there 

must be individual substances distinct from all their qualities” (43), Van Norden recommends 

invoking as a counter-position the Buddhist “ontology of states rather than things” (44). This 

latter viewpoint is usefully propounded in the form of a dialogue between a Bactrian king and 

the Buddhist monk Nāgasena in the Pāli text known as The Questions of King Milinda (c. first 

century BCE). Van Norden’s other proposals include: confronting Hobbes’ conception of 

human nature as ruthlessly competitive with the more benign Confucian conception argued for 

by philosophers such as Mengzi (fourth century BCE); contrasting an Aristotelian understanding 

of ethical cultivation with Confucian, Buddhist, and Neo-Confucian versions; and turning to 

Chinese philosophers to enhance discussions of the problem of “weakness of will” in ethics. 

While admitting that, on account of his own areas of expertise, his choice of examples leans 

towards Chinese philosophy, Van Norden is confident that comparable examples could be 

drawn from other LCTPs, such as Indian, African, Native American, African-American, 

feminist, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, and LGBTQ philosophies (82). This is no doubt 



“Citizens of the Universe”  72 
 

true, and the chapter does a convincing job of fulfilling its aim, which is to illustrate the 

bringing into dialogue of voices from philosophical traditions that were not, originally, in actual 

dialogue with one another. I am concerned, however, that by cherry-picking examples in the 

way that he has done, Van Norden presents an unduly rosy picture of comparative cross-

cultural philosophy. There are, in my view, also potential difficulties that ought not to be 

underplayed. 

Van Norden’s sanguinity is typified by a comment about Indian philosophy. “[A]ny 

acquaintance with Indian philosophy,” Van Norden affirms, “reveals that, in terms of both 

methodology and subject matter, it is philosophical even according to the most narrow 

standards that Anglo-European philosophy might supply. Just open a book!” (82). In response 

to this, I should like to emphasize: it depends on which book you open. One of my own principal 

areas of expertise is the darśanas (roughly, “schools” or “viewpoints”) of classical Indian 

philosophy known as Sāṃkhya and Yoga. The most authoritative texts of these schools are 

commonly referred to as the Sāṃkhyakārikā and Yogasūtra, respectively, both of which date 

from around the fourth or fifth century CE. If one were to naively open either of these texts, it 

is unlikely that one would be able to make much of them, even in English translation, without 

a good deal of surrounding contextual and interpretive information. The Sāṃkhyakārikā 

comprises a series of seventy-two two-line stanzas, each of which, despite forming a coherent 

semantic unit, is extremely dense. And the Yogasūtra is composed in the style typical of many 

classical Indian philosophical treatises, which involves the stringing together of a series of 

pithy statements or half-statements, each being an individual sūtra (literally, “thread” or 

“suture”) that is often barely intelligible without an accompanying commentary. Indeed, recent 

scholarship has suggested that the 195 sūtras (or 196, depending on which version one 

consults) that constitute this text were never presented in manuscript form independently of the 

commentary known as the Yogabhāṣya, the combined text-plus-commentary being designated 

the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.4 

Owing to the difficulty of understanding either the Sāṃkhyakārikā or the Yogasūtra, even 

when—or sometimes especially when—read in conjunction with traditional commentaries, the 

vast majority of modern scholarship surrounding these texts, both in India and in the West, is 

primarily exegetical in nature: it is an attempt merely to understand what the texts are saying, 

which is, of course, a necessary prerequisite for undertaking any philosophical engagement 

with them. My own approach has included drawing comparisons with aspects of Western 

philosophy, such as Kantian transcendental idealism and the phenomenology of Brentano and 

Husserl, for the purpose of explicating what I take to be the most coherent interpretation of the 



73  Burley 
 

Indian material. Provided one avoids simply imposing Western models upon the original 

sources, such comparisons can be illuminating. There is a sense in which this comparative 

approach brings Western and Indian philosophies “into productive dialogue,” yet it does so 

primarily for exegetical ends, not in order to set up an argument between two or more rival 

philosophical positions. Furthermore, the exegetical enterprise also demands several other 

factors, most notably a high degree of competence in the language in which the sources were 

composed—in this case classical Sanskrit—plus a thorough acquaintance with the 

philosophical milieu out of which the sources arose. 

Competence in the language is vital because texts such as the Sāṃkhyakārikā and Yogasūtra 

contain numerous technical terms that lack any straightforward English synonym. For example, 

the Yogasūtra defines its central term, yoga, as citta-vṛtti-nirodha. But what does citta-vṛtti-

nirodha mean? The range of possible translations is extensive. Citta is something like “mind” 

or “consciousness”; a vṛtti is, literally, a “turning” (related to Latin vortex), and hence can 

denote a “whirl” or “ripple” in a body of water. In view of what comes later in the text, citta-

vṛtti can be understood to mean “changing states of mind”5 or, in one influential early 

translation, “the fluctuations of mind-stuff.”6 Nirodha, meanwhile, derives from a verbal root 

meaning “to hold back, stop, hinder, shut up, confine, restrain, check, suppress, destroy,”7 thus 

suggesting that yoga consists in the “stilling” (Bryant) or “restriction” (Woods) of the states or 

fluctuations of the mind. But arriving at an approximate translation such as this hardly resolves 

the question of meaning. To understand what, for the school of philosophy known as Yoga, 

“stilling the mind” amounts to requires a detailed study of the text as a whole and probably of 

several commentaries on it as well. 

With regard to the philosophical milieu out of which Sāṃkhya and Yoga arose, available 

historical evidence is extremely thin. We have the names of authors to whom the primary texts 

have traditionally been attributed: Īśvarakṛṣṇa in the case of the Sāṃkhyakārikā and Patañjali 

in the case of the Yogasūtra. But we have no reliable biographical information about them. And 

neither of them claims to be the originator of the philosophies presented in the texts. The author 

of the Sāṃkhyakārikā states explicitly that he is merely expounding doctrines that have been 

passed down from the “highest seer,” which is generally treated as an epithet of a legendary 

figure named Kapila;8 and the Yogasūtra, enigmatically, declares Īśvara (roughly, “the Lord”—

not to be conflated with Īśvarakṛṣṇa) to be “the teacher of the ancients, because he is not limited 

by Time.”9 Thus, we do not really know when or where the philosophies of Sāṃkhya and Yoga 

originated; we can merely speculate on the basis of snippets of information derivable from 

traditional commentaries, supplemented by comparative analysis of ideas contained in the 



“Citizens of the Universe”  74 
 

classical sources and similar ideas expressed elsewhere, including in texts for which we have 

independent reasons for regarding as historically either earlier or later than the Sāṃkhyakārikā 

and Yogasūtra. 

We may also look to the texts of rival Indian philosophical schools, such as those of 

Vedānta, Nyāya, Buddhism, Jainism, and others, to find arguments against the views of 

Sāṃkhya and Yoga. But we should be wary of uncritically accepting interpretations of 

Sāṃkhya and Yoga put forward by proponents of these rival schools, just as we should be 

cautious about accepting interpretations of the rival schools presented in partisan Sāṃkhya and 

Yoga commentaries. As with any philosophical tradition, the painting of one’s opponents’ 

views in unfavourable colours can often prove to be a means of bolstering one’s own position 

that is too tempting to resist. The floors of many traditions are littered with discarded straw 

men, and that of Indian philosophy is no exception. This is why close attention to the original 

sources is indispensable, which, in turn, is why scholars have gone—and continue to go—to 

great lengths to furnish as much information, both contextual and based on close readings of 

the texts themselves, about what the sources are saying. Hence, while not all work in Indian 

philosophy is philological and interpretive in nature, a substantial amount of it is. So to imply, 

as Van Norden does, that one merely has to pick up a book on Indian philosophy and one will 

immediately see that this tradition is much like that of Western philosophy—with which it can 

readily “be brought into productive dialogue”—is, as it stands, in need of qualification. Some 

Indian philosophy lends itself to this purpose, but much of it needs to be studied at considerable 

length in relation to its own cultural context before it can be utilized for the sort of 

manufactured cross-cultural argumentative exchanges that Van Norden illustrates by means of 

his own examples from Buddhist and Chinese sources. 

These points that I have been making about the need for careful examination of original 

texts, informed by some knowledge of the language in which they were composed and of the 

cultural milieu from which they derive, bear upon Van Norden’s response to what he deems to 

be a “bad argument … against diversifying the curriculum” (32). The purportedly bad argument 

takes the form of the question “What would you have us cut? We can barely cover Western 

philosophy as it is!” Van Norden’s response acknowledges that the coverage of Western 

philosophy would indeed have to be reduced, but adds that covering all of Western philosophy 

was never a realistic prospect in the first place; since compromises are already being made, the 

replacement of some Western philosophy by content drawn from non-Western or other LCTPs 

would not be a radically new departure in this respect. But is the argument to which Van Norden 

is responding really so bad? In my view, Van Norden’s response overlooks a significant 



75  Burley 
 

difference between, on the one hand, introducing new material into a curriculum from within 

the philosophical tradition that is already being predominantly taught and, on the other hand, 

introducing material from a very different philosophical tradition. I shall elaborate this point 

below. 

 

Philosophizing Within and Across Traditions 

Having admitted the importance of comprehending “how doctrines and practices of 

argumentation are situated in their particular cultures,” Van Norden observes that “it is equally 

important to avoid the misconception that philosophy in the West is monolithic” (30). This is 

true, and it is a poignant reminder that there is no absolute differentiation between what we 

might call intra-traditional and cross-traditional philosophizing, respectively—intra-

traditional being the discussion of philosophical topics with reference to only one tradition 

(e.g., “Western philosophy” or “Chinese philosophy”) and cross-traditional being the 

discussion of such topics with reference to two or more traditions. Traditions, after all, are 

rarely sharply bounded: they tend to be both porous and internally variegated, frequently 

blurring into one another. As Van Norden highlights in chapter 1, there has in fact been cross-

fertilization between, for example, Chinese and European philosophy since at least the 

seventeenth century. So the idea of discrete and entirely heterogeneous philosophical traditions 

is naïve. It does not follow, however, that distinctions between different traditions cannot be 

made, for even if they have fuzzy edges, traditions may nonetheless be distinguishable in rough 

and ready terms. Indeed, any contention that philosophies from non-Western traditions ought 

to be integrated into the curriculum presupposes that traditions are distinguishable. 

My point is not that cross-traditional philosophizing should be avoided, but that the potential 

challenges it poses should be properly appreciated. In some instances, finding ways of 

overcoming these challenges—or of simply recognizing their existence—is apt to make cross-

traditional philosophizing all the more worthwhile, for doing so may, among other things, 

reveal philosophical possibilities (including possible understandings of what philosophy is) 

that would not otherwise have come to light. But entering into cross-traditional philosophizing 

with the blasé expectation that, in practice, it is no different from intra-traditional 

philosophizing carries the risk of being counter-productive. It carries this risk because, if 

students expect to be able to understand arguments from two or more traditions and to bring 

those arguments into dialogue when their knowledge of all but one of the traditions is extremely 

limited, there is a danger that an injustice will be done to the arguments from the less well-

understood tradition or traditions. 



“Citizens of the Universe”  76 
 

Needless to say, defining what a tradition consists in is no easy task. But in the case of 

philosophy, one of the common characteristics is its broadly conversational nature. It is no 

accident that Plato presented the bulk of his philosophy in dialogue form, for philosophy is 

typically pursued through communication with others: ideas are sharpened and arguments are 

refined by subjecting them to interrogation and contestation. Even when a philosopher, such as 

Descartes, adopts the conceit of having sought to devise a philosophical system “from first 

principles” by sitting alone in an isolated room,10 there nevertheless comes a point when the 

system must be tested out in the public arena and responded to by fellow philosophers, whether 

in face-to-face dialogue or in written form. Thus, when Alfred North Whitehead described “the 

European philosophical tradition” as “a series of footnotes to Plato,”11 he was, in part, 

emphasizing (albeit by means of deliberate exaggeration) the extent to which this tradition 

constitutes an ongoing succession of responses and counter-responses. Novel thoughts may 

arise from time to time, but not in a vacuum: they are invariably stimulated by ruminating upon 

the thoughts of others, even if those others lived and died several hundred years earlier. Western 

philosophy, we might say, is, like art or culture in general, a conversation over time.12 When 

communicating with one another, philosophers “count on mutual understanding insofar as they 

exploit a shared heritage, refer to a common canon, and use a common language (even if their 

language is broken into different dialects).”13 And something similar may be said about, for 

example, the philosophical traditions of China and India, and about other traditions as well: 

there need not be a common language in the sense that all contributors to the conversation must 

speak, say, Classical Chinese or Sanskrit, but the tradition gains its coherence from a certain 

shared heritage and set of reference points. 

A consequence of the conversational nature of philosophical traditions is that one’s 

understanding of current discussions in philosophy is likely to deepen by studying the history 

of the subject, for current discussions—when pursued competently—will be aware of, and will 

be responding either explicitly or implicitly to, ideas that have come before. Hence, one’s 

insight into Kant will be enhanced by studying the thought of Descartes and Hume, and one’s 

comprehension of Heidegger improves from learning about Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and 

Husserl. In the case of Chinese philosophy, the work of Mengzi and Zhu Xi will be better 

understood if one also studies Confucius. And in Indian philosophy, one needs to have some 

acquaintance with Abhidharma and Yogācāra Buddhism, and with classical Sāṃkhya and 

Yoga, if one is to appreciate how Śaṅkara, in his commentary on the Brahmasūtra, tries to 

differentiate his own nondualist philosophy from those other viewpoints. So, too, will one need 

some familiarity with the Upaniṣads, and perhaps the Bhagavad Gītā as well, to grasp the 



77  Burley 
 

background of Śaṅkara’s own thought. In turn, knowledge of Śaṅkara’s nondualist version of 

Vedānta is needed if the later Vedāntic systems, such as the “qualified nondualism” of 

Rāmānuja and the dualism of Madhva, are to be adequately interpreted. And so on. 

Again, none of this rules out the possibility of incorporating non-Western philosophy into 

the curriculum, but it does suggest that gaining a genuinely rich understanding of many 

important philosophical works will require learning about the traditions in which they are 

embedded. That takes time. And learning about a different tradition takes more time than 

learning about another work within a tradition with which one is already familiar. The 

investment of such time is apt to be well rewarded, for it facilitates not merely a new viewpoint 

within an existing set of disputes but, potentially, a radically new vista upon a divergent 

disputational landscape—a way of seeing things from a different cultural as well as a different 

philosophical perspective, perhaps one that deploys a markedly different conception of what, 

from a Western point of view, has been called philosophy. But the investment of time is 

significant, and this significance ought not to be glibly dismissed on the grounds that 

compromises are already being made in the coverage of Western philosophy. Building a 

philosophy curriculum that is cross-traditional and multicultural should be done. But doing it 

well is not easy. 

 

Hermeneutics and Neglected Options 

Turning now to Van Norden’s concern with philosophical methods, I want in this penultimate 

section to consider the threefold distinction that Van Norden adumbrates—between what he 

calls a “hermeneutic of faith,” various versions of a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” and, thirdly, 

“relativism.” According to Van Norden, a hermeneutic of faith consists in reading texts with 

an attitude of hope that one may discover in them qualities of “truth, goodness, and beauty,” 

whereas a hermeneutic of suspicion involves seeking motives behind a text “that are unrelated 

to its truth or plausibility”—motives such as economic or political advantage “as well as sexist, 

racist, or imperialist conceptions of the world” (139). Without wishing to reject either of these 

hermeneutical orientations, Van Norden proposes that a focus on suspicion has become 

pervasive in the humanities and social sciences, and that departments of philosophy “are often 

the last refuge of the hermeneutics of faith” (140). 

Although Van Norden does not cite Paul Ricoeur in this connection, it is from Ricoeur that 

the distinction between a hermeneutics of faith (or a “hermeneutics of recollection”) and a 

hermeneutics of suspicion derives. For Ricoeur, these notions have specifically religious 

implications: a hermeneutics of suspicion is an interpretation that strives to demystify religion 



“Citizens of the Universe”  78 
 

(in the manner exemplified by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) whereas a hermeneutics of 

recollection is one “that tries to grasp, in the symbols of faith, a possible call or kerygma”14—

a religious message that speaks to one personally. Evidently, Van Norden is extending these 

terms beyond the sphere of religious texts and symbols to encompass approaches to the 

interpretation of texts more generally. What both he and Ricoeur neglect is the possibility of 

an approach that, while being properly philosophical, endeavours neither to demystify and 

debunk nor, necessarily, to discover values to adhere to. The neglected approach, which has 

been dubbed by D. Z. Phillips a hermeneutics of contemplation,15 is one that prioritizes 

understanding the variety of ways of being human over the advocacy or condemnation of any 

of those ways in particular: it aims to disclose “possibilities of sense” within human forms of 

life and discourse, salvaging them from the tendency, especially common among philosophers, 

to prematurely foreclose certain possibilities in the haste to develop general theories. As with 

Wittgenstein’s note of caution about philosophers being beguiled by the methods of science, a 

hermeneutics of contemplation eschews the “craving for generality” in favour of giving due 

attention to particular cases.16 Far from ignoring matters of truth, goodness, and beauty, a 

contemplative hermeneutics would investigate the variety of meanings that the concepts of 

truth, goodness, and beauty can have in multiple contexts, instead of assuming from the outset 

that each of these concepts must have an essential and uniform meaning across all contexts of 

use. 

Given its opposition to essentialism and its emphasis on the recognition of a plurality of 

ways of being human, a hermeneutics of contemplation is well suited for cross-cultural 

philosophical inquiry. It is concerned, precisely, with finding “intriguing conceptual 

possibilities,” which is part of what Van Norden himself aims to achieve in his exposition of 

alternative philosophical perspectives (82). So, I submit, a hermeneutics of contemplation 

deserves a place alongside the hermeneutics of faith and of suspicion in the list of options 

available to the multicultural philosopher. 

Van Norden’s own third option, however, is what he calls “relativism.” Yet it is not really 

a third option in Van Norden’s eyes, since he considers relativism to be philosophically 

worthless—not even deserving to be taken seriously (140). Despite this, Van Norden does go 

to the trouble of distinguishing two varieties of relativism: cognitive and ethical. Cognitive 

relativism is the view that the truth-value of any proposition “depends upon the perspective 

from which [it is] evaluated” (140). The view has long been recognized to be incoherent, Van 

Norden remarks, because it undermines itself: if it is held to be objectively true, then it asserts, 



79  Burley 
 

inconsistently, that there is at least one nonrelative truth; but if it is held to be true merely 

relative to the proponent’s perspective, then it provides no basis for anyone else to accept it. 

Ethical relativism, meanwhile, “asserts that the truth or falsity of evaluative claims (and 

only evaluative claims) depends upon the perspective from which they are evaluated” (141). It 

is unclear to me why Van Norden refers to “evaluative” rather than merely ethical claims here. 

If he means to include all evaluative claims—such as aesthetic, legal, political, and religious, 

as well as ethical ones—then the form of relativism at issue would be more aptly named 

evaluative relativism or value relativism. But, in any event, Van Norden, while admitting that 

the view is not incoherent in the way that cognitive relativism is, considers it to be “a banal 

dead end in philosophy” (141). It is a dead end because it affords no practical guidance about 

what, ethically, to think or do. If one maintains that the truth-value of ethical judgments is 

relative to individuals, then no help is offered for someone trying to make an ethical judgment; 

and if one maintains that the truth-value of such judgments is relative to cultures, then no help 

is offered in cases where divergent judgments are present within the same culture (and trying 

to determine which “subculture” one belongs to is unlikely to help either, Van Norden adds). 

If one were to claim that ethical relativism fosters tolerance towards other peoples and cultures, 

then one would have overlooked a crucial implication of ethical relativism itself—that whether 

one should be tolerant is dependent on one’s own (cultural or individual) perspective. All of 

these are fair points. In fact, one might get the impression that, by making them, Van Norden 

comes close to appearing as though he is taking relativism seriously as a position, or set of 

positions, that deserve to be countered. But Van Norden’s self-confessed grumpiness about 

relativism seems out of step with his overall openness to conceptual possibilities. Indeed, his 

characterizations of relativism are so quick and dirty that they run the risk of foreclosing 

discussion about more subtle positions that many would call versions of relativism—positions 

which, even if one disagrees with them, undoubtedly do deserve to be treated with 

philosophical seriousness. (As Van Norden says in connection with Buddhist, Confucian, and 

Neo-Confucian philosophers, “It’s fine to tell me that you don’t agree with them, but 

philosophy is not about teaching only figures whom you agree with” (82). The same applies, I 

am contending, to the work of sophisticated philosophical relativists.) 

I do not have space here to go into detail about versions of relativism that warrant serious 

philosophical scrutiny, but, as a starting point, one might mention the “perspectivism” of 

Nietzsche, the “internal realism” of Hilary Putnam, and certain interpretations of the Jain 

“doctrine of many-sidedness” (anekāntavāda). In the case of Nietzsche, we are confronted with 

an eloquent and provocative non-systematic thinker who revels in metaphor and hyperbole. 



“Citizens of the Universe”  80 
 

Notoriously, when railing against “positivism”—which he characterizes as the insistence that 

“There are only facts”—Nietzsche replies, “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only 

interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a 

thing.”17 By Van Norden’s lights, the claim that there are no facts, only interpretations, would 

appear to suffer from the incoherence of cognitive relativism: if what is asserted is to be taken 

as true, then, in effect, what we are being asked to accept is that it is true—and hence a fact—

that there are no facts, which is incoherent; alternatively, if we treat the assertion as the mere 

expression of an interpretation, which overtly disavows any claim to be factual, then we are 

left wondering why we should accept it. This would be a tempting way of evading the challenge 

that Nietzsche, in his work more generally, poses; for if we take the time to go beyond 

superficial readings, we are apt to find a multifaceted thinker who, in certain places, strives to 

carry through a radical rejection of the very norms of rationality upon which the superficial 

readings depend. For instance, in many places, Nietzsche celebrates the affirmation of life over 

the affirmation of truth: in these moods, Nietzsche regards the essential question as being not 

whether a judgment is true or false—or even coherent (by conventional standards)—but rather 

“to what extent it is life-promoting.”18 This shift of priorities—from truth to “life,” or indeed, 

in other places, from truth to power—is profoundly unsettling for the philosopher who can see 

no purpose in philosophical argumentation if it is not directed towards truth. But that capacity 

to unsettle us—and not infrequently to advance a startlingly perceptive observation about life 

or the world (which, ironically, may strike us as all too true)—is part of the wonder of reading 

Nietzsche. Relativist or not, he deserves to be taken seriously—and I suspect that Van Norden 

would agree (not least because he cites Nietzsche several times in his book). 

As for Putnam, he put forward his internal realism in the early 1980s as an alternative to 

metaphysical realism, which he defines in terms of three main theses: first, that “the world 

consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects”; second, that “[t]here is exactly 

one true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’”; and third, “Truth involves some 

sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and sets of things.”19 Internal 

realism, by contrast, maintains that the question “what objects does the world consist of?” 

makes sense only within what Putnam variously terms a “theory of description,” a “scheme of 

description,” or a “conceptual scheme.” On this view, it makes no sense to suppose that objects 

could exist as objects independently of any conceptual scheme, for it is the conceptual scheme 

that divides up the world into distinguishable objects. While some commentators would 

construe this as a form of antirealism, Putnam calls it internal realism because it maintains that 

the objects we, as individuals, perceive and think about do really exist independently of our 



81  Burley 
 

own thoughts and perceptions, albeit not independently of the conceptual scheme within which 

our perceiving and thinking are occurring. In effect, then, Putnam’s theory—which, admittedly, 

he later came to modify and partially disavow—amounts to a form of conceptual relativism: 

what counts as an object (how we conceive of it), and hence also the truth about any object, is 

relative to a conceptual scheme—that is, to a system of concepts that operates within a given 

human community. Again, as with Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Putnam’s internal realism seems 

to fall within Van Norden’s definition of cognitive relativism, for it does indeed assert that “the 

truth or falsity of all claims depends upon the perspective [in this case, the conceptual scheme] 

from which they are evaluated.” And yet, I presume Van Norden would agree that the numerous 

philosophers who have engaged, whether sympathetically or critically, with Putnam over this 

view—including Putnam himself—are not thereby making the mistake of taking seriously 

something that does not deserve to be. 

Finally, it is worth mentioning here the Jain anekāntavāda, which translates as “non-

onesidedness [hence: many-sidedness] doctrine.” Although most scholars agree that this was 

not, in its original form, a doctrine of cognitive relativism, it has nevertheless lent itself to 

overtly relativist interpretations or appropriations. The classic exposition of the doctrine 

utilizes the well-known parable of the blind men and the elephant, in which several blind men 

each touch part of an elephant and assume, on that basis, that they know what the whole 

elephant is like.20 Clearly, what the parable does not illustrate is the absence of objective truth; 

indeed, the implication is that a fully enlightened individual—a Jina—would be capable of 

seeing the whole elephant and hence knowing the whole of reality. But since the achievement 

of such enlightenment is, for most of us, a very long way off, the parable, and the doctrine it 

illustrates, is generally understood to promote a strong form of epistemic humility according 

to which all views should be treated as merely partial and perspectival. This radical 

perspectivalism has, in certain instances, been construed in relativist terms, which is in fact 

how it is articulated on one of the most prominent Jain websites, according to which “Jainism 

developed the theory that truth is relative to the perspective (naya) from which it is known.”21 

My point is not that such interpretations ought to be accepted uncritically, but simply that they 

should not be dismissed out of hand. “Relativism” is itself a many-sided doctrine—or 

multiplicity of doctrines—and Van Norden’s perfunctory repudiation on the basis of a crude 

typology does not do justice to the variety. 

 

Concluding Remarks 



“Citizens of the Universe”  82 
 

In sum, then, I concur with Van Norden that philosophical contemplation can enable us to 

become, in Russell’s phrase, “citizens of the universe” as opposed to being parochially 

preoccupied with only a miniscule portion of it. Diversifying our philosophical interests to 

encompass traditions beyond the Euro-American mainstream can contribute significantly to 

that widening of horizons, and, yes, students ought to be given “the opportunity to be inspired 

by [for example] Buddhism in addition to Platonism, or Confucianism in addition to 

Aristotelianism” (Van Norden 101). We should not, however, presume that the task of 

curriculum expansion is an easy one, not least because learning about a philosopher, or a school 

of philosophy, from another tradition demands—if it is to result in more than a superficial or 

distorted understanding—contextualizing that philosopher or school within the larger tradition 

itself. This amounts to more work than simply introducing another Western philosopher into 

an existing Western-focused curriculum. 

Moreover, I have contended, we should be open to methodological pluralism, too, and 

recognize more hermeneutical options than the binary picture of “faith” versus “suspicion” 

sketched by Van Norden. And finally, this openness should preclude casual dismissals of 

complex and ramified philosophical positions—such as the multiplicity of relativisms—on the 

basis of cursory definitions that fail to consider actual versions of the positions at issue. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 161; 

quoted in Bryan W. Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto 

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 154. 

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the 

Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 18. 

3. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New 

York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 171; quoted in Van Norden 152. 

4. Philipp A. Maas, “A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy,” in 

Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, ed. Eli Franco (Vienna: 

Publications of the De Nobili Research Library, 2013), 53–90.  



83  Burley 
 

5. Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and 

Commentary with Insights from the Traditional Commentators (New York: North Point 

Press, 2009), 10. 

6. James Haughton Woods, The Yoga-System of Patañjali (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1914), 8. 

7. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 

1899), 553. 

8. Mikel Burley, Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience 

(Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 51. 

9. Yogasūtra 1.26, trans. Bryant 103. 

10. René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of 

Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch 

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15. 

11. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, eds. David Ray 

Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 39. 

12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1979), 389–394. 

13. Adriaan Theodoor Peperzak, Thinking about Thinking: What Kind of Conversation Is 

Philosophy? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 86. 

14. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage 

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 343. 

15. D. Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2001). 

16. Cf. Wittgenstein 18; D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: 

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 63, 87. 

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale 

(New York: Vintage Books, 1968), §481. 



“Citizens of the Universe”  84 
 

18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 

trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), §4. 

19. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1981), 49. 

20. Jeffery D. Long, Jainism: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 117–118. 

21.  “Anekantvad,” Jainworld.com, http://jainworld.com/education/seniors/senles16.htm.  


