Comparative Philosophy

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as we saw in the first part of this book, significant work on primal and non-western religious traditions was done by anthropologists and historians of religion. During the most recent decades in the west, there has been something of an explosion of scholarly work in non-western traditions resulting from the widespread availability of non-western texts in European languages. The scholarly work on other religious traditions can be attributed in part to the increasing recognition that politically and economically persons are in some sense citizens of the globe and need to have a better understanding of each other. Technological developments in travel and communication have also increased opportunities for scholarly exchange among persons of diverse religious traditions. Until recently, however, the impact of these developments on the western study of philosophy and the philosophy of religion in particular has been somewhat limited in scope. Western philosophy departments with faculty lines in non-western traditions are rare, and persons trained in non-western traditions are more likely to be found in departments of religious studies.