Prof. Thorsten Pattberg — The Frontiers of Academic Imperialism

The “Frontiers of Philosophy in China” – a “distinguished” academic journal with an impressive editorial board composed of many prominent “China experts”- involuntarily supports Western sovereignty over the interpretation of Chinese thought. And it’s not alone.

The Journal’s open propaganda is striking: the word “philosophy” is a Western term and concept that is nowhere to be found in pre-colonial East-Asia. I would guess that 90% of China’s population have never heard of “philosophy”. The Journal’s title deliberately conceals from the public what China has instead. The correct Chinese term for philosophy, zhexue, is a late 19th-century import from Japan, where it is pronounced tetsugaku. It therefore cannot exist in any of the Chinese classics. Have a close look at the Journal’s ‘Aims’:

“Frontiers of Philosophy in China aims to disseminate new scholarly achievements in the field of broadly defined philosophy, and promote philosophical researches of the highest level by publishing peer-reviewed academic articles that facilitate intensive or extensive communication and cooperation between philosophers in China and abroad. It covers nearly all main branches of philosophy, with priorities given to original works on Chinese philosophy or in comparative studies in Chinese philosophy and other kinds of philosophy in the world.”

Apart from the self-praise for being elite and exclusive (it tacitly offers the title “philosopher” to its authors) – and essentially an old-boy network – , the ‘Aims” propagates the Western term ‘philosophy’ no less than eight times. If this looks like ideological indoctrination, that’s because it is ideological indoctrination.

We can only guess at how this propaganda pamphlet came into being; something along the lines of:

Editor: Hmm, that’s awkward. We’ve put “Philosophy” in our ‘Title’, but we couldn’t find the term “philosophy” nowhere in Chinese tradition. Editor-in-Chief: That’s why we have to repeat it another eight times in our ‘Aims’, Goebbels Law!

Read more.. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32081

Print PDF