Do American colleges and universities narrow their students' perspectives by refusing to teach philosophical traditions from China, India, Africa, and other non-Western cultures? This book, a scathing critique of American higher education, answers with a resounding yes. Despite living in a multicultural world, most philosophy departments in Western universities stubbornly insist that only Western philosophy is true philosophy, disdaining anything outside the European philosophical canon.

In this book, Bryan W. Van Norden, a chair professor in the Department of Philosophy at Wuhan University in China, criticizes the Eurocentricity of academic philosophy, its isolationism, and its complicity with nationalism, issuing a warning that our educational institutions must return to their global ideals.

Bryan W. Van Norden—a specialist in Chinese philosophy—presents, in a sharp and powerful yet controversial style, a comprehensive and multicultural approach to philosophical inquiry. He offers numerous examples of how Western and non-Western thinkers can engage in fruitful dialogue and then demonstrates that philosophy achieves its depth only when it incorporates diverse traditions. This book is at once a manifesto advocating for multicultural education and an accessible introduction to Confucian and Buddhist philosophy, a critique of ethnocentrism, an opposition to the ideas that characterize contemporary American policies, a defense of the value of philosophy and the humanities, and a call to return to the search for the good life; this is the motto that distinguished the philosophies of Confucius, Socrates, and Buddha. The origin of this book is a famous article published in the New York Times that suggested renaming any philosophy department that does not teach non-Western philosophy as "the Department of European and American Philosophy." From this perspective, this book prompts any student or researcher in philosophy to reconsider what the love of wisdom truly means.