Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2020
Terry Nardin’s chapter grows out of an experiment in cross-cultural teaching that has flourished at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The program crosses the civilizational boundaries that often define the way political theory is taught and refuses the usual distinction between “Western” and “non-Western” thought. This distinction privileges European thought, throwing the rest of the world into a residual category, obscuring the fact that the rise of “the West” brought much of the world under the dominating rule of Europeans. Drawing on ancient and modern texts from India, China, and the Islamic world as well as from Europe, the course combines the close reading of both political and philosophical texts. By drawing on a wider range of texts than is usual in political theory courses, it invites students and teachers to explore a diversity of genres and their associated contexts, presuppositions, and reverberations. It addresses disputes about canons, relevance, translations, and expertise, inviting students to engage with a broad intellectual inheritance. It illustrates how faculty can educate one another as they teach all the students in a liberal arts college how to transcend parochialism by sharpening their capacities for philosophical and political reasoning.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.