A brief history of western philosophy in Thailand: mid seventeenth to the end of twentieth century (original) (raw)

World philosophies are gradually gaining in recognition. Today, philosophers in Southeast Asia can freely construct their regional philosophies without philosophical tyranny of the West. However, this situation has not come so easily. Many Asian and African philosophies have experienced a struggle for acceptance. And even this recognition is limited by selectivity and philosophical fashion centered in Western academia and perpetuated by Western educated eastern intellectuals. This paper attempts to show how regional philosophy in general and Southeast Asian philosophy in particular can be constructed and accepted. These regional self-constructed philosophies can serve to correct the legacy of the racism and bigotry of the tradition. And the paper also promotes the idea of establishing a philosophical umbrella called 'Southeast Asian philosophy' under which regional philosophies can develop and thrive.

published in _The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of Colonialism in Thailand_, ed. Rachel Harrison and Peter Jackson, Hong Kong University Press, pp. 135-151.

Philosophy claims its goal is to search for truth. The history of philosophy, however, demonstrates that, in most cases, this search for truth is not free from the power structures of the time. The formation of modern philosophy in East Asia is no exception. This essay will demonstrate how the East-West power imbalance at the beginning of the modern period is implicitly and explicitly imbedded in the formation of modern Buddhist philosophy in East Asia. By examining the life and thoughts of two East Asian Buddhist thinkers, Paek Sŏnguk (白性郁1897-1981) and Inoue Enryō (井上円了1858-1919), this essay will demonstrate two seemingly unrelated aspects of the East-West encounter in the philosophizing of the East. On the one hand, Paek’s and Enryō’s Buddhist philosophy tells us that the beginning of philosophy in modern East Asia is inevitably related to the power imbalance between the East and the West. On the other hand, however, the forced encounter of Eastern “thought” tradition with the Western genre called philosophy generated a new mode of philosophizing, which is also shared by some contemporary Western philosophers in their criticism of institutionalized philosophy.

Thailand has never been officially colonized by foreign powers whereas the re-appropriation of neo-liberal policy and nationalistic propaganda by the Thai government to promote the conservative elites’ version of nation-centrism clearly functions to maintain the hierarchical social structure and dominant hegemony through education. Grounded in Chen’s idea, Asia as Method, Winichakul’s framework (2014) on Thai cultural studies, home as method, has been recontextualized for understanding how the researcher gain and encounter educational experiences as well as having freedom of choice to reconstitute on the powerful curriculum discourse in Thailand. The notion of “home” signifying Thailand is a part of Asia is used to move beyond the debate over “us vs. them” or “insider vs. outsider” which is neither misleading nor productive. Additionally, it is employed for the understanding of the hegemonic roles of national elites on policy re-contextualization to combine both the neo-liberalism a...