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Foreigners in Philosophy and Openness to Dislocation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Elİf Yavnık
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Abstract

Because of political, economic, technological, and other developments, foreigners who come as students or academics to practice philosophy in a country, geography, and culture other than their own are increasingly prevalent in academic philosophy today. Yet this reality is insufficiently discussed and is under‐thematized, so that it remains opaque even to foreigners themselves. This article seeks first to dissipate that opacity by developing an account of what it is like to be a foreigner in philosophy. I offer an understanding of foreignness through a cluster of interrelated experiences, and I describe “existential dislocation” as the core experience that characterizes the foreigner. Next, the article follows some consequences of these descriptions and analyses. I address considerations of equality in the academy, and then I examine the significance of “existential dislocation” for the philosophical enterprise and propose that it occasions revitalizing possibilities for the discipline.

Type
Cluster on Foreigners in Philosophy
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , Spring 2018 , pp. 343 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

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