Reintroducing Philosophy: Thinking as the Gathering of Civilization - According to Contemporary, Islamicate and Ancient Sources
What if philosophy was never the property of the West —only the meeting place of civilizations?
BOOK SUMMARY:
Published 2020, Reintroducing Philosophy: Thinking as the Gathering of Civilization - According to Contemporary, Islamicate and Ancient Sources by Anthony F. Shaker is a bold intellectual intervention —an invitation to reclaim philosophy as a global, civilizational, and deeply human pursuit.
As the world moves unmistakably into a post-Western age, Shaker asks a question almost no one dares to confront: What happens to philosophy when the West is no longer the center of world thought?
Drawing on an astonishing range of traditions—Leibniz and Frege, Qūnawī and Ṣadrā, the Greeks, the classical Indians, and the ancient Chinese—this book dismantles the illusion that philosophy belongs to a single civilization.
Instead, Shaker restores it to its true form: a universal quest for completeness in thought and being, forged across centuries of intellectual exchange.
His exploration of logic, metaphysics, identity, knowledge, and the human condition shows how civilizations have long spoken to each other through the medium of philosophy, even when political borders kept them apart.
Shaker argues that before the “modern West” drew the map of global knowledge, human civilization was already global, already connected, already sophisticated. In reviving that broader vision, Reintroducing Philosophy reawakens the oldest truth of all great traditions —that thinking is itself the gathering of civilization.
A monumental work for anyone passionate about Islamic philosophy, comparative thought, or the fate of wisdom in a fractured world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
• Acknowledgments
• Preface, Introduction
PART I. BACK TO BASICS
Not What Is Philosophy, but Why Philosophy
What Is a Thing?
The Human Dimension of Things
Method and the Path to Discovery
A New Logic of Discovery?
Identity: What Is Real and What Is True
The Love of Wisdom and the Question of Science
The Mathematization of Knowledge
PART II. THE DYNAMICS OF BEING
9. When Is “Before” the World?
10. Creation as Allegory
11. Philosophy and the Uses of Anatomical Teleology
12. Explanation in the Greek Spirit
13. Knowledge and Action
14. The Paradigm of Man in the World
15. The Paradox of Thinking
PART III. PHILOSOPHY TO THE EAST
16. Patterns of Philosophical Thinking in Classical India
17. The Restoration of Philosophy in Modern China
18. Rebellion against Whom?
PART IV. THE TRAVAILS OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
19. What Is So New About Contemporary Philosophy?
20. How Subservient Is Contemporary Philosophy to Technology?
21. The Indifference to Humanity
• Concluding Remarks: Thinking as the Gathering of Civilization
• Bibliography, Index
PUBLISHER SUMMARY & PURCHASE:
• Vernon Press: