Oliver Leaman
Oliver Leaman is Professor of Philosophy at University of Kentucky. He specialises in the philosophy of religions, in particular Islamic philosophy. He has written a number of books in the area, including Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy, Averroes and his Philosophy, and has edited, with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the History of Islamic Philosophy and Friendship of East and West: Philosophical Perspectives. He has written widely on Asian philosophy, in particular Key Concepts in Eastern Philosophy and Eastern Philosophy.
We often speak of one culture affecting another, or one culture developing out of another culture. This can be problematic. Orientalism sees Islam, for example, as predominantly something different from how it sees itself, and as owing far more to the cultures out of which it developed than it is prepared to acknowledge. This is profoundly insulting to Islam, since it implies that it is not an independent religion but is a cultural phenomenon dependent on what preceded it. On the other hand, there clearly is a strong link between Islam and the preceding civilizations, a link which Islam itself acknowledges and celebrates. We should not analyse the links between civilizations as being a matter of either total identity or complete difference, however. We can use the notion of conversation to explain how in a dialogue the individuality of the participants in the discussion is not compromised by the fact that they make allowances and accommodations to the other in order to allow the conversation to continue. This is a useful model to explain the relation of the intercultural, and it has the advantage also of respecting the relative autonomies of both cultures. Does this mean that it must be accepted that all cultures are equal to each other? This is not the case, there are perfectly good criteria for distinguishing between cultures and valuing some more than others, but the use of conversation as an explanatory model will suggest that differentiating between the content of conversation does not imply differentiating between how we value the speakers themselves. It will be argued that this analogy provides a superior way of understanding the links between cultures than many of the alternative theories.