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How can students and scholars in professional studies turn experience and ideas into practical knowledge and wisdom (phronesis)? How can critical and theoretical reflection on professional practice nurture practitioners' human development or Bildung, and help them develop the capacity to respond wisely in complex situations? How might world philosophies and intercultural dialogue inspire lived life and professional practice? With leading scholars as guests, hosts professors Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog explore these questions at the intersection of philosophy, epistemology, education, and professional studies.
TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY
(This transcript summary was AI-generated and then edited by the podcast hosts for quality assurance)
#37 Dag Herbjørnsrud | A Different History of Ideas
- a podcast dialogue with Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
INTRODUCTION
In this episode of the ResponsAbility Podcast, Norwegian historian of ideas and author Dag Herbjørnsrud invites us to reconsider some of the most familiar stories about the origins of philosophy, democracy, science, and European intellectual culture. Drawing on his work in global and comparative history of ideas, Herbjørnsrud argues that many narratives still prevalent in education are shaped by categories and assumptions inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than understanding intellectual history through supposedly separate traditions—Western, Eastern, European, Asian, African—he proposes attending to the complexity, connections, and exchanges through which ideas have developed across cultures.
The conversation therefore moves beyond the question of simply “decolonizing” knowledge. For Herbjørnsrud, critique and deconstruction are not enough. What is also needed is reconstruction: the development of richer accounts of intellectual history that take seriously neglected thinkers, texts, traditions, and connections. This raises a central educational question running throughout the dialogue: What responsibility do scholars, teachers, and educational institutions have for the narratives through which students learn to understand the world?
DISCOVERING A DIFFERENT INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Herbjørnsrud begins by tracing his interest in global intellectual history back to encounters in his own education. One formative experience was discovering an older edition of Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss’s introduction to philosophy. Unlike the philosophy education Herbjørnsrud encountered at university, which focused primarily on the Greek and European traditions, Næss's book began with Indian philosophy and also included Chinese and Arab thought.
He recalls another experience from childhood. Growing up in a multicultural area of Oslo, he encountered a school textbook that presented Islam from what he describes as a strongly Lutheran-Christian perspective. A Muslim neighbour responded by telling him about Arab philosophers, women in Islamic intellectual history, and scientific developments associated with the Islamic world. Such experiences made visible a discrepancy between the intellectual history presented through formal education and a much more interconnected history encountered elsewhere.
FROM DECOLONIZATION TO RECONSTRUCTION
A central concern of the dialogue is how to move from criticizing established canons toward constructing something more adequate. Herbjørnsrud emphasizes that this cannot simply mean replacing one canon with another. Rather, the first requirement is more knowledge: texts need to be translated, neglected traditions studied, and connections reconstructed before a genuinely global intellectual history can emerge.
As an example, he discusses the seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosophers Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat, whose writings engage questions of reason, religion, equality, slavery, and the position of women. For Herbjørnsrud, examples such as these complicate conventional accounts of where rationalist and critical traditions developed. He similarly points to intellectual traditions whose texts were destroyed, marginalized, or excluded from later historical narratives.
His alternative is a global comparative approach organized around three concepts: complexity, connection, and comparison. Intellectual traditions should be understood in their internal complexity, in relation to their historical connections with other traditions, and through careful comparison rather than through predetermined categories of “East” and “West.”
QUESTIONING OUR MENTAL MAPS
Herbjørnsrud argues that inherited historical narratives are powerful partly because they contribute to collective identities. What appears to be neutral historical knowledge may therefore be surprisingly difficult to revise.
One example discussed in the conversation is the familiar image of ancient Greek sculpture as white marble. Herbjørnsrud points to research showing that Greek sculptures and buildings were originally polychrome. Their contemporary whiteness is largely the result of pigments disappearing over time. Yet the image of white classical sculpture became so culturally established that reconstructed multicoloured statues could appear unfamiliar or even “wrong.”
Herbjørnsrud compares this to the continued influence of the Mercator projection, which dramatically distorts the relative size of different parts of the world. Africa, for example, appears much smaller in relation to Greenland than it actually is. For him, the geographical map becomes a metaphor for our mental maps: representations can become so familiar that their distortions become difficult to perceive.
WHERE DID DEMOCRACY BEGIN?
The conversation then turns to one of the most familiar narratives in Western education: that democracy originated in ancient Athens. Herbjørnsrud questions the simplicity of this account by drawing attention to political traditions elsewhere in the ancient world.
He refers, among other examples, to Aristotle's discussion of the political system of Carthage in North Africa, as well as accounts of political deliberation in ancient Persia and Mesopotamia. Rather than identifying a single birthplace of democracy, Herbjørnsrud emphasizes the existence of different historical forms of collective governance and political participation.
Particularly important for him is the ancient concept of isonomia, understood as equality under or before the law. This concept shifts attention away from democracy understood merely as majority rule and toward the legal and institutional conditions through which citizens—including minorities—are treated equally. The discussion thereby raises a broader conceptual question: perhaps recovering forgotten political concepts can also help us think differently about contemporary political life.
RETHINKING EUROPEAN IDENTITY
Another example concerns assumptions about the historical appearance of Europeans. Herbjørnsrud discusses archaeological and genetic research on prehistoric European populations, including reconstructions such as that of Cheddar Man in Britain. These findings, he argues, complicate contemporary projections of racial categories backwards into European prehistory.
The larger point is not simply what particular prehistoric Europeans looked like. Rather, it concerns the ways contemporary identities can influence how the past is imagined and represented. For Herbjørnsrud, scholars and educational institutions therefore carry a responsibility to revise established representations when new research challenges them. Continuing to reproduce outdated images because they are culturally familiar risks turning education into a mechanism for preserving inherited assumptions rather than questioning them.
DID PHILOSOPHY BEGIN IN GREECE?
Perhaps the most fundamental challenge discussed in the episode concerns the widespread narrative that philosophy began in ancient Greece. Herbjørnsrud argues that this account is historically much younger than is often assumed.
He points to Thomas Hobbes, who in Leviathan referred to philosophers in India, Persia, Chaldea, and Egypt when discussing the ancient origins of philosophy. According to Herbjørnsrud, earlier European intellectual histories were considerably more open to acknowledging non-European philosophical traditions. It was particularly during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the history of philosophy was reconstructed around a predominantly Greek and European lineage.
This reconstruction, he argues, contributed to the marginalization not only of Indian, Chinese, African, and Islamic thinkers, but also of women philosophers. He points, for instance, to the importance of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in earlier European intellectual culture and to Raphael's famous Vatican fresco commonly known today as The School of Athens. Herbjørnsrud notes that this title was not Raphael's own and that Ibn Rushd occupies a visible position within the work—an indication of an intellectual world that was less neatly divided into “Western” and “non-Western” traditions than later narratives might suggest.
Chinese philosophy provides another important example. Herbjørnsrud points to its long and continuous intellectual tradition and recalls that European thinkers themselves engaged with Chinese philosophy. Martin Buber, for example, translated Daoist thought, and Herbjørnsrud mentions Heidegger's engagement with this material. Such examples illustrate how intellectual traditions have repeatedly crossed the boundaries subsequently constructed between civilizations.
INDIA, RATIONALITY, AND THE PROBLEM OF INTELLECTUAL STEREOTYPES
Toward the end of the conversation, Herbjørnsrud turns to India as an example of how entire intellectual traditions can become associated with simplified stereotypes. India, he argues, has frequently been represented primarily in terms of religion, spirituality, or mysticism, while its contributions to mathematics, rational inquiry, and materialist and atheist philosophy receive considerably less attention.
He points to the development of mathematical concepts in India and their later transmission through Persian and Arab intellectual centres into Europe. He also highlights the ancient Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition, which represents a long history of materialist, skeptical, and atheistic thought. Such examples challenge the binary in which rationality is associated with “the West” while spirituality and mysticism are associated with “the East.” The intellectual history that emerges instead is one of circulation, translation, debate, appropriation, and mutual influence.
WHAT SHOULD EDUCATION DO WITH GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE?
These historical examples ultimately lead back to education. Herbjørnsrud suggests that increasing specialization has created disciplinary silos in which scholars may possess highly developed expertise within narrow fields while lacking broader knowledge across disciplines and intellectual traditions.
This leads to the possibility of reviving something resembling the Norwegian examen philosophicum, but in a form updated for the twenty-first century. Rather than reproducing another traditional canon, such an education could introduce students to the global and interconnected histories of philosophy, science, politics, and culture.
The idea may be particularly relevant to professional education. Teachers, nurses, and other professionals increasingly work within culturally and intellectually diverse societies. A broader understanding of how knowledge traditions have developed—and of how inherited assumptions shape what is recognized as legitimate knowledge—can therefore become part of professional judgment itself.
The episode thus leaves listeners with a challenge that extends beyond historical scholarship. If our understanding of the world depends partly on the intellectual maps we inherit, then education also involves learning to examine those maps critically. Response-ability, in this context, can mean cultivating the capacity to respond when established narratives are challenged: to seek neglected perspectives, revise what we think we know, and participate in reconstructing knowledge in ways that better reflect the complexity and interconnectedness of human intellectual history.