Home schooling
philosophy without travel
pp. 99-111
in: Ron Scapp, Brian Seitz (eds), Philosophy, travel, and place, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
"Life as journey" is an ideology of civilization. When travel is justified as producing knowledge, positivism enters the ideology. Consider a counter-metaphor: wisdom that comes of being traveled to. Lucian imagines a Scythian assessing Roman customs. Descartes's Meditations begins with "infidels' who need his proofs for God's existence. Kant's Third Critique recalls an Iroquois chief in Paris. Such travel brings outsiders to question our unquestioned thoughts—likewise appeals to observers from Mars or the future. Against the checklist "Places to visit before you die" I"d propose travel-as-knowledge for philosophers under the rubric "Places to be visited from before you start to live."
