Toward New Adventures in Philosophy

Preview: /Review: Eli Kramer, Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume One: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), 382 pages./ Eli Kramer has provided us with the first volume of an ambitious trilogy entitled Intercultural Modes of Philosophy. His first volume, Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (hereafter PGPC), sets us on a rich, detailed, and lengthy exploration of the much neglected, and at times romanticized, communal mode of Philosophy (philosophical community). For Kramer, philosophical community is a “mode of mutually reinforced ethical praxis in a shared cosmopolitan place” (PGPC, 6). The exploration of these communities (some present, some past, and some to come), serves as “[a transition] to a new adventure in philosophy” (PGPC, 99), along with an attempted rescue of successful philosophical community practices that, in turn, “[unify] the activity of a stable community” (PGPC, 129). Kramer’s twenty-six “principles,” derived from communal investigations, act as samples (experiential swatches) of living communities, and from histories of philosophical communities that would serve as support, or guiding images, for future communities (PGPC, 140). Looking ahead while glancing back is how this treatise remains for, and most noticeably from, an ongoing “praxis of learning” (PGPC, 144).