Article #6, October 28, 2026

In order to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and language as a methodological basis of our project, the center hosted a Research Talk on the interconnectedness of languages, writing systems, and modes of thinking across diverse cultural and geographical contexts. The conversation brought together scholars working on Arabic, Asian and African philosophical traditions, exploring fundamental questions about how languages and scripts shape philosophical discourse and cultural identity.

Rolf Elberfeld opened the discussion by emphasizing the need to distinguish between spoken and written dimensions of language when analyzing philosophical traditions. He highlighted how scripts can function as connective tissues that transcend the boundaries of spoken languages, creating what might be termed scriptospheres—domains of intellectual exchange unified by shared writing systems rather than mutual intelligibility of spoken languages. He noted that in the case of East Asia or the “sinosphere,” Chinese script operates somewhat like a system of ideograms, establishing a “sphere of ideas” across linguistically diverse communities.

While acknowledging differences in how Arabic script functions compared to Chinese characters, he proposed that both writing systems transform the languages that adopt them and create connections between otherwise distinct linguistic traditions. The importance of scriptospheres is particularly evident in East Asian contexts, where Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese developed profound intellectual connections through the shared use of Chinese characters. Elberfeld identified this attention to the multiple levels of spoken and written language as fundamental to the research group’s work, citing Noburu Notomi’s contribution to the Orders of Knowledge volume on practiced communalities between different languages and traditions enabled by the Chinese writing system.

Sool Park raised the question of whether the concept of scriptosphere could be universalized, suggesting the possibility of conceptualizing a “latinosphere” that would function analogously in Western philosophical traditions. This intervention opened space for considering how different scriptospheres might be compared and analyzed through similar frameworks.

Rolf Elberfeld further developed this framework by identifying multiple scriptospheres beyond the well-known sinosphere and arabosphere. He outlined a broader comparative landscape including the latinosphere, the Devanagari sphere (India and surrounding regions), and the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, among others. Each scriptosphere creates distinct cognitive patterns and philosophical possibilities. Drawing on Christian Stetter’s work on Script and Language (Schrift und Sprache), Elberfeld emphasized how the alphabetic structure of Greek writing—with its analytic decomposition into discrete letters (A, B, C) rather than syllables—fundamentally shaped Greek logical thinking. Stetter argues, through a comparative study with Chinese script, that specific forms of logic emerged directly from alphabetic structures.

Sool Park introduced a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between written and spoken language through the lens of diglossia. Park argued that diglossia creates a fundamental hierarchy between the natural, lived world (the realm of spoken, flowing language) and the universal, symbolic world (the realm of written, fixed language). In this framework, written language acquires a symbolic character that transcends its immediate communicative function. Philosophy, Park suggested, operates precisely in this symbolic realm through what he called “symbolic manipulation”—moving around rigid conceptual structures that connect communities across space and time without requiring a definite political empire. This creates a “mental empire” united by shared symbolic operations. Park emphasized the physical and material dimensions of this symbolic sphere, referencing Kafka’s In the Penal Colony where the law is literally inscribed on the prisoner’s body until death.

Leon Krings identified a cross-cultural pattern in which philosophical traditions draw authority from archaic or foreign languages. The Greeks were fascinated with Egyptian; the Romans with Greek; Koreans and Japanese with Chinese script; the Chinese with Sanskrit. This pattern serves a specific function: using a language that is not used for spoken communication in the respective context allows a projection of that language into a “holy, esoteric domain” accessible only to an initiated elite. The archaic language establishes connection to a specific kind of “truth” that is conceptualized as a mythical origin. Krings illustrated how different strategies engage this mystical authority through the example of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. The first version consisted purely of Chinese kōan collections, maintaining a fixed mystical authority.

The later mixed version added Japanese commentary and interpretation to the Chinese, adding a layer of creative wordplay that both honors and transforms the authoritative source. This mixed strategy allows philosophers to play with the established order and change it through reinterpretation—maintaining connection to the mystical sphere while introducing vernacular innovation.

Abbed Kanoor proposed a theory about the relationship between vernacular languages and philosophical authority. When Descartes chose to write in French rather than Latin, he wasn’t merely translating ideas into a different language—he was creating a new conceptual order within French itself. Descartes established concepts, terminologies, and systematic structures that elevated French to the status of a philosophical language. This involved what Kanoor called “vindication of truth”—making claims that transcend autobiography or personal narrative to assert universal validity. “I think that is, for me, the religious aspect of philosophy,” Kanoor added, noting that philosophy begins with unproved claims, with assertions that demand acceptance based on their inherent authority rather than empirical demonstration.

The above mentioned pattern repeats across traditions and historical moments. Medieval philosophers—Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Augustine—wrote in Latin, and we have no textual traces of their vernacular speech. With Descartes, and later Kant and Leibniz in German, new vernacular languages became “topoi of thinking” through the establishment of a systematic order, repetition, and the creation of a stable conceptual architecture. The process requires not just writing in a language but fixing it, as Monika Rohmer noted: natural spoken languages constantly flow and change, but writing slows down the movement, creating stable building blocks for theoretical work. Rohmer cautioned, however, that this fixing can preserve nonsense as easily as truth.

Abbed Kanoor connected this analysis to Cheikh Anta Diop’s project of elevating Wolof by translating Einstein’s theory of relativity and creating glossaries of mathematical, physical, and philosophical terms. Diop insisted that to establish a language’s philosophical legitimacy required demonstrating its capacity for exact sciences, not just humanistic discourse. This language-elevation project, embedded in Diop’s broader philosophy of science, exemplifies the ongoing work of creating new philosophical vernaculars.

Rolf Elberfeld traced the European version of this pattern back to Sperone Speroni‘s sixteenth-century Dialogo delle Lingue, the first European text advocating for vernacular philosophy. Speroni argued that the Tuscan dialect (Italian) was as worthy of philosophy as Latin and ancient Greek. Abbed Kanoor noted the temporal lag: Dante and Petrarca had already been writing in Italian for centuries (since the twelfth century), meaning literary work in the vernacular preceded philosophical work by approximately four hundred years. Monika Rohmer suggested that this pattern is characteristic, in the sense that literary language comes first, “using much more fully the repertoire of language,” with its playfulness and experimentation. Philosophy follows, imposing order on what literature has made possible. This sequence appears across contexts: African terms entering philosophical texts in English and French began as a literary movement, pioneered by works like Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, which demonstrated how “to use the colonizers’ languages in a different, localized way.”

Abbed Kanoor provided historical context on the political dimensions of language, particularly in West and South Asian contexts. He emphasized the distinction between court languages, cultivated literary languages, and vernacular speech, illustrating how political power structures linguistic practices across regions. Kanoor traced the history of Arabic script and language in Iran following the Islamic expansion, noting how Arabic became the official language in some local courts after several centuries, despite Persian remaining the primary spoken language for most people. He drew parallels to North India, where Mughal rulers such as Akbar Shah and Dara Shikoh were native speakers of Indian languages but used Persian as court language. This linguistic politics had far-reaching intellectual consequences: Dara Shikoh translated the Upanishads into Persian, which Anquetil-Duperron subsequently translated into Latin and French, thereby establishing a channel for Indian philosophical texts to reach European audiences (Arthur Schopenhauer being one of the most popular in Western thought). Kanoor highlighted also the case of Muhammad Iqbal (Allama Iqbal Lahori), the intellectual architect of Pakistani independence, who wrote his poetry in Persian despite not speaking the language in everyday life, a practice that would seem extraordinary today but was entirely conventional in his era, and is still common in many multilingual contexts to this day.

These language choices, Kanoor argued, stemmed from multiple factors: political considerations, the association of certain languages with specific literary or intellectual genres (particularly poetry), and practical concerns about communication across diverse regions. The interplay between Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish in West Asia created particularly complex patterns of linguistic cross-influence and cultural transmission. Kanoor offered a personal anecdote: as someone literate in Arabic script, he can read Ottoman Turkish texts that contemporary Turkish citizens cannot read (following Atatürk’s script reform), though he doesn’t understand the language, while Turkish speakers can understand the meaning but not decipher the script. This example vividly illustrates the disjunction between written and spoken dimensions of language. Ottoman Turkish played an important role in disseminating ideas and terminology from Central Asia to North Africa, with Kanoor noting how words originating in Iran or North India can be found in Tunisian vocabulary today. He offered the term diwan as a case study in cross-cultural semantic migration. Originating possibly in Old Persian, diwan appears in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish with dual meanings: the physical location where a ruler sits (not the throne itself, but the governing space) and, metaphorically, a collection of poems—a semantic range exemplified in Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan. Tracing such terms reveals unexpected pathways of intellectual and cultural influence.

Returning to the Iranian context, Kanoor elaborated on why the Arabic script spread widely while Arabic as a spoken language met substantial resistance in many regions. After the ninth or tenth century, Arabic script was adopted extensively throughout the region, partly because it was easier to use than earlier writing systems like Pahlavi. While Egypt adopted both Arabic script and Arabic language, leading modern Egyptians to identify as both Egyptian and Arab, Iran presents a different picture. Only southern Iranian communities with Arabic ethnicity typically identify as Arab, while Persian speakers maintain a distinct identity. Kanoor addressed the influential narrative about the poet Ferdowsi, whose tenth-century epic Shahnameh (Book of Kings) is often credited with preserving the Persian language—a text comparable to Dante’s Divina Commedia or Homer’s epics.

While acknowledging Ferdowsi’s significant role, Kanoor cautioned against overstating the poet’s singular influence on language preservation and identity formation. Contemporary scholarship employs the term “Persianate world” to encompass Persian-speaking communities across Tajikistan, Afghanistan, parts of Turkmenistan, Tati speakers in Georgia, and parts of Kurdish speakers (given Kurdish’s proximity to Persian). This terminological choice deliberately avoids nationalist framings like “Iranian world” or “Persian world,” instead emphasizing linguistic affinity while recognizing ethnic and national diversity. Kanoor linked this to ongoing debates about appropriate terminology in other contexts, such as the discussion around “Arabic philosophy” versus “Arabic-speaking philosophy”—a designation that Souleymane Bachir Diagne sometimes employs to avoid conflating language with ethnicity or nation.

If one uses the criterion of “Japanese-speaking philosophy,” scholars like Bret W. Davis—who recently published a book on Japanese philosophy written in Japanese—naturally belong to the tradition as practitioners of philosophy through the Japanese language. This framework shifts the emphasis from ethnic or national identity to linguistic and intellectual practice, though Elberfeld acknowledged that all terminological choices involve trade-offs.

Rolf Elberfeld reflected on extensive discussions within the research project about terminology, noting how Souleymane Bachir Diagne grappled with various options: Islamic philosophy, philosophy in the Islamic world, Arabic philosophy, and Arabic-speaking philosophy. The Hi:Phi Historiography Project suggested using formulations like “Chinese-speaking philosophy” and “Japanese-speaking philosophy” to avoid nationalist framings. Elberfeld recalled a particularly illuminating discussion in Kyoto over twenty years ago about who should be included in a sourcebook on Japanese philosophy. The question arose whether foreigners should be included, with some Japanese scholars insisting on restricting the volume to ethnic Japanese philosophers. This position troubled Elberfeld, who saw advantages in a language-based rather than nationality-based criterion.

Sool Park built on this discussion by distinguishing between “Japanese-speaking” and “Japanese-writing” philosophy, noting that Bret W. Davis is primarily a Japanese-writing philosopher. This distinction proved crucial for Park’s work on Korean philosophy, where the concept of “Korean-speaking philosophy” creates significant historical complications. Park noted the impossibility of determining what language pre-twentieth-century Korean philosophers spoke, given the absence of audio recordings. These historical figures wrote in Chinese characters, creating a complex situation where scholars lived in the Korean peninsula, presumably spoke Korean in daily life, but produced their philosophical work in Chinese script. Park expressed particular interest in the African context, which he understood as similarly complex with extensive diglossia and multilingualism, complicated further by colonial legacies. This raised questions about the nature of philosophy itself: Is philosophizing fundamentally an oral tradition, an activity of writing, or both simultaneously?

Rolf Elberfeld agreed that language histories are crucial for understanding these issues. He suggested that the language-based approach might resolve some contemporary problems: defining “Japanese or Korean-speaking philosophy” as philosophy conducted in those languages includes anyone—American, European, or otherwise—who uses the language as their philosophical medium. However, he acknowledged that historical cases present far greater difficulty, precisely because of the complex linguistic situations Park described.

Sool Park further elaborated that, in Korea, the concept of a national language emerged only in the 1920s and 1930s, making it relevant for approximately a century. Going back to that period, Korean philosophers were still writing in Chinese, though they could not necessarily speak Chinese fluently. They lived in a bilingual or digraphic reality, speaking Korean while writing philosophical works in Chinese, and sometimes employing both writing systems.

Leon Krings introduced an important comparative dimension by contrasting the sinosphere’s syncretistic multiplicity with monotheistic systems organized around single textual sources. In the case of East Asia, the eighth-century Japanese Ritsu-ryō legal system exemplifies this syncretism: a mixture of Chinese legalism and Confucianism, combining criminal code (Ritsu) and administrative code (Ryō). No single system claims full authority—Buddhist, Confucian, and Shinto ideas and practices coexist, with practitioners freely interpreting Confucianism from Buddhist perspectives and vice versa. This stands in contrast to contexts where a single divine text provides a unified source.

Abbed Kanoor responded by noting that even monotheistic contexts exhibit more complexity than simple theological unity might suggest. The Quran, as the literal word of God (not merely divinely inspired like the Bible), establishes a different relationship between text and authority. Yet the possibility of jurisprudence (ijtihad) creates flexibility, and concrete political situations meant that different dynasties in Iran could not simply “execute Sharia law” because practical governance required adaptation to local conditions. The theoretical unity of divine law encountered the reality of competing authorities: the Caliph often had to contend with local governors, Turkish-speaking governors, and Persian-speaking administrators who exercised considerable autonomy. This comparison reveals that both monotheistic and syncretistic systems develop complex accommodations between textual authority and sociopolitical context.

Monika Rohmer contributed observations about West Africa’s participation in the Arabic scriptosphere. Between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, major intellectual endeavors in the region were conducted in Arabic as both script and spoken language. A subsequent movement toward the use of other languages occured, though this did not eliminate the Arabic script. Nevertheless, the very name ajami (used for local languages written in Arabic script) carries devaluative connotations, implying that “real” philosophy, religion, and science operated in Arabic. Rohmer noted significant parallels with the situations described by other speakers concerning Asia. The production of valued works in local languages typically had political or religious motivations, often connected to Islamic reform movements. Arabic served as the language connecting West African intellectuals to the broader Islamic world, functioning as the primary medium for intellectual expression, including poetry. The historical pattern extended across North Africa and sub-Saharan regions, including coastal East Africa such as Tanzania, where Arabic played a comparable role.

Rohmer drew attention to the sacred dimension of Arabic script in West Africa. In Islamic schools in northern Nigeria, students engage in Quranic recitation and writing exercises. After writing Quranic verses or prayers on wooden boards, the ink is washed off, and the water that has absorbed the letters is considered holy. This blessed water is consumed to fill oneself with sacred knowledge or  sold as a source of benediction. This practice powerfully illustrates how script transcends its communicative function to become a vehicle of spiritual power and transformation, whereby the physical materiality of written words becomes imbued with sanctity.

Sool Park connected this discussion to similar practices in Buddhist contexts, where inscribing texts into physical materials serves purposes beyond textual preservation or dissemination. Park referenced discussions at a conference in Kyoto where scholars explored how Buddhist texts inscribed in stone become sacred sites of pilgrimage, transforming the text into a physical, sacred object that attracts devotional practices. This discussion, Park noted, generates analytical questions about treating text as an immaterial and purely ideal sphere versus text as a material object, and the relationship between the language of the text and the script in which it appears.

Lindokuhle Shabane introduced a striking dimension of scriptural materiality from biblical tradition, namely passages in the Torah where prophets literally eat sacred texts. In these accounts, the paper and words become sweet in their mouths as they swallow the divine message. In one instance, however, when the script contained divine punishment, the prophet ate it and found it turned sour and bitter in his stomach. This tradition takes words literally as consumable objects—the physical substance of divine language can be ingested, becoming part of the body. Shabane also noted the practice where monks copying biblical texts would wash themselves before writing the word “God,” then wash again afterward, treating the act of inscribing the divine name as requiring ritual purification due to the immense significance it represented.

Rolf Elberfeld expanded this discussion by drawing on classical and medieval traditions of language as nourishment. In Seneca and ancient Greek philosophy, words are conceptualized as seeds planted in the soul. The soul is imagined as a field (ager) where good words grow into virtuous thoughts and bad words produce corruption. This agricultural metaphor remains embedded in contemporary academic practice: “seminar” derives from Latin seminarium, a place for planting seeds. When we speak, Elberfeld noted, “we exchange these kinds of seeds” which can “grow in ourselves, assume a new life, and become a big tree of thought.” The medieval practice of ruminatio extends this embodied metaphor: like cows chewing cud, scholars were encouraged to bring texts back to “chew” repeatedly, extracting deeper nourishment through repeated contemplation.

Monika Rohmer emphasized that in West African Islamic education, learning means memorization through oral repetition—students don’t necessarily understand what they are reciting but master the sounds and rhythms through performative repetition. Only later in the educational process do students receive semantic explanation. This pedagogical approach means that writing, recitation, and memorization form an integrated practice, with understanding emerging from prolonged embodied engagement rather than preceding it.

Leon Krings offered a perspective from Japanese Buddhist thought, especially in relation to Kūkai and the Shingon tradition. He emphasized that in certain Japanese contexts, the phonetic and performative dimensions of language take precedence over semantic meaning. In some traditions, language is not merely interpreted as symbolic representation, but as embodied resonance (hibiki): according to this view, sound, breath, and gesture participate directly in the structuring of thought and reality. In Kūkai’s understanding of mantra and script, the materiality of syllables—above all the Sanskrit seed syllables (bīja), but also the Japanese pronunciation as presented in the kotodama system—is not secondary to meaning but constitutive of it. According to the Shingon worldview, the cosmos articulates itself as vibrational resonance, such that linguistic vocalization becomes a mode of bodily attunement rather than just semantic reference.

Script and recitation therefore function as disciplined practices that participate in a cosmological order understood as resonating, dynamic, and expressive. In this perspective, symbols, sounds, and embodied gestures are not external vehicles of thought but modalities of philosophy as a practice of becoming enmeshed in the world. This perspective challenges the assumption that philosophy primarily inhabits a detached symbolic sphere governed by conceptual analysis. Instead, it foregrounds practice, somatic cultivation, and the transformative power of repeated embodiment patterns (kata). In this framework, philosophical language does not simply point to truth; it enacts and discloses it through cultivated participation in a resonant field of meaning.

Rolf Elberfeld noted that meditation practices present analogous questions. While meditation is often discussed in the context of psychology or therapeutic practice, it raises philosophical questions about consciousness, attention, and the nature of experience. He suggested that meditation, like chanting, might constitute a form of philosophical practice that doesn’t conform to conventional Western models centered on discursive reasoning and argumentative texts.

Monika Rohmer added that in Islamic mysticism (Sufism), dhikr practices—repetitive invocations of divine names—serve similar functions, using vocalization and rhythm to induce altered states of consciousness and facilitate spiritual-philosophical insight.

Lindokuhle Shabane contributed a personal perspective from growing up in a Zulu-speaking context in South Africa, describing how language embeds social hierarchies and power relations from an early age. Even within the family, children cannot use their father’s name, and speaking to elders requires modifying one’s language. Different grammatical forms exist for addressing different categories of people, embedding social differentiation directly into linguistic practice. Shabane emphasized that isiZulu exhibits even more explicit gendering than many languages, with boys and men speaking a somewhat different variety of the language than women—what might be called men’s language versus women’s language. This linguistic differentiation both reflects and reproduces social structures and power relations.

Sool Park and Rolf Elberfeld discussed Jesuit missionary strategies in seventeenth-century China as a sophisticated example of cross-cultural “hacking.” The Jesuits initially attempted to dress as Buddhist monks but discovered that Buddhism didn’t hold the highest discursive rank in Chinese intellectual culture. Switching strategies, they adopted a Confucian presentation and translated Euclid’s geometry as well as texts on astronomy, domains that held high prestige in the Chinese system. Through these scientific translations, Park observed, they positioned Christian concepts of God, creation, and cosmology within frameworks the Chinese literati recognized as authoritative and thereby “hacked” the foreign system they tried to infiltrate.

Elberfeld noted that the Chinese in turn mounted counter-strategies, using astronomical knowledge to challenge European chronology and the Biblical creation timeline by going further back in time. However, Park argued that despite this tactical success, the long-term “discursive win” belonged to the missionaries: three centuries of “Western learning” in Asia fundamentally transformed the regional intellectual frameworks.

The adoption of the European calendar system—marked in China as a fundamentally metaphysical structure managed by the Emperor—signaled profound shifts. Korean intellectuals, observing that China had adopted Western calculations, began reading European books, initially focusing on mathematics and astronomy. The introduction of the twelve celestial spheres, with the immobile sphere where God and angels dwell, gradually transformed the whole intellectual system. The resulting transformations included Korean Christian movements, violent suppressions, and the Donghak Revolution that imitated Christian religious structures.

Rolf Elberfeld situated this within a broader argument about rationalization in European thought, identifying two major waves of external influence. The first came through Arabic sources: the introduction of Aristotelian empirical rationality, which “really introduced a rational momentum that was not there at that time in Europe.” The influence extended to figures like Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, whose thought drew on Arabic philosophy—a connection only recently acknowledged in historical research. The second wave came from China. Christian Wolff’s 1721 lecture claiming that “the perfect ethical system is in China, but without any God, without the revelation of God” created an enormous scandal among European intellectuals—the possibility of ethics without divine revelation.

This Chinese influence provided resources for those seeking to challenge Christianity’s monopoly on moral philosophy, contributing to European secularization. Lindokuhle Shabane connected this to contemporary debates among “famous pop philosophers and thinkers” anxiously discussing the “Western metaphysical substrate” and calling for a return to Christianity as foundation, revealing continued anxiety about the diminishment of divine authority that these cross-cultural encounters accelerated.

Rolf Elberfeld suggested mapping the relationships between different scriptospheres and language families, a dimension the conversation touched on but did not fully develop. Such systematic exploration would clarify what levels of analysis are necessary for understanding how languages entangle with each other and how these entanglements shape philosophical discourse.

The discussion revealed several key themes requiring further investigation: the relationship between spoken and written language in philosophical practice; the political economies of language choice in different historical and geographical contexts; the sacred and material dimensions of script; the role of embodied, performative practices in philosophical traditions; questions of naming and categorizing philosophical traditions in ways that avoid nationalist essentialism while acknowledging linguistic specificity; and the methodological challenges of studying philosophy across contexts where the very concept of “philosophy” may be differently constructed.

Rolf Elberfeld: Sprache und Sprachen. Eine philosophische Grundorientierung

Monika Rohmer: “Philosophizing in Wolof. Beyond Translation”

Lindokuhle Shabane: “Conversational thinking as a method of conceptual decolonization”

Leon Krings: Phänomenologie der Kata-Übung. Versuch einer interkulturellen Philosophie leibgeistiger Praxis

Abbed Kanoor (ed.):
Du métissage à la pensée métisse (Rue Descartes, Vol. 105)

Sool Park: Paradoxien der Grenzsprache und das Problem der Übersetzung. Eine Studie zur Textualität philosophischer Texte und zu historischen Übersetzungsstrategien