India, Aug. 21 -- In college, a professor often went on diatribes against Eurocentrism, the practice of viewing the world through the lens of the hegemonic West. While he earnestly taught us the prescribed syllabus for philosophy students, he bemoaned its overwhelming focus on Western philosophy at the expense of, say, Indian, Arab, or Chinese thought.

However, even as he exhorted us to be aware of our Western blinkers, he acknowledged the impossibility of completely discarding them within our current modes of knowledge production and dissemination. After all, he was railing in English, the link language for us students from across India. But in doing so, he left us with an appreciation of the assumptions that constitute the bedrock of o...