Paper Title: Comparative Philosophy and Family Resemblance
Author: Tim Connolly, East Stroudsburg University (East Stroudsburg, PA)
Abstract:
Comparative philosophers are fond of invoking the notion of “family resemblance.” Even
before Wittgenstein popularized the concept, Paul Masson-Oursel used the term in his fourvolume Comparative Philosophy, published in 1926. More recently, the Wittgensteinian version
has been adopted as an anti-essentialist framework for approaching the thought of different
cultures. When comparative philosophers at a recent conference were asked to agree on a
“minimal methodology” for their field, one of only a handful of principles to gain general assent
was that family resemblance is a helpful notion for the comparative endeavor (Stephen C. Angle,
“The Minimal Definition and Methodology of Comparative Philosophy, 109).
One justification for using family resemblance in comparative philosophy is that it helps us
to avoid an asymmetrical approach to candidates for the title “philosophy” from other traditions.
As Victoria Harrison writes, the family resemblance approach “opens the way for the practice of
global philosophy by allowing us to recognize different traditions as philosophical without
requiring us to give any one of them a preeminent position as the paradigm case against which to
judge all others” (Eastern Philosophy: The Basics, 5). Carine Defoort utilizes the concept in
such a way with reference to Chinese thought in her provocative paper on the “legitimacy of
Chinese Philosophy” (“Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?”, 407-409).
Yet in philosophy at large, the idea of family resemblance has been widely criticized for
going too far in the other direction in its critique of essentialism. The typical reproach is that it
leaves the application of a concept too unrestricted, since there is no mechanism for determining
which family resemblances are essential and which are accidental. Comparative philosophers
likewise have acknowledged that the broader our notion of philosophy, the less meaning the
concept has. This is the so-called “problem of under-determination of extension” or “wide-open
texture.”
In this paper, I question whether the family resemblance approach to comparative philosophy
can avoid the problem of under-determination while still doing what it was originally intended to
do, that is, allow for an approach to global philosophy that avoids taking one tradition’s
conception of the subject as paradigmatic. I draw on discussions of Chinese philosophy by
Defoort and others, as well as on earlier attempts by John Hick and Ninian Smart to use family
resemblance in the study of world religions. I argue that that the standard solutions to the
problem of under-determination cannot be applied in comparative philosophy in a way that
avoids asymmetry; thus the family resemblance approach either leaves us with a conception of
philosophy that is too broad to be meaningful, or else does not solve the problem it claims to
solve. If this is correct, the study of Chinese philosophy and other non-Western traditions is
better off without the notion of family resemblance.