Jay Lazar Garfield (born 13 November 1955) is an American professor of philosophy who specializes in Tibetan Buddhism.
Garfield was the inaugural Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor of Humanities and Head of Studies, Philosophy, at Yale-NUS from 2013-2016.
He has noted that "people in our profession are still happy to treat Western philosophy as the 'core' of the discipline, and as the umarked case.
However, he was "outraged" that there were only "one or two" members of the regular faculty in the department who attended the event, because he felt that this showed a lack of support for their own students' interest in non-Western philosophy.
[5] Garfield discussed this issue with another speaker at the conference, Bryan W. Van Norden, and they wrote an editorial that appeared in The Stone column of The New York Times in May of that year, entitled "If Philosophy Won't Diversify, Let's Call It What It Really Is.
Consequently, so long as "the profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric," Garfield and Van Norden "ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness.
'"[7] One typical comment was that Western philosophy deserves precedence because "there is a particular school of thought that caught fire, broke cultural boundaries, and laid the foundation of modern science (Does anyone want to fly in a plane built with non-western math?)
"[9] Garfield and Van Norden's article was almost immediately translated into Chinese,[10] and over twenty blogs in the English-speaking world have commented or hosted discussions, including Reddit.