The project of doing philosophy as a conversation among all the world's traditions rather than as the property of one. Where epistemology or metaphysics name questions, global (or intercultural) philosophy names a stance: no tradition gets to set the terms alone, and the "great books" canon of Europe is one shelf among several.
Region
Transnational — German-speaking academia, then worldwide
Era
Named field from the 1980s; precursors in the early twentieth century
Key Figures
Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Heinz Kimmerle, Ram Adhar Mall, Franz Martin Wimmer
Precursors: Masson-Oursel's "comparative philosophy" (1920s), the Indian philosopher Brajendranath Seal, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's East–West bridge-building.
The field crystallizes in the 1980s among German-speaking philosophers — Kimmerle, Wimmer, and the journal culture around intercultural philosophy.
Its foil is Eurocentrism: the old story, from Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, that philosophy proper begins in Greece — answered with Karl Jaspers's Axial Age observation that China, India and Greece each broke into critical thought in the same centuries.
Latin American thinkers (Fornet-Betancourt) tie the program to decolonial critique: dialogue is not neutral when traditions meet under unequal power.
Central Ideas
Interculturality as attitude: not a subfield beside others but a way of doing every question — dialogue on equal footing, including non-textual forms such as ritual, art, and myth.
The polylogue: Wimmer's term for a many-voiced conversation, with his minimal rule that no single-tradition thesis may be accepted as well-founded for that reason alone.
Analogical hermeneutics: Mall's reading between radical incommensurability and forced sameness — traditions are neither translatable into one another nor sealed off.
Comparative method: the craft of comparing, say, Indian pramāṇa theory with analytic epistemology without collapsing either — see tradition as a philosophical problem.
Schools & Key Figures
German intercultural school: Kimmerle (dialogue with African philosophy on equal terms), Wimmer (polylogue), Holenstein (rules against intercultural misunderstanding).
Comparative philosophy: the Anglophone counterpart — methodological rules for comparing traditions, running from Masson-Oursel to today's survey literature.
Decolonial wing: Fornet-Betancourt's reconstruction of philosophy's history out of cultural diversity.
World philosophies in the curriculum: the institutional fight over what gets taught — echoed on this site by the traditions registry itself.
Influence & Reception
University curricula and the Stanford and Internet encyclopedias now carry substantial non-Western coverage — Indian, Chinese, Islamic entries sit beside the Euro-American canon.
Journals (Polylog and others) and societies institutionalize the conversation across continents.
Critics ask whether "global philosophy" dissolves differences into a single academic idiom — the debate it must keep answering.