______________________________________________________________________________ Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutical expansion? In engaging with this question, the symposium focuses upon methodological issues salient to cross-cultural inquiry. Douglas L. Berger lays out the ground for the debate by arguing for a methodological approach, which is able to rectify the discipline's colonial legacies and bridge the hermeneutical distance with its objects of study. From

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... own perspectives, Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul Roth and A. Raghuramaraju analyze whether such a processual and hermeneutically-sensitive approach can indeed open up new hermeneutic horizons. Their responses shed light upon cross-cultural philosophy's continued embedment in Euroamerican professional philosophy and how the locality of its knowledge-seeking endeavors may indeed have repercussions on attempts to bridge temporal and spatial distances. This short essay arises out of my career so far in cross-cultural philosophy. Cross-cultural philosophy is certainly not a discipline governed by a priori principles. We cannot know in advance, that is, what sorts of resonances, differences, conversations, incommensurable features and so on will emerge from bringing a thinker or idea from one tradition into engagement with another. Neither can we know, beforehand, what sorts of methodological approaches will be appropriate to conducting cross-cultural conversation; the best approaches emerge from the process and the experiences drawn from it. It is, both for individual researchers and cultures, an activity in which certain lessons may be learned through the course of time; the process is what provokes our learning. Where do we stand after recent centuries of cross-cultural philosophical engagements between various Western and Asian traditions, and should such a stock-taking provoke us to alter approaches that have been employed so far? The examples I will employ in what follows are drawn from the areas in which I have worked, namely the Indian, Chinese and Continental European traditions, but hopefully the ideas I will discuss here will be relevant to other spheres of thought in these spheres of dialogue. There are, in my view, two fundamental difficulties with what has passed for "comparative philosophy" as it has been largely practiced in the past five hundred years. The first of these difficulties is that it has grown out of colonial contexts, in which European and American military and economic power has led to conquest, domination and homogenization of other cultural traditions across the globe. In these admittedly complex contexts, Western philosophies, despite their historically provincial frameworks and categories, were erected as Symposium/122 the standards for universal thought and truth, while the philosophical traditions they confronted were often either measured against Western standards or dismissed as "unphilosophical." Even when native cultures responded to such Western representations and vilifications of their heritages of thought in these centuries, they often did so by attempting to demonstrate that the West's very ideals of universality and truth were better fulfilled by those heritages than by the systems of the West. 1 The second fundamental problem of modern "comparative philosophy" is what has come to be called the problem of "prejudice" as it is connected to the "hermeneutic circle" (Gadamer 1994) . In short, if we are bound, as the historical beings we are, to encounter other traditions at first through our own tradition's language, conceptual framework and civilizational prejudices, then the likelihood of completely abandoning these in the attempt to "understand" another cultural tradition has but dim prospects. While Gadamer, who formulated this version of the problem, took a positive tack in seeing our prejudices as inescapable conditions of initiating a kind of dialectic interchange between reader and text, and Ricoeur thought readers in these circumstances could attain expanded capacities for "projecting themselves" into a text and another "lifeworld," the dangers implicit in such prejudices are still obvious (Ricoeur 1981: 192). When we look at other traditions, we not only look as ourselves, but often for ourselves in them. Resisting these legacies of recent "comparative philosophy" is indeed no easy matter. But perhaps we entertain impossible expectations of ourselves to begin with when we strive for a transcending, an escape, from our historical and hermeneutic situatedness in an attempt to arrive at some abstracted "neutral" stance in comparative studies. Are there ways we may be able to, not so much break out of the "hermeneutic circle" or pretend that we are not heavily influenced by the legacies of colonialism, but perhaps expand our hermeneutic boundaries instead, and forge overlappings with other "circles" of thought, creating new relationships between cultures? Of course, growing up in any modernized cultural tradition and being trained from within a westernized academic system hardly makes anyone, practically anywhere, immune from either the legacies of colonialism or hermeneutic distance. The challenges of engaging with ancient facets of a cultural tradition may be different for those who do so from within the inherited and internally developed interpretive frameworks of that tradition, but for those who have been trained or influenced by western academic and civilizational mores, the effects of modernization and hermeneutic distance will be felt by the Indian or Chinese researcher with regard to their own culture's past. The prevailing ideals of contemporary life, which have been thoroughly transformed by the market forces of a globalizing economy, and the variously inflected secular trends of professionalized academic research, themselves results of westernization, facilitate much of what we take to be philosophical writing, teaching and interchange today. Furthermore, it is not as if any of us has a crystal ball that would enable us to peer into the ancient "lifeworlds" of philosophers even in one's own traditions to divine what they were thinking or what the exact meanings and intentions of their ideas and texts were. So, historical distance itself is a potential barrier for the scholar, whether they are doing cross-cultural thought or investigating the ancient texts of a tradition that is supposedly their "own." And this historical distance constitutes a good portion of the problem of the hermeneutic circle. 2 Is it a barrier that we cannot hope to traverse at all, or are there degrees to which we can venture out beyond our own boundaries? There are various strategies for "coping," as it were, with the hermeneutic problem of "distanciation." One of the more widespread strategies as of late is the invocation, valid as far as it goes, of ever-present and ever-transforming cultural "hybridity." Cultural and intellectual traditions were, at the time of the composition of classical texts of any period, in various phases of hybrid influences and forms, and this can certainly also be said of our contemporary circumstances. 3 This condition of dynamic hybridity would seem to mitigate the problem of historical and hermeneutic distanciation on both ends, as it were. For if the frameworks of ancient texts and ideas were not themselves culturally monolithic, then we need not worry about some kind of hypostatized classical "Indian" or "Chinese" cultural tradition that is, in some stereotypical ways, essentially different from that of the interpreter, for the former have their own internal differences and plurality of Symposium/128 "connectivity;" they allowed for meaningful academic discourses and professional careers to take shape. The field is still growing on this basis as shown by the emergence of new academic publication outlets, such as the journal in which this short paper will be published. We can only hope, as noted above, that neither the maximization nor the minimization efforts lead to a final consensus that would threaten the future existence of the field.