APQ - APPON PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

The 21st century philosophical circle tends towards respect for intercultural philosophy. This trend tilts to cultural debate that allows cultural dialogue. Cultural dialogue is the platform which provides a podium for presenting cultures, values, beliefs and other ideologies for better interactions for the purpose of bringing about contemporary relevance of the cultural philosophy across people of different background Thus, helping to strengthen and reaffirm the idea of unity in diversity for the attainment of the spirit of togetherness, peaceful coexistence and the promotion of multiculturalism for the advancement of postmodern conception of reality. In achieving these goals, intercultural philosophy requires the services of reflective reasoning i.e., critical thinking as an instrumental value which a successful debate or discussion on integration of values, beliefs and other productive ideas required in the pursuit of multiculturalism such that what intercultural philosophy is not could be eliminated e.g., trans-culturalism etc. This paper is an attempt to appraise the instrumental value of reflective reasoning- critical thinking in the discourse of intercultural philosophy. To attain this, the paper applied historical and analytic method of inquiry. The historical stance is used here in this excerpt to show how values, beliefs, tradition which make up a peoples' custom and culture are integrated through the instrumentality of critical thinking to bring about unity in diversity, universality in the midst of relativity for the purpose of balancing nature. The historical method was further used to explain the various theories and stances in generic order that gave acceptance to cultural interactionism and relativism in the midst of universalism for a cross cultural philosophical movement like the concept of structuralism, historicism, pluralism and post modernism. All these strands have given vent to the popularity and wide acceptance to intercultural philosophy while the analytic method is used to synthesize the basic ideas that form the concept of inter-cultural philosophy and cultural dialogue.

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