David Griesedieck is the owner of an impressive last name, and all who have seen him must note that his wild white hair and thick-rimmed glasses make the very image of the absent-minded professor.  His custom-published textbook, Three Eastern Traditions, provides a broad introduction to the topic he loves most—the three philosophical traditions of Islam, India and China.  It merits praise for its digestible presentation of a huge variety of schools of thought, and also merits some criticism on points which I will elaborate below.

The first criticism I will make of Professor Griesedieck’s book is that while it covers a wide range of ideas and movements, it covers them all somewhat shallowly.  Some historical background is given, but it is not particularly vivid.  Some schools are treated more deeply than others, but in general there is a lack of the kind of details which would help a wild jumble of philosophies like this to stick in the mind.  Griesedieck does a very good job of outlining the basic relationships and contrasts between the various ideas; but at only 170 pages of rather large print for such a broad topic, he has much room yet to fill before he could be called long-winded.

Another criticism which presents itself on careful reflection of the books contents is an apparent asymmetry in the presentation of the three traditions.  Griesedieck covers all of the Indian schools of thought, Buddhist and Hindu and otherwise from beginning to end, and likewise all of the Chinese schools whether Confucian or Legalist, Daoist or Zen.  In this way he captures the whole context of what was going on spiritually and intellectually in these regions, and each of the individual philosophies makes a bit more sense.  For Islam, however, he deals with just Islam.  There is no investigation of Judaism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, or any of the other Middle Eastern prophetic traditions to which the ideas and history of Islam are so closely tied.  Even within the Islamic tradition he practically ignores the entire range of Shia traditions (on the grounds that their followers today make up “only” 15% of the Muslim population), and races through the section on orthodoxy to get to the topics he perhaps feels are more important, the Islamo-Aristotelian philosophers and the Sufi mystics. 

No one can deny the importance of Ibn Sina and whirling dervishes to any broad study of Islamic thought, but to include them while omitting the four schools of jurisprudence and the various lines of Shia scholarship is questionable.  Griesedieck’s treatment of India and China is certainly more comprehensive.  The reasons for this asymmetry are unclear, but it probably stems from the professor’s less complete study of the Islamic tradition, and the relative poverty of Western research on the topic.

Finally, the presence of a number of typographical errors and a few clumsy phrases, indicating a lack of thorough editing, should be noted.  Perhaps in a custom-published textbook some oversights like this are inevitable.  In spite of its flaws, Three Eastern Traditions presents the student with a basically solid introduction to a range of fascinating ideas, and may spark further curiosity.

Title reviewed: Three Eastern Traditions: An Introduction to Asian Philosophy, 3rd Edition
Author: David Griesedieck
Date of publication: 2002
Availability: I'll sell you my copy at the end of the semester