1 Provincializing Philosophy of Religions, and Beyond 1 Sonam Kachru Sonam Kachru is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at The University of Virginia. Specializing in the history of philosophy and Buddhist philosophy, he is currently working on two monographs: one on the philosopher Vasubandhu, and another on the Buddhist poet Asvaghosa. (For a Symposium on Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto, Syndicate, 8.14.17: https://syndicate.network/symposia/philosophy/philosophy-and-the-study-of-religions/) I want to thank Kevin Schilbrack for his wonderful Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto. It is with a relief hard to communicate that I read the following therein: “I agree with Richard King: ‘engagement with the intellectual traditions of the non-western world has become the single most important task for the philosopher in an age of globalization.’” (Schilbrack 2014, p. 12) 2 Quite. So when William Wood effectively inquires of Kevin Schilbrack just what is wrong with the state of affairs described by the latter as insular (Burley 2015, pp. 250-51), I want to say “nothing, so long as one sees that one also has reasons and the means to be less insular.” 3 There is all the difference between being parochially insulated and seeing that one is so; and being accountable to the decision to remain parochial, it seems to me, will require still more of one. 4 1 I would like to thank Eric Dickman for inviting my response to the book, and for reading out a précis of this response at the SECSOR 2015 meeting when hospitalization made my presence impractical. 2 Schilbrack is here discussing the first task of “the full task” of the Philosophy of Religion. 3 This paraphrase of William Wood’s question is derived from his contribution to the review essay roundtable in Burley 2015. It turns out, however, that Wood focuses on a very narrow methodological variety of insulation, a focus on belief and reasons rather than practices, and a the disciplinary insulation Schilbrack is concerned to address; Wood does not appear to be concerned with the broader issue of bald ethnocentrism (twinned, I believe, with the issue of disciplinary isolation) which I shall be concerned to highlight believing it to be the most urgent context for the salience of Schilbrack’s proposals. 4 As Bryan W. Van Norden and Jay L. Garfield in Norden and Garfield 2016 put it in the title of their op- ed: “If philosophy won’t diversify, let’s call it what it is.” Some of the anxiety in responses to these kinds of critiques (which to my mind valuably state the obvious) is already anticipated by Schilbrack when he says that “the proposal is not for a change in the work of any individual philosopher of religion, but rather