An Ethiopian Descartes? A French Zera Yacob? Comparison, connection and the prospects for a global history of philosophy

A growing consensus holds that the history of philosophy must move beyond its traditional parochialism, yet there has been less clarity about what non-Eurocentric histories that do not reproduce inherited exclusions might look like. One influential alternative is ‘comparative philosophy’, which David Wong characterises as ‘bringing together’ traditions that developed in ‘relative isolation’ and are defined along “regional and cultural lines”. I argue that this framework faces three persistent difficulties – speculation, incommensurability, and geopolitical categorisation – illustrating these problems through the frequently-invoked comparison between René Descartes and Zera Yacob. I argue that these difficulties not only obscure what is philosophically distinctive about each thinker but also hinder our ability to place both within a unified, global narrative of seventeenth-century philosophy. I propose instead a ‘connected history of philosophy’: an approach that centres on tracing concrete material and linguistic connections between thinkers and intellectual milieux. This approach, I suggest, provides a more historically grounded basis for comparison, illuminates the philosophical parallels between Descartes and Zera Yacob, and enables both to be located within the emerging global networks of seventeenth-century intellectual exchange. I conclude by outlining how connected histories can lay foundations for a genuinely global account of early modern philosophy.