Many of us who teach the works of the European Enlightenment live outside Europe, for example, in North America or Australia. We tend to view our societies as extensions of European or Western or Christian civilization. In the United States before the 20th century, universities primarily hired Christian theologians to teach philosophy.

Later, when American universities became more secular, philosophy departments were among the last to hire professors of Jewish ancestry. This was not because those who entered the profession were more anti-Semitic than their peers in other fields, but instead because Jews were regarded in the early 20th century as non-Western and therefore unfit to teach Western philosophy. The Harvard philosopher William Hocking is alleged to have said that “the Jewish mind could not properly interpret and teach the philosophy and history of Western Christian civilization.”

After World War II, when European Jews were reimagined as European, and therefore of the West, social barriers to Jews broke down in most areas of American life, including academic philosophy. Although some of the new arrivals attempted to incorporate Jewish thinkers into the American curriculum, those who did were pushed to the margins of the discipline. This is partly because philosophy itself became more secular, and its practitioners focused more on the epistemology and implications of Western science. Philosophers who engaged with Christian thought or the philosophy of religion were similarly marginalized in this period.

Research and teaching in the history of philosophy has become sidelined, too. Those who champion the importance and relevance of philosophy’s history to the field mostly defend the traditional Western canon, although there are some new efforts to incorporate the works and ideas of non-European and also women philosophers, and to teach the works of figures like Kant in ways that expose his social biases.

With the resurgence of old hatreds in the 21st century, philosophers are challenged to think about the ways we trace the history of our discipline and teach our major figures, and whether our professional habits and pieties have been shaped by religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry. For example, why not emphasize how philosophy emerged from schools of thought around the world? In the fields of history and literature, introductory courses that focus on European studies are being replaced by courses in world history and comparative literature.

There has not been a similar widespread movement to rethink the standard introduction to philosophy in terms of world philosophy. There are philosophers who contend that such projects inappropriately politicize our truth-seeking endeavors, but, as some philosophers of science have shown, objective truth involves the convergence of multiple observations and perspectives. Moreover, the anti-Semitic theories of Hume, Voltaire and Kant show that philosophy has rarely, if ever, been insulated from politics.

Laurie Shrage is a professor of philosophy at Florida International University.

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.