Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy

"Why were Chinese and Indian ways of thinking excluded from European philosophy in early modern times? This is a study of what happened to the European understanding of China and India between the 17th century and the late 18th-century. In 1600 Otto van Heurn published Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum introducing, for the first time in a history of philosophy, Indian philosophical thought. But a century and a half later Jakob Brucker's De Philosophia Exotica rejected the methods of Asian philosophers outright. After Brucker, Chinese and Indian thinkers were excluded from the histories of philosophy, ignored and disparaged by Kantism and Hegelism. Investigating the description of these two Asian civilizations during a century and a half of histories of philosophy, this work accounts for the change of historiographical paradigms, from Neoplatonic philosophia perennis and Spinozistic atheism to German Eclecticism. Uncovering the reasons for inserting or excluding Chinese and Indian ways of thinking within the field of Philosophy in early modern times, it reveals the origin of the Eurocentric understanding of Philosophy as a Greek-European prerogative. By highlighting how this narrowing and exclusion of non-Western ways of thought was a result of ignorance and personal prejudice this work provides a new way of thinking about the place of Asian philosophical traditions in Western ways of thinking"--