The exclusion of Asia from the formation of a modern canon of philosophy: Debates in German philosophy, 1790--1830.

摘要

At the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, the question of whether Asian philosophies should be included in the general history of philosophy became a matter of renewed debate. A broad campaign began within academic philosophy to reform the discipline of the history of philosophy. Kantian philosophers formulated and put into practice the method of a priori constructivism in the writing of the history of philosophy. According to this principle, the history of philosophy was to be organized under a ruling definition of philosophy, which also established criteria for what qualifies as philosophy. Kantian philosophy itself was to provide this definition and principles by which the history of philosophy could now be reorganized. In the histories of philosophy written in the early nineteenth century by the Kantians, the Orient is excluded since Oriental thought did not fit within their definition of philosophy. They were among the first historians of philosophy to begin their histories with the Greeks. Even when confronted with growing source-based information on the intellectual heritage of the Indians, a historian of philosophy such as Hegel remained chronically ambivalent as regards India's place in the history of philosophy. Hegel's exclusion of Asia from the history of philosophy was a defensive maneuver against the polemical attacks of the neo-Pietist theologian and Orientalist August Tholuck, who compared his philosophy to certain speculative systems of Muslim theologians and more generally classed his philosophy as "conceptual pantheism" along with the systems of the Eleatics, Spinoza, and Fichte. In the end, Hegel was able to put down this threat by putting Oriental thought in its place: as the lowest or earliest stage in the development of human consciousness.