Abstract

There is a serious danger involved in taking the idea of the "philosophical tradition" too narrowly. Many readers of this journal will be familiar with the dangers of cultural exclusion—in particular with the long-standing tendency of many Western philosophers to reject out of hand the legitimacy of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophy, on the grounds that these Asian modes of thinking do not appear to address the same problems that Western philosophers are interested in, in the same kind of way that Western philosophers prefer to approach these problems. This culturally myopic view of what is entitled to be called "philosophy" is deplorable, and needs to be resisted, but it probably helps to remember in this...