Abstract

The paper gives a narrative of the reception of Western philosophical ideas into Thailand from the middle part of the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The first wave of the reception occurred in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, when the Thai King at that time began to gather foreign advisers around himself and sent out diplomatic missions to western countries, resulting in contact, for the first time, between indigenous and western scientific, religious, and possibly philosophical ideas. However, this first wave was cut short, only to start again in the middle part of the nineteenth century, this time for good. Thailand received western philosophy as part of the package of western education, and the process produced a number of western-trained philosophers who wrote original works. After World War II, philosophy became professionalized and became a regular part of university curricula. More Thai philosophers went abroad to study and started to make original contributions to the field. The neoliberal autonomization of universities brought a wholesale change in how professional philosophers work, and it remains to be seen how this turns out in the near future.