Abstract

It was once common to consider Greece the ‘cradle of philosophy.’ This view of ancient Greek thought took such deep root in our consciousness that it seemed permissible to make judgments that effectively ‘excommunicated’ non-Western cultures from philosophy and to allege, in the vein of Diogenes Laertius, that philosophy began with the Greeks or, like Immanuel Kant, to assert that “Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient.”1 Even those who shared Hegel’s view and recognized that “the so-called Oriental philosophy was the first to appear in terms of time” nonetheless deemed it out of place in any discussion of the history of philosophy. By the late twentieth ..