The Question of the ‘Legitimacy’ of Chinese Philosophy
February 7, 2026 – 10:48 amWestern philosophers – or philosophers working in the Western tradition – whatever their interest in Chinese systems of thought may be, do not draw upon them for insights, or adopt any of their ideas and concepts to augment the standard repertoire. In particular, where Chinese Philosophy is taught, it is taught in a separate in which it is treated as different from real philosophy and more like an intellectual curiosity of history or geography.
Now, the same might be said to be true of all non-Western philosophies – of Indian or Islamic Philosophies for example. It might be said, in generalizing the statement above, that Western philosophers, whatever their interest in non-Western systems of thought, do not draw upon them for insights, or adopt any of their ideas and concepts to augment the standard repertoire. There too, where a non-Western philosophy is taught, it is taught in a separate class in which it is treated as different from real philosophy and more like an intellectual curiosity of history or geography. The situation for Chinese Philosophy is, however, rather more severe than that, for there are many who seem to believe that Chinese Philosophy, more than just being irrelevant to, incompatible with, or inferior to Western Philosophy, is not really philosophy at all. Comments may be made, for example, that it lacks the essential characteristics of a rational and dialectical domain of enquiry, that its concerns are not those of philosophers, or that it is merely, at best, a type of ‘Wisdom’ literature common enough in world cultures and not to be despised for that but not to be patronisingly over-valued either. In this way, the very legitimacy of the term ‘Chinese Philosophy’ is put in question.
Not surprisingly, this has irritated some Chinese scholars. One, for example, writes that
Western philosophical circles have for a long time refused to regard Chinese philosophy as a philosophy and have only studied it as a sort of thought or religion, precisely because they maintain that the questions of Western philosophy were not discussed in Chinese philosophy or not discussed in the Western manner. Regarding the questions of Western philosophy as the questions of “philosophy,” or understanding philosophy merely as a branch of learning concerned with exposition and justification (lun zheng zhixue), and thereupon determining whether or not a non-Western culture possesses a philosophy, is, in essence, a manifestation of Western cultural chauvinism. (Chen Lai (2005) ‘An Elementary Discussion of a Number of Questions Concerning “Chinese Philosophy”,’ Contemporary Chinese Thought, 37:1, 34-42, p. 40)
And it is also challenged by a number of Western students of the subject. As far back as 1996 BW van Norden, for example, wrote a letter to the APA (Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 70.2 (November 1996) pp 161-3) putting the case for including Chinese philosophy as part of the great conversation. His arguments there were cogent enough but with the continuing failure to adopt his recommendations he has become more inclined to simply attribute it to racism. Thus, in an interview for the ABC in 2019 he declared
“It definitely is due to racism,” he says. “When Europeans first encountered philosophy in China and India, they immediately recognised it as philosophical and were fascinated by it.” Beginning with Kant, he says, Western philosophers “started to assume that people in India and China were racially incapable of doing philosophy. “Kant’s claims about white racial superiority were accepted by generations of students, and Kant’s own disciples rewrote the philosophy textbooks.” (Racist attitudes ‘whitewashed’ modern philosophy. What can be done to change it? – ABC News)
The question cannot, however, be rejected simply in terms of anti-colonialism, white supremacy, Western chauvinism, etc. Those aren’t arguments or intellectual responses to the question: they are simply ways of saying ‘shut up.’ Yet the question remains pertinent, because it is obvious to most people that there are significant differences between the things that Chinese philosophers tend to do and say and the things that Western philosophers tend to do and say. Chinese and Western philosophies just feel different; but does this feeling signify anything more than that we are faced with an unfamiliar form of philosophy.
1. Reasons for Doubt?
Perhaps it does. Consider that until recently there was no such term as ‘philosophy’ in Chinese by which to refer to whatever it was that the Western philosophers were doing. It was necessary for a Japanese scholar (Nishi Amane) trained in the Netherlands to invent a term (tetsugaku) using the Chinese characters (??) that would be pronounced zhexue (lit. ‘wisdom study.’) This term was then applied to the pursuits of some figures in Chinese history who were then declared to be Chinese ‘philosophers.’ The term was so applied because the actions or interests of those persons were felt to be in some way similar to those of Western exemplars of the term ‘philosopher:’ I am not aware that any well-reasoned criteria were first provided for being a philosopher. The class of Chinese philosophers is therefore one that was discovered or invented after the fact and was not driven by any internal requirements of the Chinese society but, one might suspect, because Chinese self-respect demanded that they have something to set beside the Western class that was so highly regarded by the West. The members of that class were selected – whether by Westerners or by Chinese – as just the sorts of individuals whose membership looked plausible given the sorts of individuals who were allowed to be members of the Western class of ‘philosophers.’ The reason that the class of Chinese philosophers seems comparable to the class of Western philosophers is because it has been carefully constructed to do so.
a. Philosophy as a Cultural Form
This has consequences for the legitimacy of CP. Suppose that the class of Western philosophers emerges from the application of criteria (perhaps not explicitly formulated) and that amongst these criteria are certain functional (what they do) or procedural (how they do it) or relational (to whom they are reacting) restrictions on the activities of persons who thereby get to be assigned membership of the class, and suppose that philosophy as we know it is whatever the members of this class do in the appropriate way with appropriate others that entitles them to membership of this class. Then, because it is plausible that the class of Chinese philosophers is not defined by the appropriate criteria but only by a kind of surface similarity, it may equally follow that what the members of that class do does not count as philosophy.
b. Comparison to Science as a Cultural Form
Perhaps we could compare this to the question of whether there was a Chinese Science. Science, as we understand it, is a certain kind of pursuit of knowledge about the external world. The search for a pure criterial account of Science has proven chimerical, yet we can most of us recognise it when we see it and recognise its absence when we see that. One way to resolve that paradox might be to approach the question of the definition of Science from the other direction – just as was proposed for the definition of Philosophy above. It’s at least plausible that we may define the class of scientists in terms of what they do, how they do it, and with respect to whom they do it, just as we supposed could be the case for the class of philosophers. It’s at least plausible that we may then say that Science is whatever it is that scientists do when they do it in the appropriate way and while in the appropriate relations to appropriate others, just as we supposed could be the case for Philosophy.
Now suppose that we reviewed Chinese history to determine whether there was a Chinese Science. We might identify a number of individuals who did certain things, proposed certain theories, made certain discoveries, created certain inventions which looked a bit similar to the sorts of things done, theories proposed, discoveries made, inventions created by members of the class of Scientists. We might call them the Chinese scientists. Yet we would not then be justified in claiming that this demonstrated that there was a Chinese Science, because the criteria for selection of the Chinese scientists are not relevantly similar to the criteria for the class of Scientists. In fact, the choice of those criteria of selection of the Chinese scientists mistakes the ‘accidents’ of Science for its ‘essence’, and the effects of good Science for its causes.
c. Plausibility of this Comparison
In fact, it is much less controversial to claim that China did not have Science than it is to claim that China did not have Philosophy. This is probably because we recognise that Science was actually something that had to be developed: there was a time – quite recently – when there was no Science in the West. We find it much harder to imagine that Philosophy is like that: its origins are so far in our past that we imagine it to be a natural possession of all humans – but this imagining may well be incorrect. In any case it is accepted that whereas there is some overlap in the activities and achievements of Chinese individuals with the activities and achievements of Western scientists, this does not amount to there being a Chinese Science. There are Chinese technologists, craftsmen, inventors and alchemists (who may even apply trial and error to their endeavours,) speculators on the natural order, and so on, but no Chinese Science.
On the other hand, it might be argued, as Norden and Garfield do argue, that there is an essential difference between Philosophy and Science.
Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures. (Garfield, J. and B. W. van Norden, ‘If Philosophy Won’t Diversify …’ The Stone, 11/5/2016)
That final claim is true, but only because all contemporary Science derives from Western Science. The preceding claims are also perhaps true but relate to those parts of philosophy that we might think of as its contingent qualities. In Science they might be compared to the Arab Alhazen’s theory of optics which preceded European Science in rejecting the extromission theory of vision. If those particular Chinese philosophical items are worthwhile, they may be adopted by Modern Philosophy without qualms.
2. Reasonable Reactions to that Doubt
Of course, the easiest response in rebuttal is simply to say that, however we might have come to accept a category of activities under the label of philosophy, we now have a pretty good idea of the sorts of activities and concerns and methods that we are prepared to countenance as philosophical, and that by most criteria that might be reasonably proposed Chinese Philosophy cannot be denied legitimacy. The acid test for this response would be an attempt to come up with some list of criteria that would at the same time include all that we accept as Philosophy and exclude all that we are sure doesn’t count as Philosophy and then to apply that to what has been proposed as Chinese Philosophy to see whether it is accepted or not.
a. The Problem of Appropriate Criteria
This, in fact, would seem to be the obvious way to approach the question of inclusion of non-Western Philosophy into the class of Philosophy, but there are some obvious difficulties. In the first place, if we compare the vast range of things that have been accepted as Philosophy in the West, we might doubt that any set of criteria could be proposed which would properly mark out the class. There may be no good set of criteria which will include the work of Parmenides, Plato, Kripke, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Carnap while excluding all the speculative, irrational, mystical, nonsensical stuff that we don’t want in the class. The diversity just seems too great to be captured by a strict criterial approach. In such a case we might be forced to fall back on the idea – popular at one time – of a term whose extension is marked by a series of family resemblances or overlapping well-defined classes none of which cover all and only the required space. ‘Philosophy,’ could be a term like ‘game’ (in Wittgenstein’s example.) In that case, to determine whether Chinese Philosophy existed we would need to determine whether elements of Chinese Philosophy showed one or other of the identified family resemblances of Western Philosophy.
b. The Problem of Parochialism
But that very process still assumes the centrality and normativity of Western Philosophy, and it may not be a great advance to say that Chinese Philosophy only exists in so far as it has a sufficient family resemblance to Western Philosophy. This is exactly the chauvinism that people like van Norden decry. A more radical alternative might be to say that in the West there is a class of intellectuals we call Philosophers who do something we call Philosophy and that is a Western thing. In China there is a different class of intellectuals who do something else. We might accept that there is some overlap in some respects between these two classes and their doings without being at all inclined to say that the one is a subclass of the other, or that the set of Chinese intellectuals or their doings in the defined intersection could reasonably be discussed independently of their larger group. It has in fact been suggested that such a class of Chinese intellectuals is the class of ‘sages’or zhuzi (??) whose function is the pursuit of sagacity, sagery, sage-ness, or sagesse. The study of Chinese philosophy should be abandoned and the study of Chinese sagesse should replace it, because that is to study the undistorted form of the Chinese thought and to respect the Chinese understanding of their own civilisation.
Conclusion
I have no particular conclusion apart from a general belief that the study of a diversity of forms of thought is always valuable in itself – and probably instrumentally too. The question of the legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy might be a merely semantic except for the (unnecessary, socially contingent) effect that it has on the tendency to encourage the serious study of Chinese forms of thought. I have spent more time here presenting a plausible case against this legitimacy mostly because students of Chinese Philosophy would otherwise not often encounter one: those who dismiss Chinese Philosophy are not much concerned to attack it any more than Physicists spend much time attacking astrology, and those who are in support of it are more concerned to argue for it than to give the arguments against it.
Tags: Chinese