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Comparative Philosophy

In the twentieth century Western philosophers set out to compare the traditions. Paul Masson-Oursel’s thesis La philosophie comparée (Paris 1923), whose English edition of 1926 is dedicated “to my master M. Lévy Bruhl”, found only three branches of humanity that had developed en constant parallélisme au cours d’environ trois millénaires, in constant parallel over some three millennia: l’Europe, l’Inde et la Chine, Europe, India and China. He named the starting point: L’Europe s’impose comme point de repère, attendu que nous ne saurions comprendre autrui que relativement à nous, même si nous apprenons à ne pas juger autrui par nous-mêmes, Europe imposes itself as the point of reference, since we cannot understand others except in relation to ourselves, even if we learn not to judge others by ourselves. His method was “analogy”, “a likeness of relations” that “in no sense implies assimilation of different terms”, and he refused to cut China and India into the Western ancient, medieval and modern, since they “never cut up into sections the continuous thread of their traditions” (Comparative Philosophy, English edition of 1926, part of it translated by V. C. C. Collum).

Karl Jaspers placed the beginnings side by side in time. In what he called the Axial Period, “between 800 and 200 B.C.”, “Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being … India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism” (The Origin and Goal of History, tr. Bullock, 1953).

In 1939 the first East–West Philosophers’ Conference met in Honolulu, initiated by Charles A. Moore, Wing-tsit Chan and Gregg Sinclair, “to explore the significance of Eastern ways of thinking as a complement to Western thought”; others followed from 1949 to 2024. In his preface to the proceedings, Philosophy—East and West (1944), Moore gave the aim: “The underlying purpose was to determine the possibility of a world philosophy through a synthesis of the ideas and ideals of East and West”. Its “constant theme” was that “neither Orient nor Occident is philosophically self-sufficient, each lacking that total perspective which is characteristic of philosophy”. The “East” consisted “primarily of India, China, and Japan”, and “no Indian scholar was available”. The journal Philosophy East and West was founded in 1951.