From Theology's Handmaid to the Science of Sciences: Western Philosophy's Transformations on its Way to China

Abstract

This article analyzes the various ways in which philosophy transformed in the West from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, thereby making it appealing to Chinese scholars at the end of this period. In a first step, it presents the type of philosophy that was introduced to China by the Jesuits and, in a second step, the various transformations philosophy underwent until its reintroduction in the nineteenth century. The study thereby problematizes and challenges the assumption that philosophy was important always or by default in the West and therefore no justification was needed for its introduction to and importance in Asia. Philosophy, of course, has never been an immutable category changing in content alone; the term itself has had different referents and thus its own intellectual history. Moreover, in none of periods examined here was there a single type of philosophy; my focus is therefore on the kinds of philosophy – or rather, the kinds of perceptions of philosophy – that ended up in China in the context of philosophy’s transformations in the West.