ABSTRACT
One cannot understand and appreciate the activities and fruits of recent Chinese philosophy without understanding something of how Chinese philosophy was studied in the west.
Chinese philosophy has been known to the west since the seventeenth century, when Jesuits went to China and communicated with intellectuals and scholars there. The Jesuits wished to convert Chinese intellectuals to Christianity, but they also gained a knowledge of Chinese philosophy, specifically Confucianism. They discussed what they had learned about the Confucian classics with their own people and also with other scholars in Europe. In the mid-seventeenth century Confucius the Philosopher was published; this book aroused intense interest in Chinese learning among European scholars. Notably, Leibniz mentioned this book and also came to correspond with the Jesuit Father Buvet in China; and through him Leibniz came to know the hexagrams of the Yijing (Book of Changes) and the binary system of numbers in the Yijing. Throughout the next century many European philosophers in Germany, France, and England commented on Chinese philosophy.
