ABSTRACT
I once worked as a member of the program committee for the 22nd World Congress of Philosophy held in Seoul from July 30 to August 5, 2008. The WCP is a global meeting of philosophers that takes place every five years. In one of the program committee meetings, we were discussing the issue of locating East Asian philosophical thoughts in terms of Western philosophical frameworks and problematics. A French philosopher insisted that philosophy was distinctively of Greek origin. What he meant was that there were a way of thought, a system of knowledge, and a method or logic of thinking that defined philosophy as was understood in the general intellectual community of the world and they were distinctively of Greek origin. The Asian intellectual tradition could not be categorised as ‘philosophy’ by his standard. It was, he thought, not so much philosophy as ideas and thoughts. Western philosophy has configured the general agenda and main problems of philosophy as an intellectual discipline, and the philosophical questions it has generated have been considered to be universal in the sense that human reason in general must seek to find answers. Some people may agree with this idea and some may not. It may take an entire book to process the question of what philosophy is and to make comparisons among various philosophical traditions in terms of their methods, worldviews, and norms of rationality. But, even if we accept the proposition that philosophy is a discipline that uniquely emerged from Western culture, it is ironic that even most Westerners have little idea of what philosophy is. Philosophy seems to them too abstruse, recondite and remote, even when it deals with the problems we face in the real world. Today, philosophy seems to be losing its appeal as an intellectual discipline that remains meaningful and beneficial to the world and our lives.
