Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy

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Why were Chinese and Indian ways of thinking excluded from European philosophy in early modern times? This is a study of what happened to the European understanding of China and India between the 17th century and the late 18th-century. In 1600 Otto van Heurn published Barbaricae philosophiae antiquitatum introducing, for the first time in a history of philosophy, Indian philosophical thought. But a century and a half later Jakob Brucker’s De Philosophia Exotica rejected the methods of Asian philosophers outright. After Brucker, Chinese and Indian thinkers were excluded from the histories of philosophy, ignored and disparaged by Kantism and Hegelism.