Introduction

In recent years, the call to diversify and globalize the study of philosophy has resulted in an interest in achieving greater geographical and cultural inclusivity in many fields of academic philosophy. While this has brought different philosophical traditions together in the space of shared conversation, the question of how diversity and inclusion translate into genuine intercultural understanding is one that requires urgent examination. A major challenge involves getting a handle on what kind of thinking and understanding we can recognize in traditions that are unfamiliar to us. And, this, in turn, calls for an interrogation of what we consider thinking and understanding to be in the first place, and how they are connected to the forms of articulation that we identify as properly philosophical.

Many past efforts to engage different philosophical traditions under the guise of comparative philosophy betray the deep prejudices embedded in the methods and categories that have emerged in conjunction with the rise of the modern sciences. This has resulted in a certain bifurcation in approaches to the study of non-Western philosophical traditions. In the case of early China, it has, on the one hand, led to a narrow identification of philosophy as corresponding to modes of thought and explanation that resemble (or, as has been more likely the case, made to resemble) familiar templates found in the Western philosophical tradition, and, on the other, to the idea that thinking in the Chinese tradition operates in a way that is not so much rational as it is intuitive, emotional or strategic.1 Underlying what appear to be widely diverging pronouncements about what philosophical thinking in traditional China amounts to is a common core assumption: namely, that modern Western philosophical practices of rational investigation simply represent rational investigation itself.

A major obstacle to the intercultural study of philosophical thinking, then, is arguably our ways of thinking about thinking itself, and how such thinking relates to the cultural forms we investigate to find evidence of it. The aim of this chapter is to highlight this problem and offer some much-needed perspective on cross-cultural philosophical methodology by engaging with Wittgensteinian approaches to intercultural understanding.