In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gerando s "Histoire comparee des systemes de philosophie," Friedrich Schlegel s lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast s and Thadda Anselm Rixner s systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over pantheism. "

In an age of rising nationalism and expanding colonialism, the science of language has been intimately bound up with questions of immediate political concern. Taken together, the essays in this volume suggest that the emergence of language as an autonomous object of discourse was closely connected with the consolidation of new and sometimes competing forms of political community in the period following the French Revolution and the global spread of European power. This is the common thread running through the seven individual studies gathered here. By deliberately juxtaposing the European, academic configuration of modern linguistic research with the more practical, extra-European activities of missionaries, colonial officials, or East Asian literati, the authors explore the tensions between forms of linguistic knowledge generated in different geopolitical contexts, and suggest ways of thinking about the role of social science in the process of globalization.