TOWARDAS A COMMON PHILOSOPHY OF ASIA

ŞENGÜL ÇELİK

ABSTRACT

Although Western philosophy in the intellectual sense carries throughout its history
eastern characteristics which are laid down by a long standing tradition that has
established a systematic inventory of principles, the way this tradition of philosophy
handles its problems and offers solutions to them is reserved to its own worldview.
This is indeed an epistemological requirement; nay maybe a necessity based on our
human system of knowledge. That is why intellectually as well as scientifically we can,
if at all, go beyond the framework of our worldview only in a very limited distance.
In the same way we still discuss whether eastern traditions developed a philosophical
tradition as the Western tradition. We nevertheless observe in history that the Asian
communities did develop great civilizations in the past. If we approach this issue with a
method of observing the living space with the phenomenological approach we can find
out that eastern traditions also have a very rich philosophical content. A philosophical
tradition in the Western sense develops fully by laying down its primary principles
derived from maximum common points imbedded within multi-cultural character of
a tradition called “Eastern”. For this reason we need to first identify our Eastern origins
and ascertain exactly those elements that make our tradition “Asian”. It is the purpose
of this study to defend the thesis that what makes Asia Asia are those elements that are
imbedded within our living space. Taking my departure from this idea I shall try to
show that Asian philosophy has a phenomenological structure which is nested in our
daily life space. Therefore, we need to develop phenomenologically the principles of our
philosophy from such a way of living space.