1 Approaching East Asian and Intercultural Philosophy In contrast to its pre-modem interpretation in the West,still evident in early modem philosophers such as G.W.Leibniz and Christian Wolff,the conception of philosophy in Western modemity has been typically restricted and deformed in ethnocentric and ideological definitions as an intrinsically Western and occidental tradition that contradicts its own ostensibly universal aspirations) This questionable understanding of philosophy as a mythical unified self-unfolding transmission from ancient Greece to Western modernity developed in conjunction with the growth of Western colonialism and racial theorizing in the 18th-and 19th-centufies.2 This narrow conceptual horizon of the possibilities of and for philosophy shaped the asymmetrical encounter between Eastern and Western discourses in which non-Western discourses are of philosophical value—if they are considered of value at all given their prevalent exclusion and marginalization—in relation to Western philosophical discourse.3