Atheism, wisdom, enlightened Empire and irrationality. The changing influence of Jesuits' China on European histories of philosophy (1600-1744)

What we want to contend in this speech is that the exclusion from the history of philosophy of every non-Greek and extra-European civilisation past and present was already implied in the precise time of the insertion of China and India as ancient and contemporary philosophic civilisations in the early 17th and 18th century histories of philosophy. This essay is a short investigation about the insertion of Chinese thought within the histories of philosophy published in Europe between the 17th and the first half of the 18th century. About the historiographical paradigms , we shall come across with three of them: 1. The inclusion within a “perennial philosophy” or “prisca theologia”; 2. The Sceptical paradigm of the “Oriental Spinozism” (i.e. Bayle) and 3. The German eclectic paradigm.