In one of my posts on Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy, I pointed out that the phrase 'western philosophy' was barely used before 1880, trailing the increasingly popular use of 'western civilization' with a lag of a few decades. I argued that Russell probably played a non-trivial role contributing to the popularity of the very idea of western philosophy. In context Russell clearly signaled some familiarity with existing literature (especially through his interest in Albert Schweitzer's writings) in comparative philosophy, in which 'western philosophy' was compared with the philosophies to be found in other great 'civilizations,' especially China and India. This use of 'western philosophy' is also (recall) presupposed by the critics of the 'eurocentric' professional practices or the 'western' canon.

Naturally, this made me curious about the pre-history of the concept of 'western philosophy' in the comparative sense assumed by (say) Russell. Obviously, this rules out all the kinds of uses of 'western philosophy' where 'western' picks out something different than the comparative, civilizational sense presupposed by Russell. As I noted before, Ibn Tufayl, for example, writing in medieval Islamic Spain, understands himself as a western philosopher to be contrasted with philosophers (e.g. Al-Farabi, Ibn Sinna, etc.) of the Islamic orient some of whose texts are not circulating in the west. One can easily imagine that when the Roman empire was divided between western and eastern parts, a Roman philosopher working in, say, Rome, could refer to the members of Alexandrian school as those eastern philosophers.

There is a further issue lurking here in that when Russell is writing 'philosophy' is many respects a considerably narrower project than in the ancient world, where in the remit of philosophy there is both what we would call 'science' and what we would call 'wisdom literature' or 'self-help literature.' Philosophy in Russell's sense is only increasingly clearly visible from, say, the late Renaissance onward. So, this made me narrow the search space a bit.

The first use of ‘western philosophy’ that I am familiar with -- but this is an invitation to my learned readers to do better -- to mark an implied contrast between the speculative thought of Europe and that of a distinct contrasting civilization occurs in volume 4 of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (L'Espion Turc), published in the early 1690s. The exact author of this volume is unclear. The book is surrounded by mystery and mystification. The work is clearly a model for Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, one of the foundational texts of the Enlightenment.

The context of that use of ‘western philosophy’ is a bit complicated to convey succinctly in part because the letter itself pretends to be an "endless meditation," (mocking Descartes) but within this meditative structure it occurs in the midst of a ridiculing digression by the ‘turkish spy’ on the misguided faith in the divine origin of holy texts by various peoples.* That's an explosive topic then much debated in the wake of Spinoza’s suggestion that the Hebrew Bible as we have it was pretty much the society shaping work of Ezra at the re-founding of Israel as a political entity. He (the ‘spy’) goes on to offer a heterodox argument to the effect that whatever else is true, something, be it God or a Vacuum, must exist eternally. And at that point the ‘spy’ introduces a scholastic distinction immanently, in part for comic effect, with terminology used by ‘western philosophers.’

Part of the comedy is that such terminology must have felt already partially dated to the learned audiences of the Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy because a new, modernizing anti-scholastic philosophy (familiar to us through names like Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes) had swept away the Scholastic kind. Of course, part of the art and pretense of the Letters is that they are written just during the ascent of this modernizing anti-scholastic philosophy, but that its ultimate victory cannot be taken for granted.

Part of the larger agenda of the Letters is to defamiliarize and thereby problematize moral and political assumptions common in 'the West.' So, in a rhetorical sense the framework of the Letters is resolutely comparative, presupposing familiarity with and taking on the natural perspective of the philosophy and mores of Turkey and Islamic civilization more generally. But, of course, in practice that is primarily a ruse. So, the home civilization presupposed between the letter writer (the spy) and his audience is itself a construct as imagined from a perspective that at least rhetorically and perhaps conceptually understands itself as western.