Hi!

One quick observation I'd make is that it is surprisingly rare for historians of philosophy to speak of specifically European philosophy. Nor is this a uniquely contemporary development: Medievalists have pretty much always been interested in Islamic thinkers like Averoess (who lived in the Almohad Caliphate that spanned parts of Iberia as well as North Africa) and Avicenna (a Persian), for example, while Ancient philosophy in the Western canon has always been concerned primarily with the Greco-Roman (read: Mediterranean) world. So, thinkers from North Africa and the Middle East, at least, are traditionally included in the Western philosophical canon. In fact, you insightfully highlight the first period at which the canon of Western philosophy does become thoroughly Eurocentric.

Now, the traditional canon of early modern philosophy consists (roughly) of the following thinkers: Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. So, we have four Brits, a Frenchman, an ethnically Jewish Dutchman, and two Germans. So, a good first step would be to consider whether these thinkers evince any awareness of non-European thought.

Now, there is a sense in which the answer is trivially yes, owing to the influence of earlier non-Europeans upon the Western canon. To take perhaps the most obvious example, St. Augustine (an ethnically Berber clergyman in the late Roman Empire from North Africa) looms large in Descartes. I take it, however, that you are not especially interested in this sort of thing, so let’s leave it aside.

Less fruitfully, one can detect the influence of early travelogs on thinkers like Locke and Hume, though this is all very much half-baked, superficial, and very often inaccurate. Hume, for example, claims in a famous example that an "Indian prince" refused to believe Dutch claims that water in Holland became so cold that it solidified, with the thought being that the prince's lack of experience of a Northern climate colored his intuitions regarding the possibility of water becoming solid. Whatever one makes of Hume's philosophical point, there is obviously no meaningful philosophical engagement with the East here.

It must also be said that this superficial engagement with realities outside Europe was by no means always as harmless as this example from Hume might suggest. For example, the uncolonized Americas were often held out as an exemplar of the state of nature. This might look like just another superficial example being pressed into service to help get an abstract philosophical point across. The truth, however, was often more sinister. For one thing, to say that the Americas exist in state of nature straightforwardly implied that Native Americans were uncivilized in an important sense. After all, the entire notion of the state of nature is of a state without government (and, indeed, all the associated trappings of civilization more broadly). In the interest of brevity, I’ll large let you put two and two together regarding the use such a judgment could be put to by colonial powers (who could thus even claim scholarly/philosophical authority for their policies). But one especially important implication should be mentioned, namely that Native Americans had no right to the land on which they lived. On one extreme, one might claim, in a Hobbesian vien, that no such rights could possibly exist in the state of nature. Alternatively, one might claim that Native Americans lacked land rights in virtue of not having "improved" the land in right, civilized ways. On this last point, obviously, the Lockean theory of property rights is especially important, and could be used to justify treating land in the Americas as unowned, virgin soil ripe to be claimed by planting crops, building settlements, and so on. Locke himself was, in fact, personally and intimately involved in the British colonial project, even helping to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina - a fairly sordid document that, among other things, specified that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his slaves”, though in fairness it is a good question how much authorial input Locke actually had on the document. In any case, the broader point is that while we often do not think of these theories in their colonial context, that was very much the context in which they were written and initially applied.

Note, of course, that this does not mean a sophisticated Lockean (i.e., contemporary exponents of broadly Lockean views like A. John Simmons or Robert Nozick) is doomed to echo these same colonial positions. Arguably, all that is needed is a more comprehensive understanding of how one can “mix one’s labor” with the land, one that does not simply reduce the notion to the existence of institutions recognized by early modern Europeans. In my experience, this is the basic position of pretty much every contemporary Lockean, that the basic emphasis and articulation of the natural rights of human beings is largely correct, but that the way it was interpreted and used in the context of colonialism was abhorrent. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering how such philosophical views were used at the time, even if (indeed, perhaps especially if) we are sympathetic to the underlying philosophical thrust when stripped of these historical trappings, as in the case of the Lockean theory of rights.

Anyway, lets look elsewhere in the traditional canon. Perhaps the most intriguing case is Spinoza, as scholars have long noted significant parallels between his thought and certain philosophical doctrines originating in India. Still, to my knowledge at least, no one has established a causal connection between the two, and in any case it seems undeniable that Spinoza's jumping off point is Cartesian metaphysics. For example, he arrives at the view that there is and must be only one substance, God, from considerations pertaining to the Cartesian theory of substance. To oversimplify, Spinoza points out that consistently applying Descartes’s own ontological standards imply the Spinozistic position, namely substance monism. So, it seems what we have here is best understood as a case of independently arriving at similar and significant philosophical positions to some Indian thinkers via a different route.

Of course, the traditional canon does not exhaust early modern philosophy! Recently, scholars have been increasingly interested in expanding the canon of early modern philosophy, both in the interest of correcting historical injustices relating to the formation of the canon (etcetera) and in the interest of greater historical accuracy. By and large, however, this movement has not incorporated folks from outside Europe. Actually, it has often focused on two groups: wealthy European women and those traditionally thought of as scientists rather than philosophers. As examples of the first class, there has been an increasing amount of work on thinkers like Margaret Cavendish, Lady Mary Shepherd, and Emilie Du Chatelet. As an example of the latter, we could cite the body of work that has built up around Newton, Descartes's sceintific work, and Emilie Du Chatelet again. Recently, some have been pushing for more engagement with thinkers who have traditionally been thought of as more religious than philosophical thinkers, though in practice this generally means European men and women working in, say, the Catholic mystical tradition (e.g., St. Teresa of Avila).

There are, however, two important exceptions that spring to mind. Both involve men who were brought to Europe as part of the slave trade. The first was Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703-1759), an African who was brought as a slave to Germany as child. His biography is thoroughly fascinating, but for our purposes here suffice it to say that he was raised by members of the German nobility, educated at German universities, and became a professor of philosophy at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His writings have recently been made available via the Oxford University Press in a parallel translations (his original Latin on one side, the English translation on the other) and are paradigm cases of early modern rationalism. This isn’t the place to go into too many philosophical details, but suffice it say that having a very firm grasp of both Cartesianism and Leibniz will help tremendously in understanding Amo’s thought.

The other exception is Ottobah Cugoano (c. 1757-1791). Cugoano was born in West Africa, taken as a slave as child, and eventually found himself in England where he was educated and freed. Cugoano’s work sort of straddles the line between traditional philosophy and abolitionist tracts (though, frankly, that contrast is often overdrawn - abolitionist arguments are often paradigmatic cases of argumentation in moral philosophy, applied ethics, and so on). His magnum opus is Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), which is pretty much what it says on the tin: an extended argument, interspersed with more emotionally charged anecdotes and language, against the slave trade. Again, this isn’t the place to go into too many details, but Cugoano’s work draws on Christianity, classical liberalism, and personal experience in demanding that the English public and government take action to end the slave trade.

Anyway, I’ve ranted quite long enough! Hopefully this at least gives a general impression towards answering your question, though I’d be glad to hear if anyone else can pick up some of the threads I’m unable to weave together: I fear, for example, that I don’t know of any real engagement with East Asian philosophy or thinkers, though that may well just be a function of my own interests.

Cheers, WV