What's in a name? "Philosophy" in non-European traditions

I've had a couple of conversations recently in which people challenged the use of "philosophy" in contexts outside of the European tradition, like pre-modern India and China.* Basically the worry is that if these traditions didn't have the word "philosophy," or a word that can directly be translated with "philosophy," then it is illegitimate, and maybe culturally imperialist, to impose it on them. Rather we should talk more loosely about "intellectual traditions" or "thought," or something like that (at least I guess this would be the alternative). Obviously I don't agree with this; and since I have encountered the point quite a few times over the past years, I thought it might make sense to explain why.

1. You don't need to have a word for something to do it: trees grow without having a word for growing, and people all over the world experience Schadenfreude without knowing German, or having a word of their own that means the same thing. So more needs to be said to show that the worry is a genuine problem; we clearly can't just have a blanket rule against using words to describe activities that wouldn't be used by those who engage in the activities.

2. Even within the history of European philosophy, we use non-immanent terms of analysis all the time. For example we might speak of intensional vs extensional distinctions, or dualism and physicalism, when talking about ancient philosophy. True, one needs to do this with some care, but it isn't obviously problematic and indeed often seems illuminating, even unavoidable. So again, anyone who has the worry should explain the difference between these cases, or be just as rigorous in never using contemporary terminology to discuss historical philosophy.

3. One can and should be open to importing terms in the other direction. For instance, having looked at Confucianism one may see that filial piety (xiao) and ritual propriety (li) are fundamental terms of philosophical analysis in that context; one could then use these terms to clarify one's understanding of European philosophy. I actually wrote something recently about ritual in ancient Greek philosophy that was inspired by having looked at the topic in Chinese philosophy for the podcast, and I might describe this piece as an inquiry into "ritual propriety" in the Greek context. (Cf point 5 below.)

4. As anyone who has been following the podcast will know, there is a lot of material in ancient Indian and Chinese literature that is just obviously philosophy. Or to put it another way, if it isn't philosophy it's hard to know what else to call it, and refusing to use the word seems like mere pretense. There are plenty of examples one could give, but to offer just two, consider the Mohist arguments for impartial care (jian ai), which are startlingly similar to utilitarianism, and the Nyaya tradition with its discussion of the structure and criteria for explanatory arguments, which looks very similar in intent to Aristotelian syllogistic theory (albeit reaching a different set of rules for reasoning). It is extremely implausible to claim that these things do not count as "philosophy" despite being eerily similar to core examples of philosophy from the European tradition.

5. On the other hand, there is plenty of material in these other traditions that challenges and stretches our conception of what philosophy is and can be, what topics it covers and what sorts of consideration it could take seriously. The examples given under point 3 above are a good example; another example would be the debate over oral philosophy in Africa. To my mind it is question-begging and reductive to assume in advance that none of this could possibly be "philosophy," merely on the grounds that the people involved didn't have this word. This seems to me lazy, and worse, to be a way of shielding ourselves from the prospect that people doing philosophy in the European tradition might benefit from broadening their horizons. 

With this last point, we go beyond a defense of speaking about "philosophy" in non-European contexts to give a positive reason for doing so. By taking seriously the idea that philosophy has existed in these other contexts, we can expand our conception of philosophy itself. This is how I would answer the worry about cultural imperialism. That does seem to be a valid concern. But, while it is legitimate to talk about "philosophy" in pre-modern India, China, Africa, and other places and times, it is not legitimate to use the specific features of European philosophy as a litmus test for deciding what does and doesn't count. Far from being imperialist, the global approach has the potential to de-center European philosophy, showing it to be just one of many examples of a phenomenon that has existed around the world through history - probably wherever and whenever there have been humans, in fact, though that's another question! 

*The Islamic world can be set aside here since they did inherit the word "philosophy" from Greek, and thus spoke of falsafa. There's more to say about this but I won't get into it here.