Hi Salam,
Thank you for the response. By the “East” I’m here using the term to denote what most americans typically mean by the term, primarily nations like Japan, China, India, and the like. It’s not a good term to use because it lacks specificity, but the colloquial usage of the word is usually understood by an american audience as the areas I was thinking about, hence why I went with that.
When thinking or talking bout Arab nations most Americans instead use the term “middle-east”, and I made sure to avoid using it because Islamic philosophy has had a profound impact on western philosophy (we have muslim philosophers to thank for the Kalam Cosmological Argument for example), especially in the fields of philosophy of religion. There has been far more influence from Islamic philosophy than that of nations primarily subscribing to Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, and Hindu religions, and it’s this lack of influence I was referring to.
Regarding claims like “we don’t say God exists, because anything that exists is limited”, I’d want to quibble since, for example, the Anselmian Ontological argument aims to establish the existence of a maximally great being (i.e. God) who does indeed have certain limitations (God would not commit evil, and he cannot instantiate logically impossible states of affairs, such as creating a square circle), but those limitations do not at all detract from his greatness or perfection, so I’m not sure that the claim “anything that exists is limited, therefore we don’t want to say God exists in that way” is very necessary in order to defend a conception of him as the greatest possible being. That aside, thank you for teaching me something new, I didn’t know that was a part of the Islamic tradition!
