Eastern philosophy generally refers to philosophical systems found in India, China, Japan and other Asian countries. It often also includes Persian philosophy (mostly relating to the Zoroastrian religion). The term is used in contrast with western philosophy, which is centered traditionally around Europe and more recently the United States as well.

Many have argued that the distinction between Eastern and Western schools of philosophy is arbitrary and purely geographic and to certain extent, Eurocentric [Focussed on Europe and the Europeans] It crosses over three distinct philosophical traditions, Indian, Chinese and Persian philosophy which are as distinct from each other as they are from Western philosophy. It could be argued that the idea of some distinct Eastern Philosophy as opposed to Western Philosophy is simplistic to the point of absurd inaccuracy. It may for example make more sense to include Islamic philosophy within the Western tradition, as it was influenced by Greek philosophy and Hellenistic philosophy, and in turn had a strong influence on Jewish philosophy, Christian philosophy and Western philosophy. The artificial distinction between Eastern and Western philosophy does not take into account the tremendous amount of interaction within Eurasian philosophical traditions, and that the distinction is more misleading than enlightening.

For example, Indian and Western schools of thought, with their robust mind-body conceptual dualism, share consequent tendencies to subjective idealism or dualism. Formally, they share the rudiments of Western "folk psychology": a sentential psychology and semantics, for example, belief and (propositional) knowledge, subject-predicate grammar (and subject-object metaphysics) truth and falsity, and inference. These concepts underwrote the emergence (or perhaps spread) of logic in Greece and India (In contrast to pre-Buddhist China). Other noticeable similarities include structural features of related concepts of time, space, object hood and causation all concepts hard to isolate within ancient Chinese conceptual space.