The rise of the West has often been associated, by Westerners, with the possession of a rationality not available to others. That notion has taken two main forms. The classical humanist tradition regards itself as heir to Greek rationality, especially its invention of ‘logic’. Another line of enquiry concentrates on a later period, the Renaissance, the Reformation or more usually the Enlightenment, and looks to special forms of rationality as enabling the West to take the lead in the economic and intellectual developments seen as associated with the modern world. Weber writes of this as the rationality of world-mastery and commentators have called it a specifically ‘western rationality’. His aim was to ‘comprehend the distinctiveness of the West and especially modern Western rationalism and to explain it genetically’. He posed the question why ‘did not… the economic development there [in China and India] enter upon that path of rationalization which is peculiar to the Occident’. Others have seen it as embedded in the growth of secularism, the end of magic, the beginning of experimental science and the Age of Reason. Either way the change emerges in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries CE rather than two millennia previously.

I want to challenge both these scenarios from several angles. Firstly, I discuss briefly the evidence that rationality in a wide sense, as well as in its specialist form, logic, are attributes of all cultures, taking some general as well as some culturally specific forms.