Download or read book The Emergence of Word Meaning in Early China written by Jane Geaney and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-07-01 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text."
Download or read book Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy of Logic written by Yiu-ming Fung and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a companion to logical thought and logical thinking in China with a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It introduces the basic ideas and theories of Chinese thought in a comprehensive and analytical way. It covers thoughts in ancient, pre-modern and modern China from a historical point of view. It deals with topics in logical (including logico-philosophical) concepts and theories rooted in China, Indian and Western Logic transplanted to China, and the development of logical studies in contemporary China and other Chinese communities. The term “philosophy of logic” or “logico-philosophical thought” is used in this book to represent “logical thought” in a broad sense which includes thinking on logical concepts, modes of reasoning, and linguistic ideas related to logic and philosophical logic. Unique in its approach, the book uses Western logical theories and philosophy of language, Chinese philology, and history of ideas to deal with the basic ideas and major problems in logical thought and logical thinking in China. In doing so, it advances the understanding of the lost tradition in Chinese philosophical studies.
Download or read book Having a Word with Angus Graham written by Carine Defoort and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical reflections on the work of Angus Charles Graham, renowned Western scholar of Chinese philosophy and sinology. This volume engages with the works and ideas of Angus Charles Graham (1919–1991), one of the most prominent Western scholars of Chinese philosophy, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of his passing. Over a professional career of more than thirty years, Angus Graham produced an impressive amount of scholarship on a wide array of topics, ranging from Chinese grammar and philology to poetry and philosophy. His combination of rigorous scholarship and philosophical originality has continued to inspire scholars to tackle related research topics, and in so doing, has required of them a response to his views. This book illustrates the range of scholarship still elaborating upon, disagreeing with, and reacting to Graham’s work on Chinese thought, philosophy, philology, and translation. Carine Defoort is Professor of Sinology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She is the author of The Pheasant Cap Master (He guan zi): A Rhetorical Reading, also published by SUNY Press, and the coeditor (with Nicolas Standaert) of The Mozi as an Evolving Text: Different Voices in Early Chinese Thought. Roger T. Ames is Humanities Chair Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i. His many books include Confucian Cultures of Authority (coedited with Peter D. Hershock) and Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and Philosophical Reflections (coedited with Hsingyuan Tsao), both also published by SUNY Press.
Download or read book Sensing China written by Shengqing Wu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first collection of studies of the senses and sensory experiences in China, filling a gap in sensory research while offering new approaches to Chinese Studies. Bringing together 12 chapters by literary scholars and historians, this book critically interrogates the deeply rooted meanings that the senses have coded in Chinese culture and society. Built on an exploration of the sensorium in early Chinese thought and late imperial literature, this book reveals the sensory manifestations of societal change and cultural transformation in China from the nineteenth century to the present day. It features in-depth examinations of a variety of concepts, representations, and practices, including aural and visual paradigms in ancient Chinese texts; odours in Ming-Qing literature and Republican Shanghai; the tactility of kissing and the sonic culture of community singing in the Republican era; the socialist sensorium in art, propaganda, memory, and embodied experiences; and contemporary-era multisensory cultural practices. Engaging with the exciting "sensory turn," this original work makes a unique contribution to the world history of the senses, and will be a valuable resource to scholars and students of Chinese Literature, History, Cultural Studies, and Media.
Download or read book Language as Bodily Practice in Early China written by Jane Geaney and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a language crisis. Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaneys interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confuciuss proposal to rectify names (zhengming).
Download or read book A Way of Life written by Judith Farquhar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A short and thoughtful introduction to traditional Chinese medicine that looks beyond the conventional boundaries of Western modernism and biomedical science Traditional Chinese medicine is often viewed as mystical or superstitious, with outcomes requiring naïve faith. Judith Farquhar, drawing on her hard-won knowledge of social, intellectual, and clinical worlds in today’s China, here offers a concise and nuanced treatment that addresses enduring and troublesome ontological, epistemological, and ethical questions. In this work, which is based on her 2017 Terry Lectures “Reality, Reason, and Action In and Beyond Chinese Medicine,” she considers how the modern, rationalized, and scientific field of traditional Chinese medicine constructs its very real objects (bodies, symptoms, drugs), how experts think through and sort out pathology and health (yinyang, right qi/wrong qi, stasis, flow), and how contemporary doctors act responsibly to “seek out the root” of bodily disorder. Through this refined investigation, East-West contrasts collapse, and systematic Chinese medicine, no longer a mystery or a pseudo-science, can become a philosophical ally and a rich resource for a more capacious science.
Download or read book Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association written by American Philosophical Association and published by . This book was released on 2022-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of members in v. 1-
Download or read book Philosophy on Bamboo written by Dirk Meyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-11-14 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarship on early Chinese thought has long tended to treat texts as mere repositories of ideas rather than as meaningful objects in their own right. Not only does this approach present an idealised account of China’s intellectual past, but it also imposes artificial boundaries between textual and philosophical traditions. As the first study to treat text as a cultural phenomenon during the Warring States period, this book demonstrates the interplay among the material conditions of text and manuscript culture, writing, and thought. Through close readings of philosophical texts excavated at Guōdiàn, it analyses crucial strategies of meaning construction and casts light on the ways in which different communities used texts to philosophical ends. Meyer thus establishes new understandings of the correlation between ideas, their material carrier, and the production of meaning in early China.
Download or read book Chinese Lexicography written by Heming Yong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-14 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first account in English of the history of Chinese lexicography traces its development from 1046 BC to AD 1911. It describes the origins and development of primers, thesauruses, dictionaries of dialects, characters, and technical terms, rhyming dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, and encyclopaedic dictionaries.
Download or read book The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China written by Uffe Bergeton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a conceptual history of the emergence of civilizational consciousness in early China. Focusing on how words are used in pre-Qín (before 221 BCE) texts to construct identities and negotiate relationships between a 'civilised self' and 'uncivilised others', it provides a re-examination of the origins and development of these ideas. By adopting a novel approach to determining when civilizational consciousness emerged in pre-Qín China, this book analyzes this question in ways that establish a fresh hermeneutical dialogue between Chinese and modern European understandings of 'civilization.' Whereas previous studies have used archaeological data to place its origin somewhere between 3000 BCE and 1000 BCE, this book explores changes in word meanings in texts from the pre-Qín period to reject this view. Instead, this book dates the emergence of civilizational consciousness in China to around 2,500 years ago. In the process, new chronologies of the coining of Old Chinese terms such as ‘customs,’ ‘barbarians,’ and ‘the Great ones,’ are proposed, which challenge anachronistic assumptions about these terms in earlier studies. Examining important Chinese classics, such as the Analects, the Mencius and the Mòzi, as well as key historical periods and figures in the context of the concept of ‘civilization,’ this book will useful to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history.
Download or read book Ways with Words written by Pauline Yu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-09-19 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an interdisciplinary collection of articles analyzing seven classic premodern Chinese texts that are provided in translation.
Download or read book The World of Thought in Ancient China written by Benjamin Isadore Schwartz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The center of this prodigious work of scholarship is a fresh examination of the range of Chinese culture thought during the formative period of Chinese culture. Benjamin Schwartz looks at the surviving texts of this period with a particular focus on the range of diversity to be found in them. While emphasizing the problematic and complex nature of this thought he also considers views which stress the unity of Chinese culture. Attention is accorded to pre-Confucian texts, to the evolution of early Confucianism, to Mo-Tzu, to the Taoists the legalists, the Ying-Yang school, the five classics as well as to intellectual issues which cut across the conventional classification of schools. The main focus is on the high cultural texts, but Mr. Schwartz also explores the question of the relationship of these texts to the vast realm of popular culture.
Download or read book Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books of Fate and Popular Culture in Early China is a comprehensive introduction to the manuscripts known as daybooks, examples of which have been found in Warring States, Qin, and Han tombs (453 BCE–220 CE). Their main content concerns hemerology, or “knowledge of good and bad days.” Daybooks reveal the place of hemerology in daily life and are invaluable sources for the study of popular culture. Eleven scholars have contributed chapters examining the daybooks from different perspectives, detailing their significance as manuscript-objects intended for everyday use and showing their connection to almanacs still popular in Chinese communities today as well as to hemerological literature in medieval Europe and ancient Babylon. Contributors include: Marianne Bujard, László Sándor Chardonnens, Christopher Cullen, Donald Harper, Marc Kalinowski, Li Ling, Liu Lexian, Alasdair Livingstone, Richard Smith, Alain Thote, and Yan Changgui.
Download or read book The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy written by Curie Virág and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the genealogy of early Chinese conceptions of emotions, as part of a broader inquiry into evolving conceptions of self, cosmos and the political order. It seeks to explain what was at stake in early philosophical debates over emotions and why the mainstream conception of emotions became authoritative.
Download or read book Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy written by Bo Mou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology explores how Chinese and Western philosophies could jointly and constructively contribute to a common philosophical enterprise. Philosophers with in-depth knowledge of both traditions present a variety of distinct comparative approaches, offering a refined introduction to the further reaches of Chinese philosophy in the comparative context, especially regarding its three major constituents - Confucianism, philosophical Daoism, and the Yi-Jing philosophy. This book examines various issues concerning philosophical methodology, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic, and investigates both the living-spring source of Chinese philosophy and its contemporary implications and development through contemporary resources. The balanced coverage, accessible content, and breadth of approaches presented in this anthology make it a valuable resource for students of Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, and other related courses.
Download or read book Literary Information in China written by Bruce Rusk and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Information” has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world that became central only in the digital age. In this book, leading experts turn to China’s textual tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment. Contributors trace the organization of literary information across China’s three millennia of history, examining the forms and practices of information management that have evolved alongside the increasing scale and complexity of textual production. They reimagine literary history as information processing, detailing the many kinds of storage, encoding, sorting, and transmission that constitute and feed back into China’s long and ever-growing cultural tradition. The volume features state-of-the-field essays on all major forms of literary information management, from graphs to internet literature, and from commentaries to literary museums and archives. By shifting focus from individual works and their authors to the informatic schemata of literature, it identifies three scales of information management—the word, the document, and the collection—and surveys the forms that operate at each level, such as the dictionary, the anthology, and the library. Literary Information in China is a groundbreaking work that provides a systematic and innovative reassessment of literary history with implications that extend beyond the particular Chinese context, revealing how informatic practices shape literary tradition.
Download or read book A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 998 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture is the first publication, in any language, that is dedicated to the study of Chinese epistolary literature and culture in its entirety, from the early empire to the twentieth century. The volume includes twenty-five essays dedicated to a broad spectrum of topics from postal transmission to letter calligraphy, epistolary networks to genre questions. It introduces dozens of letters, often the first translations into English, and thus makes epistolary history palpable in all its vitality and diversity: letters written by men and women from all walks of life to friends and lovers, princes and kings, scholars and monks, seniors and juniors, family members and neighbors, potential patrons, newspaper editors, and many more. With contributions by: Pablo Ariel Blitstein, R. Joe Cutter, Alexei Ditter, Ronald Egan, Imre Galambos, Natascha Gentz, Enno Giele, Natasha Heller, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Jie Li, Y. Edmund Lien, Bonnie S. McDougall, Amy McNair, David Pattinson, Zeb Raft, Antje Richter, Anna M. Shields, Suyoung Son, Janet Theiss, Xiaofei Tian, Lik Hang Tsui, Matthew Wells, Ellen Widmer, and Suzanne E. Wright.
