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Author: Jane Geaney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438488955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 454
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Book Description
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."
Author: Jane Geaney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438488955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 454
Get Book Here
Book Description
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."
Author: Michael J. Puett
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478034X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
As early as the Warring States period in China (fourth through third centuries B.C.), debates arose concerning how and under what circumstances new institutions could be formed and legitimated. But the debates quickly encompassed more than just legitimation. Larger issues came to the fore: Can a sage innovate? If so, under what conditions? Where did human culture originally come from? Was it created by human sages? Is it therefore an artificial fabrication, or was it based in part on natural patterns? Is it possible for new sages to emerge who could create something better? This book studies these debates from the Warring States period to the early Han (second century b.c.), analyzing the texts in detail and tracing the historical consequences of the various positions that emerged. It also examines the time's conflicting narratives about the origin of the state and how these narratives and ideas were manipulated for ideological purposes during the formation of the first empires. While tracing debates over the question of innovation in early China, the author engages such questions as the prevailing notions concerning artifice and creation. This is of special importance because early China is often described as a civilization that assumed continuity between nature and culture, and hence had no notion of culture as a fabrication, no notion that the sages did anything other than imitate the natural world. The author concludes that such views were not assumptions at all. The ideas that human culture is merely part of the natural world, and that true sages never created anything but instead replicated natural patterns arose at a certain moment, then came to prominence only at the end of a lengthy debate.
Author: Jane Geaney
Publisher: Suny Chinese Philosophy and Cu
ISBN: 9781438488943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jane Geaney
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438468628
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
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, Geaney's 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 Confucius's proposal to rectify names (zhengming).
Author: Craig Benjamin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107114969
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.
Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791441138
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 558
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Book Description
This book traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the foundation of imperial authority. Its central theme is the emergence of this body of writings as the textual double of the state, and of the text-based sage as the double of the ruler. The book examines the full range of writings employed in early China, such as divinatory records, written communications with ancestors, government documents, the collective writings of philosophical and textual traditions, speeches attributed to historical figures, chronicles, verse anthologies, commentaries, and encyclopedic compendia. Lewis shows how these writings served to administer populations, control officials, form new social groups, invent new models of authority, and create an artificial language whose master generated power and whose graphs became potent objects.
Author: Uffe Bergeton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429797850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
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.
Author: Geoffrey Sampson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527555224
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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Book Description
The Chinese “Book of Odes” (Shijing) is a collection of 305 poems dating from between 1000 and 600 B.C., and, thus, is one of the earliest literary works in any living language. It offers vignettes of life in an almost unimaginably remote society; many of the poems have great charm, for instance, some are authored by women about their love problems. (For such early literature it is remarkable how many poems are by women.) Over the centuries the content of the Odes has become obscured by developments in the Chinese language, by prudishness and pomposity on the part of commentators, and because earlier translators were often more interested in philological technicalities than in the poems’ human significance. This book cuts through these obscurities to present a new translation into straightforward, down-to-earth English. The Odes are the earliest rhyming poetry in any language, and they make use of alliteration and assonance to achieve their poetic effects, but changes in the sounds of modern Chinese have destroyed all this speech-music. This book restores it: alongside the author’s translations, it spells the Chinese wording out in the sounds used by the original poets—something which has only recently become possible through advances in the reconstruction of Old Chinese speech.
Author: Yiu-ming Fung
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030290336
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
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.
Author: Jerry H. Bentley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521761628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.
