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From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China - Hardcover
From Philosophy to Philology is an indispensable work on the intellectual life of China’s literati in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there was not a scientific revolution in China, there was an intellectual one. The shock of the Manchu conquest and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 led to a rejection of the moral self-cultivation that dominated intellectual life under the Ming. China’s scholars, particularly in the Yangzi River Basin, sought to restore China’s greatness by recapturing the wisdom of the ancients from the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) and the Former Han dynasty (202 B.C.–9 A.D.), much as Renaissance Europe rediscovered the Greeks and Romans. But in China scholars faced the daunting task of determining which of many editions of the Classics were the true originals and which were forged additions of later centuries.
The ensuing search for authentic texts led to the founding of academies and libraries, the compiling of bibliographies, the rise of printing of editions of the Classics and Histories and commentaries on their components, the study of ancient inscriptions, and a two-hundred-year effort to discover and discard forged texts. In the process rigorous standards of scholarly training were adopted, and scholarship became a full-time profession distinct from gentry farmers or imperial officials.
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About the Author:
Benjamin A. Elman is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned his Ph.D. in Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, 1980. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the National Malaria Eradication Project, 1968-1971, and was director of UCLA’s Center for Chinese Studies, 1997–1999.
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His other works include Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 1990) and A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2000). He is a coeditor of Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900 (University of California Press, 1994), and of Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Pres-ent in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2001).
"... Elman has offered us a remarkable view of scholarship in eighteenth-century China. This is a very important book." -- The Journal of Asian History
"Mr. Elman places his eighteenth-century thinkers in a richly evoked setting." -- Jonathan Spence in the New York Review
"Never before have ... filaments of intellectual interaction been as painstakingly and lucidly traced." -- The Journal of Asian Studies
"Mr. Elman places his eighteenth-century thinkers in a richly evoked setting." -- Jonathan Spence in the New York Review
"Never before have ... filaments of intellectual interaction been as painstakingly and lucidly traced." -- The Journal of Asian Studies
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUniv of California Los Angeles
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 188319105X
- ISBN 13 9781883191054
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages364
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