Abstract
Contemporary philosophy has become thoroughly disciplined. The volume of publications classified under philosophy during the last century no doubt far exceeds that of previous centuries, but, as a byproduct of professionalization, the range of genres in which philosophical inquiry is practiced, or, more precisely, the range of genres which licensed practitioners consider as legitimate forms of philosophical writing, has shrunk. Academic and public philosophers mostly write monographs and journal articles, and craft titles that presume the irrelevance of form to content. The pre-twentieth-century history of philosophical writing, in contrast, is marked by the diversity of genres, the creation of new forms, and changes in their prevalence, uses, and interpretation. Just as European philosophers wrote dialogues, sentences, commentaries, epitomes, questions, guides, confessions, essays, meditations, letters, novels, or critiques, their Chinese counterparts cast thoughts on fundamental questions about life, human nature, socio-political formations, and the cosmos in recorded sayings, conversations, debates, expositions, explanations, commentaries, lectures, questions, responses, instructions, letters, poems, dictionaries, notebooks, encyclopedias, or anthologies.
The history of philosophy has also been a history of genres; this history of philosophical genres has been deliberate.
Adapted from Berel Lang (Lang 1988: 194)
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Notes
- 1.
I use “Neo-Confucianism” in the broad sense of the terms, ideas, and institutions established and debated by East Asian thinkers since the eleventh century. “Learning of the Way” I define more narrowly as a tradition of moral philosophy taking on the form of a movement in the late twelfth century, transmitted through a narrowly defined genealogical line of transmitters of the way (dao), and captured in a new set of canonical texts. For a more elaborate discussion of the meaning of and historiography on these terms, see De Weerdt (2007: 25–46).
- 2.
Chen Chun’s dates are controversial; see Satō (1989: 49 n.1).
- 3.
My discussion is limited to monographic genres and does not cover other types of pedagogical texts such as expositions (lun 論), elaborations (xiang 詳), discussions (bian 辨), clarifications (jie 解), responses (da 答), lectures (jiangyi 講義), or essays (fati 發題 ) found in the collected works of these authors.
- 4.
Some of my findings on Chen Chun and Zhen Dexiu have already presented in Competition over Content. I thank the Harvard University Asia Center for the permission to use these findings.
- 5.
I am largely adopting Wing-tsit Chan’s translation (Chan 1986: 45).
- 6.
As the Siku quanshu editors pointed out, this attribution is questionable given that it cannot be corroborated in Zhen’s other work or in contemporary reference works. The work was, however, already associated with Zhen by 1242, because a combined edition of The Classic on the Mind and The Classic on Government can be dated to that year (Zhen 1983c: tiyao; de Bary 1981: 89).
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De Weerdt, H. (2010). Neo-Confucian Philosophy and Genre: The Philosophical Writings of Chen Chun and Zhen Dexiu. In: Makeham, J. (eds) Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2930-0_11
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