| Titre | « Philosophy » : what did the Greeks invent and is it relevant to China ? | |
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| Auteur | Geoffrey Lloyd | |
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Revue | Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident |
| Numéro | no 27, 2005 Y a-t-il une philosophie chinoise ? Un état de la question | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | IV. Deux regards extérieurs |
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| Page | 149-159 | |
| Résumé anglais |
When the Greeks first coined the term philosophia and cognates
(philosophein, philosophos) in the fifth century BCE, they used them for different types of activity or modes of intellectual curiosity. Those terms were, moreover, certainly not always used with approval and the activities in question were certainly not carried on in institutions of higher education. First Plato and then Aristotle appropriated the terms for their - each rather different - concepts of the highest human activity, but neither among their contemporaries nor among later Greeks was there any consensus on either the definition or the contents of philosophy. The tension or rivalry between different interpretations of 'philosophy' continued, and continues in Europe to this day, as the different foci of interests of what passes as philosophy in different institutions in the UK and the USA, as philosophie in France, as Philosophie in Germany eloquently exhibit.
The primary task of the historian of Chinese thought is not to see whether the later terms coined or introduced to express European concepts can be applied to classical Chinese studies. Rather it is to examine how the Chinese thinkers themselves construed what they were doing - using their, actors', categories, not later, observers', ones. The question of whether any given later term can or should be applied to their work is, then, a secondary one, though it may be a politically sensitive one. The answer will in any case depend on which mode of philosophising is in mind. But the Greek materials should be reassuring in one respect, namely that they show that, from the outset, no one had a monopoly of what " philosophy " should be. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2005_num_27_27_1203 |
