The Siren and the Sage Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China

by Shankman, Steven; Durrant, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780304706402
• ISBN10: 030470640X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This book is a comparative study of what the most influential writers of ancient China & ancient Greece thought it meant to have knowledge. It surveys select works of poetry, history & philosophy from the period of roughly the 8th through the 2nd century B.C.E., examining these foundational texts & showing how their ideas still influence the majority of the world's population today.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(1)
Preamble	1	(3)
Previous comparative studies of ancient Greece and China	4	(4)
The sage	8	(4)
The siren	12	(7)
Part I Intimations of intentionality: the Classic of Poetry and the Odyssey	19	(60)
Poetry and the experience of participation	24	(1)
Participation in family and in society	25	(23)
China	25	(8)
Greece	33	(15)
Intentionality and personal responsibility	35	(1)
Fathers: Odysseus' testing of Laertes	35	(10)
Mothers: Antikleia and Odysseus in the underworld	45	(3)
Participation in the natural world	48	(31)
Nature and nature imagery in the Classic of Poetry	49	(11)
A simile from the Odyssey and Classic of Poetry 23: views of nature	60	(1)
Nature and nature imagery in the Odyssey: between meadows	61	(3)
Nature and the feminine: the Odyssey	64	(2)
Nature and the feminine: the Classic of Poetry	66	(13)
Summary and conclusion	69	(10)
Part II Before and after philosophy: Thucydides and Sima Qian	79	(78)
History and tradition	81	(20)
Sima Qian and his predecessors	81	(10)
Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides	91	(10)
The structures of written history	101	(15)
Records of the Historian	101	(9)
The tragic structure of Thucydides' report	110	(6)
The tempest of participation: Sima Qian's portrayal of his own era	116	(21)
Thucydides' tragic quest for objectivity and the historian's irrepressible ``I''	137	(20)
Summary and conclusion	145	(12)
Part III The philosopher, the sage, and the experience of participation	157	(68)
Contexts for the emergence of the sage and the philosopher	159	(11)
The emergence of the sage	159	(5)
The emergence of the philosopher	164	(6)
From poetry to philosophy	170	(8)
Confucius and the Classic of Poetry	170	(5)
The reduction of poetry to depicting the ``ten thousand things'' and Plato's critique	175	(3)
The sage, the philosopher, and the recovery of the participatory dimension	178	(47)
Confucius and participation in society	178	(5)
Laozi's return to the Dao	183	(6)
Zhuangzi's participationist response to Huizi's intentionalism	189	(4)
Plato's Symposium, Euripides' Bacchae, and noetic participation	193	(32)
Summary and conclusion	212	(13)
Afterwords	225	(9)
Bibliography	234	(15)
Index	249