Excavated Chinese manuscripts - Prof. Dirk Meyer

This is an interview with Prof. Dirk Meyer of Oxford University, conducted at Tsinghua University in Beijing, at the end of a two-day conference on ancient Chinese manuscripts. Prof. Meyer talked about his research on Chinese philosophical manuscripts, his distrust of transmitted texts, and the inadequate understanding of the quantity of Chinese manuscripts on the part of Western scholars. He also introduced the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures, which he co-founded with colleagues at Queens College Oxford. This is a centre that brings together scholars working on different text traditions, realizing that they are facing similar problems despite the linguistic differences.

[candicelittle]

I find it hard to believe that anyone would question that there is such a thing as 'chinese philosophy'. We've all heard of Tao (or Dao) from an incredible range of popular cinema media ie. Last Airbender and Star wars, even small western children have 'The Toa of Pooh' which introduces the idea at kindergarten level. Whoever you spoke to must have been living under a rock!

[robertalkemade]

From a new be of everything Chinese, this is fascinating and much appreciated

[zbarczy]

Nice topic, but a bit long-winded and dry, at least to me. Peppering it with some concrete samples, examples, artifacts (if in the public domain or legally available) would have been a welcome format, but oh well, at least we got an expert speaking. General problem of academics, btw, is the inability to express themselves in a concise, business-like manner, summarizing their thoughts in a hierarchical, easy-to-understand structure with short, succinct sentences instead of a romantic whirlpool of thought-tsunamis, but listeners to this kind of content (and source) are already accustomed to this phenomenon. Thanks Imre for shedding the light via Prof. Meyer to the existence of the heap of hitherto "un-excavated" Chinese manuscripts in the philosophy domain.

PS: Just some food for thought: the very word in English "philosophy" is coming from Greek (philo-sophia, the "love of wisdom", or rather "the fancying of knowledge", literally), so it is somewhat understandable that Western scholars live in their aforementioned "we know everything better" bubble, however ridiculous such an attitude is from the perspective of anyone coming from a civilization/culture OLDER than the entire West's 2000+ years of total existence (and there are heaps and bounds of them, like Egypt, Phoenicia, Sumeria, Persia, China, etc). There were periods in human history when newcomer cultures preserved the self-destroyed cultures of others (like the 1000 years of Islamic science period, for instance), but generally speaking, with all our "new inventions", we can safely assume that civilizations, particularly those with the longest continuous existence (like China) tried it, thought of it, had it before, so it is more logical to assume that certainly they had the philo-sophy, just like the West did. It is absurd, illogical, and indeed arrogant to assume otherwise. A healthy dose of humility would indeed be welcome, but oh well, the expectations, based on history, are set very low. Cheers anyway and thanks for the pioneering work!