Jazyk, písmo a čínská filosofie

• Authors: Zádrapa, Lukáš

Title variants

EN

Language, writing and Chinese philosophy

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

Even those historians of Chinese thought, who are capable of both masterly analyses and great synthetic surveys of pre-modern Chinese philosophy, such an Anne Cheng, author of The history of Chinese thought, mostly remain in the grip of enduring stereotypes about Chinese language and Chinese letters. This is true despite the fact that old Chinese linguistics has progressed in the last 50 years at an unforeseen rate, and practically no experts on that language fail to take these advances seriously. At issue, above all, are the immensely popular analyses of characters, which authors treat as the path to uncovering the etymology of a given concept under research. Emancipation from written characters is, it would seem, a basic precondition for a better understanding of language, including the lexicon of philosophical concepts. This article aims to give a broad acccount of the inadequacy of character-etymology and, in contrast to this method, to describe which direction we should take if we wish to understand the conceptual apparatus of ancient Chinese thinkers.

Keywords

EN

language; letters; Chinese philosophy; Chinese characters; analyses of characters; etymology; morphology of old Chinese

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filosofický časopis (Philosophical Journal)
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 62
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 583-596
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Zádrapa, Lukáš

• Filosofický časopis, redakce, Filosofický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic