Chinese Semiotic Thoughts In The Pre Imperial Age

This book examines practices on the relationship between sign and meaning in the Pre-Imperial period of China from the semiotics perspective. Although the Chinese civilization did not develop a comprehensive semiotics system in that period, they are highly semiotic in many ways. The thinking and application of signs of Chinese people can be found in many classics, such as The Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Tao De Jing and Zhuangzi. This book begins its study by re-examining the semiotic thoughts contained in The Book of Changes and inquiries into the thoughts of the major philosophers of different schools. It provides insights into the findings of these philosophers concerning the relationship between sign and meaning. In particular, it concentrates on how the prosperity of the various contending semiotic thoughts complemented each other in forming a sign system. In addition, the book also emphasizes the wholeness and associativity of observing things and studying relevant signs of Chinese people. As the first monograph in any language to systematically summarize Chinese semiotic thought in the Pre-Imperial period, this book helps promote understanding of the traditional Chinese culture and mindset.

The book is a systematic inquiry into how Chinese philosophers understood signs during the Pre-Imperial Age, which is better known among the Chinese as the Pre-Qin period. Described by Karl Jaspers as the Axial Age, it is the most important period in the development of Chinese philosophy. It is in this period that Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi , as well as other distinguished scholars, emerged and made their voices heard. This boom in Chinese philosophy is comparable to that in ancient Greece at the time of Plato and Aristotle. Among the Hundred Schools, Mohism and the School of Names helped to lay the foundation for the study of semiotics in ancient China. Their work has long been a rich source of thought for later scholars. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that to master the semiotic thought of Pre-Imperial China is to understand the roots of traditional Chinese semiotics. Methodologically, the present book tries to contextualise the historical approaches to semiotics and to understand them as part of the effort to establish order during periods of disturbance. In this way, semiotic thought can be understood in its historical and social context. This historical analysis and cultural interpretation will demonstrate that the philosophers of the Pre-Imperial Age attached great importance to signs because they believed that by reconstructing the order of signs they could restore order to society. The present book is the only one to pursue a systematic inquiry into, and analysis of, the development of semiotic thought in Pre-Imperial China and is viewed as an important step forward for the reconstruction of a Chinese traditional semiotics.

This book examines practices on the relationship between sign and meaning in the Pre-Imperial period of China from the semiotics perspective. Although the Chinese civilization did not develop a comprehensive semiotics system in that period, they are highly semiotic in many ways. The thinking and application of signs of Chinese people can be found in many classics, such as The Book of Changes, The Analects of Confucius, Tao De Jing and Zhuangzi. This book begins its study by re-examining the semiotic thoughts contained in The Book of Changes and inquiries into the thoughts of the major philosophers of different schools. It provides insights into the findings of these philosophers concerning the relationship between sign and meaning. In particular, it concentrates on how the prosperity of the various contending semiotic thoughts complemented each other in forming a sign system. In addition, the book also emphasizes the wholeness and associativity of observing things and studying relevant signs of Chinese people. As the first monograph in any language to systematically summarize Chinese semiotic thought in the Pre-Imperial period, this book helps promote understanding of the traditional Chinese culture and mindset.

This book attempts to solve the question whether semiotics is a methodology as is generally held and if the studies of meaning and the mind can shed light on a series of metaphysical issues, so that the edifice of semiotics could be erected on a philosophical ground. It proposes that a philosophical semiotics is, by necessity, a semiotic phenomenology about the construction of the “world of meaning” by signs, and any discussion about semiotics has to proceed around two core issues: meaning and the mind. This book particularly exemplifies the semiotic connections in various schools of traditional Chinese philosophies. In the “Pre-Imperial Age” (before BC 300), there emerged an abundance of semiotic thinking in China, from Yijing the first sign system that aims to explain everything in the world, to the Namists’s subtle argument about the form of meaning, from the Yin-Yang/five elements of the Han, to the “Things are non-existent while mind is non-non-existent” principle of the Vijñāptimātratāsiddhi School of Buddhism in the Tang, and from the Sudden Revelation of Chan Buddhism to the “Nothing outside the mind” endorsed by the Mindist Confucianism in the Ming. The mighty trend of philosophical heritage provides rich food to our understanding of the form of meaning.

Studying Chinese law from a linguistic and communicative perspective, this book examines meaning and language in Chinese law. It investigates key notions and concepts of law, the rule of law, and rights and their evolutionary meanings. It examines the linguistic usage and textual features in Chinese legal texts and legal translation, and probes the lawmaking process and the Constitution as speech act and communicative action. Taking a cross-cultural approach, the book applies major Western philosophical thought to Chinese law, in particular the ideas concerning language and communication by such major thinkers as Peirce, Whorf, Gadamer, Habermas, Austin and Searle. The focus of the study is contemporary People's Republic of China; however, the study also traces and links the inherited and introduced cultural and linguistic values and configurations that provide the context in which modern Chinese law operates.

Academic Paper from the year 2013 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Chinese / China, grade: 1,3, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, course: Late Imperial China - Culture, Politics, History, language: English, abstract: “Early modernity” is a concept of ambiguity in historiographic scholarship and has been a topic for discussion for several decades. Søren Clausen discussed the term in regard to China in his paper, Early Modern China – A Preliminary Postmortem. For Clausen, the search for a terminology describing an “early modern China” emerged from the urge to incorporate China into a world history, whose importance he stresses in his introductory sentence: “A world that is increasingly becoming ‘one world’ needs a world history” . What he also did was to recap the influence other historians had on the discussion during the 1980s and 90s, which are partially also addressed in the paper.

Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing follows the development of a minor tradition in French literature where metropolitan authors traveling abroad demonstrate their awareness of the ethical conundrums of representing world peoples. During the colonial–modern era, currents of anthropological thought and representational practice are identifiable throughout society, and across literature, the arts, and the sciences. Collectively, they can be theorized as belonging to a dispositif, the anthropological dispositif. The modernization of anthropology serves as an ambivalent interlocutor for the realizations of the writers studied in this book about the difficulties of describing cultural realities that lie largely outside their ken. Anthropology motivates new literary representational strategies that are, alternatively, in keeping with scientific mandates or operate against them. Forty images are analyzed alongside literary works. A postcolonial chapter shows how the ethical awareness of the colonial–modern authors studied have impacted minority self-representation in contemporary France.

"Mapping Meanings," a broad-ranged introduction to China's intellectual entry into the family of nations, guides the reader into the late Qing encounter with Western, at the same time connecting convincingly to the broader question of the mobility of knowledge.