ORGANIZERS:

Paul Goldin, University of Pennsylvania
Yuri Pines, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

 

Early Chinese intellectual history is dominated by political argumentation. Questions such as the nature of the monarch's authority, proper relations between an intellectual and the throne, state-society relations and the like stand at the center of a vast majority of texts produced before and in the immediate aftermath of the imperial unification of 221 BCE. Yet while this overt political orientation of early Chinese thought is widely recognized, the majority of studies in the West in recent decades have tended to discuss China's intellectual history from a philosophical angle while paying much less attention to their political content. This tendency has impeded our understanding of many pivotal issues in the history of Chinese thought.

To amend this situation, we will bring together leading scholars of early China, experts in philosophy and literature, paleography and history, linguistics and political thought, who will bring forth their novel uderstanding of Chinese texts to address anew fundamental issues in China's early ideological history.