The Siren and the Sage Knowledge and Wisdom

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.

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

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

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials