I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss Li Zehou’s work in this interdisciplinary forum, particularly because Li’s ideas are well suited to a cross-cultural and multi-perspectival approach. His bold ideas seek to bridge cultural traditions; yet their suggestiveness is… Read More ›
Michael Nylan
Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 3, Michael Nylan
One of the best things about reading this particular masterwork of Li Zehou—several of his writings have secured that status—is Li’s steadfast refusal to ignore the material basis for realities in the remote past. Li’s history may be the perfect… Read More ›
Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 2, Michael Nylan
The historian in me surveys the academic fads of the last forty years in her field, including the overblown and rather dubious celebrations of cultural memory and cultural representation. Come and gone is the craze for the digital humanities (merrily… Read More ›
Reimagining Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought, Part 1, Michael Nylan
When I reread Li Zehou’s A History of Chinese Classical Thought (published in Chinese in 1980), I am struck by three things: (1) How much more we know about early China now, in 2020, than we knew forty years ago,… Read More ›