From Philosophy to Philology

Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China

Benjamin A. Elman

Winter 2001
Second revised edition, 2001, i-xxx +364 pp. 6 x 9 trim size, Maps, Bibliography, Glossary, Index
ISBN 1-883191-05-X Cloth No longer available
ISBN 1-883191-04-1 Paper No longer available

From Philosophy to Philology is an indispensable work on the intellectual life of China’s literati in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While there was not a scientific revolution in China, there was an intellectual one. The shock of the Manchu conquest and the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644 led to a rejection of the moral self-cultivation that dominated intellectual life under the Ming. China’s scholars, particularly in the Yangzi River Basin, sought to restore China’s greatness by recapturing the wisdom of the ancients from the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.) and the Former Han dynasty (202 B.C.–9 A.D.), much as Renaissance Europe rediscovered the Greeks and Romans. But in China scholars faced the daunting task of determining which of many editions of the Classics were the true originals and which were forged additions of later centuries. The ensuing search for authentic texts led to the founding of academies and libraries, the compiling of bibliographies, the rise of printing of editions of the Classics and Histories and commentaries on their components, the study of ancient inscriptions, and a two-hundred-year effort to discover and discard forged texts. In the process rigorous standards of scholarly training were adopted, and scholarship became a full-time profession. Benjamin Elman follows the trajectory of China’s intelligentsia from the seventeenth century research of Gu Yanwu and Yan Roju to the mature formation of evidential studies (kaozhengxue) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Dai Zhen, Qian Daxin, Duan Yucai, and Ruan Yuan. Benjamin Elman’s book recaptures that lost world for today’s readers. The first edition of From Philosophy to Philology was published by the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, in 1984. The second edition presented here has been completely revised, updated, and enlarged by the author, with new material in every chapter and a full new chapter added. Benjamin A. Elman is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “... Elman has offered us a remarkable view of scholarship in eighteenth-century China. This is a very important book.” —The Journal of Asian History “... never before have the delicate and intricate filaments of intellectual interaction been as painstakingly and lucidly traced or the view of late Confucian thought as a pluralistic enterprise as persuasively argued.” —The Journal of Asian Studies “Mr. Elman places his eighteenth-century thinkers in a richly evoked setting. In a series of deft and original chapters we are told not only what they thought, but also how and where they thought; about their academies and schooling; their economic backgrounds..., their libraries and their diaries and their social conventions.”—Jonathan Spence in the New York Review