Reading the Four Books with Aristotle: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Translation of the Confucian Classics by François Noël SJ (1651-1729)

Henrik Jaeger

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Henrik Jaeger. Reading the Four Books with Aristotle: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Translation of the Confucian Classics by François Noël SJ (1651-1729)[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2018, 1(3): 367-376.

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Henrik Jaeger. Reading the Four Books with Aristotle: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Translation of the Confucian Classics by François Noël SJ (1651-1729)[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2018, 1(3): 367-376.

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Reading the Four Books with Aristotle: A Hermeneutical Approach to the Translation of the Confucian Classics by François Noël SJ (1651-1729)

Henrik Jaeger

University of Freiburg

Received Date: 2018-03-21
Rev Recd Date: 2018-08-26

Abstract

Abstract

François Noël SJ (1651-1729) published the Libri Classici and the Philosophia Sinica in the very complicated context of the last decades of the Rites Controversy. In his spiritual fight for an accommodation that would allow Chinese Christians to be both Chinese and a member of the Roman Church, he searched for a hermeneutical approach to read the Confucian Classics with Aristotle. Therefore his translation was rather free-he tried to make a synthesis of Confucian text and Aristotelian ethics, not a translation in the literal sense. This synthesis was able to display meaningful similarities between the two cultures and universal truths above the cultures. It was this synthesis that inspired philosophers as Christian Wolff, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Voltaire. This is clearly a concept of reason that is not yet imprisoned by colonial or postcolonial thought, it is an example of a fruitful discourse in a time, when intercultural exchange was not yet defined by western modes of thought.
- Jesuit accomodation politics in China,
- Scholasticism,
- Neo-Confucianism,
- Hermeneutics,
- Aristotelian Ethics,
- Early Enlightenment

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References(18)

References

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