The Invention of the Body in Greece and China
Prof. Lisa Raphals (The University of California Riverside)
Date: Tuesday, November 14, 2023Time: 3:30–4:30 p.m.
Venue：Block B, Rm 620
Speaker: Prof. Lisa Raphals (The University of California Riverside)
Language: English
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The relation between “body” (sōma) and “soul” (psychē) is one of the most long-standing issues in the history of Greek, and later Western, reflective thought. In this lecture, the speaker examines the very different ways that the body was first understood as an explicit concept in ancient Greece and China. She compares texts that articulate explicit concepts of the body in a range of Greek and Chinese textual genres. The Greek texts go from the Homeric poems through Plato; the Chinese texts date from the fourth- through second- centuries BCE. However, Chinese and Greek accounts of the body emphasized very different things, and had different conceptual foci, beginning with interest in very different kinds of “natures.”
About the Speaker
Lisa Raphals studies the cultures of early China and Classical Greece, with interests in comparative philosophy, history of science, and occasionally science fiction studies. She is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at the University of California Riverside, with cooperating appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Religion. She is the author of Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Cornell, 1992), Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (SUNY, 1998), Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013), and A Tripartite Self: Body, Mind and Spirit in Early China (Oxford, 2023).
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Recommended Books
Raphals, Lisa. (2023). A Tripartite Self: Mind, Body, and Spirit in Early China. Oxford University Press.
