Concept
10 readings
Textual transmission
Concept · 10 readings
Copying, performance, collection and translation shape what later readers encounter. What do those histories allow us to infer about a work or a claim?
All readings
10 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 16
Action without forcing
The Daodejing questions fixed names and praises wuwei, acting without forcing. When does a ruler’s restraint give others room to act, and when does it become neglect or paternalism?
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 42
Destiny, character and interpretation in Yoruba thought
A recorded Ifá poem and Segun Gbadegesin’s questions about destiny raise a problem about responsibility. How can choice, effort and character matter without making success or misfortune a measure of moral worth?
Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 3
How do we know what earlier thinkers thought?
Papyrus Prisse shows how a work’s setting, its composition and its surviving copy can belong to different times. What can such a witness, or a translation of it, establish about what people once thought?
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 43
Living well on an unstable earth
A Nahua mother’s advice, preserved in the Florentine Codex, teaches balance on an unstable earth. How do colonial mediation, social hierarchy and living interpreters qualify what her discourse can establish?
Guided course · Module 2 · Lesson 5
Mortality and the limits of achievement
Grief sends Gilgamesh in search of a way past death, and he returns to Uruk without one. Do mortal limits make achievement worthless, or change what we can reasonably ask of a human life?
Reference article
Sources and interpretation
A source can answer one question well and another hardly at all. This article keeps the date a work was composed apart from the date of its surviving witness, and separates historical influence from sequence and comparison.
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 47
Testing inherited authority in Ethiopia
The Hatata gives religious reasons for testing inherited belief. Its unresolved authorship is a separate question from the strength of its reasoning.
Reference article
The Teaching of Ptahhotep: a reading guide
This guide locates the passages of the Teaching of Ptahhotep read in lesson 4 and sets out their attributed setting, their surviving witness and the limits of the translation.
Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 29
Translation as philosophical creation
Hunayn ibn Ishaq revises a translation, and al-Kindi defends the pursuit of philosophy. The lesson shows how translation transforms an inheritance and asks what evidence separates real reception from a resemblance later readers notice.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 19
What stays the same when things change?
Heraclitus finds order in change, and Parmenides asks whether being could ever begin. Their surviving words are kept apart from the later reports that frame how they are read.