Lisa Raphals
University of California Riverside
Biography
Lisa Raphals (瑞麗) studies the cultures of early China and Classical Greece, with interests in comparative philosophy and history of science. She is Professor of Chinese, Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California Riverside, and Chair, Program in Classical Studies and Program in Comparative Ancient Civilizations. 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), and Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2013); and co-editor of Old Society, New Belief: Religious transformation of China and Rome, ca. 1st-6th Centuries (Oxford, 2017). Representative scholarly articles include: “Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi and Theaetetus” (Philosophy East & West 1994), “Debates about Fate in Early China” (Études Chinoises 2014), “Sunzi versus Xunzi: Two Views of Deception and Indirection” (Early China 2016) and “Body and Mind in Early China and Greece” (Journal of Cognitive Historiography 2017).
「 Matteo Ricci's Greek Sources and Chinese Writings 」
This paper looks at the broader context of Matteo Ricci’s (Li Madou) Chinese scientific writings. The first part is a discussion of the problem of cultural translation as a polyvalent interaction, both between China and “the West,” and between Christian Jesuits and the texts of Greco-Roman antiquity, using several examples, including the Xiguo jifa (Western Arts of Memory) and several texts based on, but with important differences from, the writings of Epictetus. The second part turns specific difficulties of translation in the Jihe yuanben (Elements of Euclid).
