Humanities Seminar - Life and Learning in Five Dimensions: On the Intellectual History of China

Abstract:

This talk considers the implications of taking “learning” as the proper subject of China’s intellectual history. Moral and philosophical ideas and practices, the traditional subject of intellectual history, address one dimension of life, but not the only one. Life takes place in multiple dimensions simultaneously. Humans are necessarily and constantly embedded in the physical universe and its laws; in the world of living things and the organisms that sustain them and infect them; in language and the means with which they represent meaning such as literature and art; in the legal, economic, and social institutions with which they structure relations among people; and in shared and divergent ideas about good and evil. Reflecting on China’s history since the eighth century from this perspective, we discover cumulative traditions of learning—ideas and concomitant practices—that addressed each dimension. The relative importance of learning in these five dimensions shifted over time; scholars criticized their predecessors and argued for the importance of their preferred field against their rivals. Nevertheless, traditions of learning that address each of these five dimensions have continued. They live on in the university of today.

Biography:

Peter K. Bol (包弼德) is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China, Neo-Confucianism in History, and Localizing Learning,  coauthor of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching, co-editor of Ways with Words, and various journal articles in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis.

As Vice Provost (2013/09-2018/10) he was responsible for HarvardX, the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching, and research that connects online and residential learning. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently of 470,000 historical figures that is being expanded to include all biographical data in China’s historical record over the last 2000 years. Together with William Kirby he teaches ChinaX (SW12x) course, a HarvardX course with a global enrollment of over 45,000. Bol received his Ph.D. in Chinese history from Princeton in 1980.