| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation aims at revisiting the history of Taoism as philosophy in the view of Western and Chinese academic circles. To this end the author examines the recognition of Laozi’s thought as true philosophy by reviewing the Western reception of Taoism in particular and its reconstruction in the Chinese philosophical discourse in general, as can be observed in the historiography of philosophy in the 17th through 20th centuries. The author approaches it as a subject of Sino-European philosophical encounter via a threefold methodology: Sociology of Knowledge, Xenology and Aporetics (N. Hartmann). To put it in terms of the dissertation’s title “How philosophical is the philosophy of Laozi?”, the author tries to address this question from within the knowledge construction of an ongoing quest of xeno-cultural hermeneutics, as conditioned by different social systems.
Four main chapters are proposed to meet the aforementioned goal. By reviewing the Western works of the general history of philosophy between 1655 and 1900, chapter one tries to assess the reasons for including or not Chinese philosophy in the history of philosophy. Chapter two examines how Laozi’s philosophy is defined by the historical writings on philosophy in Japan and China before 1945. In chapter three, the author focuses on the beginnings and progress of the philosophical and sinological interpretations of Taoism by examining the first Western translation of Daodejing produced in the 1720s by the Jesuit Jean-François Noëlas (1669-1740), and its first French rendering by Abel-Rémusat (1788-1832). Chapter four, finally, offers a brief historical overview of the sinological interpretations of Daodejing by early European sinologists such as Pauthier (1801-1873), Julien (1797-1873), Chalmers (1825-1899), Legge (1815-1897), von Strauß (1809-1899) etc., as well as a review of philosophical interpretations of this classic by both Western and Chinese philosophers from the late 19th century till around 1945.
Based on this review of the historiography of philosophy the author seeks to highlight the two perceptions of philosophy, viz. the Greek tradition of dialectical argumentation and the Chinese type of philosophy that combines the Insight of the Sages and the Commentaries of the followers. The author proposes to define the philosophy of Laozi as a concurrence (Mitbestimmung) in the course of questioning-and-answering (Fragen-Antworten) by ongoing commentaries on the initial insight. Consequently, the author concludes that the philosophy of Laozi is philosophical in being one of the different ways of partaking in the activity of loving wisdom (philo-sophia).
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