Published by the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas (founded in 1990 by Mortimer J. Adler and Max Weismann)
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Friday, July 28, 2017

A lost version of 'Analects' unearthed after 1,800 years

The China Post reported,

"Experts have now confirmed that the texts are the long-lost 'Qi Analects'.

"There are three versions of the Analects, namely the Old, Lu and Qi versions.

"The Qi version differs from the first two in having two additional pieces: 'Knowing' and 'Asking the King.'"

Mortimer Adler wrote of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics,

"In the history of Western moral thought, it is the only book centrally concerned and concerned throughout with the goodness of a whole human life, with the parts of this whole, and with putting the parts together in the right order and proportion."

He went on,

"As far as I know, its only parallel is to be found outside of Western culture in the moral teachings of Confucius, which address themselves to the same problem and which offer a solution to it that also refines the wisdom of common sense--by means of aphorisms rather than, as in Aristotle's case, by means of analysis of and argument."
The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense (1970), by Mortimer J. Adler, p. 236. [footnote omitted]

Chronology, then, is not the only reason to start with the Analects in The Great Books of the East - The Chinese tradition

#Aristotle #GreatBooksOfTheWesternWorld

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