DivinationandMedicineinChinaandGreece.docVIP

Divination and Medicine in China and Greece: 本文档由【中文word文档库】提供，转载分发敬请保留本信息； 中文word文档库免费提供海量范文、教育、学习、政策、报告和经济类word文档。 a href=/word文档/a A Comparative Perspective on the Baoshan Illness Divinations Lisa Raphals [Lisa Raphals is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (1992), Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (1998), and a range of studies in comparative philosophy, history of science and early Taoism. Recent and forthcoming publications include: “The Treatment of Women in a Second-Century Medical Casebook” (Chinese Science, 1998), “Arguments by Women in Early Chinese Texts” (Nan Nü, 2001), and “Fate, Fortune, Chance and Luck in Chinese and Greek: A Comparative Semantic History” (Philosophy East West (2003) 53.4: 537-574).] * * * In recent years, several distinct trends of research have converged to shed new light on divination practices in general, and also on the complex situations of iatromantic practices vis-à-vis both divination and medicine. In this paper I use these broad perspectives to look at a series of medical divinations in a recently discovered archaeological evidence from China. A growing literature has explored the rationality and coherence of divination both as a set of mental attitudes and as a significant factor in the formation of social institutions. These studies emphasize the normalcy of both aspects of divination in civilizations where it was central. It was a coherent part of “ordinary” social practices such as law, medicine, or administration (like consulting a physician or a stockbroker). It was constitutive of a wide range of activities beyond the simple sense of predicting the future; divination had profound effects on the origin and development of medicine, law, philosophy, politics, medicine, and the history of science. To better understand