The Turn Towards Philosophy in the Earliest Cosmologies: A Comparative Study of Selected Excavated Warring States–Period Manuscripts and Pre-Socratic Fragments

Abstract

Excavated texts from the fourth century BC bring new elements previously thought missing in the earliest Chinese thought. They develop cosmological theories comparable to those found in the pre-Socratic tradition, especially in processual thinkers such as the Milesians and Heraclitus. The article explores the resemblances, suggesting that the Eastern and Western thought may have not been so radically different at the beginning. On both sides, the texts attest to a new stage of intellectual independence of an individual, using strikingly similar patterns of explanation and means of expression.

Keywords

• early Chinese thought
• cosmology
• metaphysics
• excavated texts
• pre-Socratics
• Anaximander
• Anaximenes
• oneness
• process philosophy