Semantic continuum

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth issue: “Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024),” by Lothar von Falkenhausen.

Next year  E. J. Brill will publish a book by the little-known but highly accomplished Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, in which he pioneers a novel, anthropological interpretation of the Chinese classics. The book demonstrates how certain motifs and images in the Yijing (Classic of Changes), the Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and the Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) are strategically deployed as structuring elements so as to meld these texts into a semantic continuum. Unfortunately, the author passed away this fall without being able to see his book in print; this obituary aims to make him and his life’s work better known to the scholarly community.

Selected readings

• "The transcendent, cosmic language of the Book of Changes" (12/28/24) — Denis Mair, the author of the volume of Sino-Platonic Papers announced in this post, was a close friend of Scott Davis
• The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology of the Yi jing, by Scott Davis (Cambria, 2012)