Korea University Institute for Global Humanities Research and Collaboration

The HK3.0 Research Project Team of Korea University Institute for Global Humanities Research and Collaboration is currently participating in the project “AREA EXPERT HUB: Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing” as the East Asia Area Expert Hub of the MIT Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) which serves as a special collaborating institution for this project. The “Manifesto for a Generative Philology: Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing” proposed by the MIT GHI is as follows.

Manifesto for a Generative Philology: Philology 2.0 for Human Flourishing

Philology—literally the “Love” of “Words,” “Arguments” or “Learning”—is an art and science that has taken diverse forms throughout world history as communities developed strategies to collect, understand, institutionalize, and communicate textual or oral traditions in a particular language. Together with philosophy, philology has been the regal discipline of Western academia, ever since “philologists” at the behest of the Egyptian rulers began to curate and teach a canon of classical Greek literature and philosophy in Alexandria starting in the third century BCE. Philology has been tremendously productive, spawning many academic fields including biblical and “oriental” philologies, Classics, comparative linguistics, textual criticism, hermeneutics, bibliography, even literary studies, anthropology, archeology—paleography and epigraphy— and comparative religious studies. In other macro-regions, for example in China and East Asia, philology also emerged in close connection with the state. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), imperial bibliographers were appointed to organize court libraries, contributing to what might be described as a “Confucian hagiography of the book.” This framework articulated a grand vision of the primeval unity of knowledge, destroyed after the death of the great sage Confucius, and declining into various intellectual filiations, which in turn were attached to ancient political offices. From the Han period onward, scholars established both a canon of Confucian Classics and a comprehensive system of textual study and textual production organized in the four bibliographical categories of “Classics,” “Philosophical Masters,” “Histories,” and “Literary Collections,” increasingly through the broader scientific pursuit of the “investigation of things” (gewu 格物). East Asian philology developed a particularly strong commentarial culture and strong traditions, among others, in compilation and edition studies, bibliography, paleography, phonology, exegesis, empirical “evidential” philology, literary and scientific encyclopedias, calligraphic, archeological and art historical textual connoisseurship and, today, studies of excavated texts. Many of these traditions remain insufficiently represented within modern academic disciplines, which derive from Western-style education systems adopted globally under colonial or semi-colonial circumstances over the past couple of centuries.