Speaker 2
It reminds me a lot of something we've seen in other traditions. For example with Greek philosophy we have the commentators on Aristotle and Plato in late antiquity. In Indian philosophy we had these huge commentary traditions based on the sootzo texts. Also even in philosophy in the Islamic world we saw that there were commentaries written on emacina and other thinkers. So this seems to be a very common pattern for philosophy is that it emerges in the form of these formative texts that be considered classics for some reason. And then later philosophers comment on them and the commentary becomes a way or a vehicle for independence original thought. And I think we're going to see yet again that one ignores the commentators as philosophers at one's peril because they're often very original in what they're
Speaker 1
doing. Indeed, yes. Maybe
Speaker 2
one other thing that's worth flagging here is that by going up to the Han period, first of all we're kind of connecting the story to what we've already seen in the India series because of course there we're talking about Buddhism. But also we're actually not going that far chronologically in absolute terms because we're really only going up to roughly what would be the end of let's say the Hellenistic period in Europe. So we're not even getting into the period of neoplatonism which would be like the third to sixth century CE. Never mind the equivalent of medieval philosophy, early modern philosophy. So there would be a lot more Chinese philosophy to come. And really all we can say now is that hopefully eventually there will be another series
