in the midst of what network ties, and how did the work get put into circula-
tion? Who wrote the Mohist Canons, and what precisely was the process of
debate among the three “heretical” factions of Mohism that went on at this
period? Perhaps these names are already on our chart (numbers 57–61 in the
key to Figure 4.2), but it would be wonderful to pin down the circumstances
of producing this high point of Chinese rationalistic logic and mathematical
philosophy. Who precisely, within the Confucian schools, was responsible for
the Doctrine of the Mean and the “Great Appendix” to the Yi Ching? For
India we would even more like to pin down the life of Nagarjuna, to know
more about Asanga, the two Vasubandhus, to add some of the richness of
secondary and minor figures that we have for other regions; we would like to
be able to explore what is behind the scattered names of philosophers in the
Upanishads, and to know when and by whom were composed the Buddhist
sutras, which often foreshadowed technical philosophical doctrines in a scrip-
tural form.
For Greece and the West generally (including the Islamic philosophers),
anonymity is less of a problem; despite the cult of antiquity that sometimes
emerged, creative work was usually propagated under the author’s own name.
Our main problem of this kind is the Christian-occultist syncretist Pseudo-
Dionysus, a secondary figure ca. 450 c.e. We would like to be able fill in more
about certain mysterious figures: Ammonius Saccas, who taught both Plotinus
and the Christian Origen (could he have been a “gymnosophist” from the orbit
of India? although scholars think not); the Alexandria Skeptic Aenesidemus;
the milieu of Philo of Alexandria, popping up out of nowhere onto a major
position on the chart; Lucretius, the great Roman Epicurean, whose life is com-
pletely unknown. We would like to know more about the early figures, to know
what Thales really did and what was legend; what were Pythagoras’ own
contributions, and what went on inside the Pythagorean organization. And of
course we would like to have full texts of Heraclitus’ book, of Parmenides’
and Empedocles’ famous poems, and other works of the pre-Socratics.
It would also be useful to know more about missing network ties of eminent
persons. Who were the teachers of Hui Shih or Chuang Tzu? From whom if
anyone did Heraclitus get his learning? But the lack of information about these
figures implies that the persons in question were minor indeed; perhaps they
might provide an incidental link to some other milieu of importance. This
information might confirm the initial impression that a few creative figures
“come out of nowhere,” apart from existing chains of eminence, although I
suspect that the tendency would be to add connections to yet further minor
figures. On the downstream side, such information might strengthen my claim
about secondary eminence being the result of the transmission of cultural capi-
tal. If we knew, for instance, who were the anonymous followers who compiled
wang
(Wang)
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