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__NOTOC__ ''Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge'' ((スペイン語:Emporio celestial de conocimientos benévolos)) is a fictitious taxonomy of animals described by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (''El idioma analítico de John Wilkins'').〔. The essay was originally published as , and republished in ''Otras inquisiciones''〕 Wilkins, a 17th-century philosopher, had proposed a universal language based on a classification system that would encode a description of the thing a word describes into the word itself—for example, ''Zi'' identifies the genus ''beasts''; ''Zit'' denotes the "difference" ''rapacious beasts of the dog kind''; and finally ''Zitα'' specifies ''dog''. In response to this proposal and in order to illustrate the arbitrariness and cultural specificity of any attempt to categorize the world, Borges describes this example of an alternate taxonomy, supposedly taken from an ancient Chinese encyclopædia entitled ''Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge''. The list divides all animals into one of 14 categories: * Those that belong to the emperor * Embalmed ones * Those that are trained * Suckling pigs * Mermaids (or Sirens) * Fabulous ones * Stray dogs * Those that are included in this classification * Those that tremble as if they were mad * Innumerable ones * Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush * ''Et cetera'' * Those that have just broken the flower vase * Those that, at a distance, resemble flies Borges claims that the list was discovered in its Chinese source by the translator Franz Kuhn.〔A slightly different English translation is at: 〕 == Influences of the list == This list has stirred considerable philosophical and literary commentary. Michel Foucault begins his preface to ''The Order of Things,'' Foucault then quotes Borges' passage. Louis Sass has suggested, in response to Borges' list, that such "Chinese" thinking shows signs of typical schizophrenic thought processes. By contrast, the linguist George Lakoff has pointed out that while Borges' list is not possibly a human categorization, many categorizations of objects found in nonwestern cultures have a similar feeling to Westerners. Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, cited alleged acceptance of the authenticity of the list among many academics as a sign of the degeneration of the Western academy.〔.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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