Comparison and Correspondence: Revisiting an Old Idea for the Present Time

Analogical thinking that relates everything to everything else in a complicated system of correspondences was common in ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece, early modern Europe, as well as ancient China. Such premodern theories of knowledge about correspondences between the cosmos and the human world are discredited in modern scientific thinking, but by revisiting some of the old ideas, of which the value has not been sufficiently recognized in modern scholarship, we may find them helpful in rethinking the disciplinary compartmentalization of knowledge and the possibilities of dialogues between different disciplines in comparative studies.