本對古代文本進行學術校勘究竟意味著什麼?本文從比較視角 切入此問題,旨在讓西方與中國的文獻學傳統就其共同面臨的問題 展開對話。文章分三個階段進行,從最簡單的校勘情境追溯至最複 雜的情境,其中相互競爭的傳統反映了不同詮釋群體的不斷介入。 在每個階段,本文首先探討編者所面臨的難題 — 對作者真偽的判 定、轉寫與翻譯、對異文的處理,以及在某些情況下「穩定性原文」 概念的逐步瓦解; 隨後簡要介紹為應對這些問題而發展出的方法。 本文不提倡單一方法,而是指出,雖然各學科領域的語言學史所發 展出的工具極具價值,但並非放諸四海而皆準,編者應視個案情況靈活運用並加以調整。總而言之,文本校勘的學術工作能否獲得認 可,取決於其向讀者呈現的推理過程與資料來源是否具備透明度與 可追溯性。

What does it mean to produce a scholarly edition of an ancient text? The article approaches the question from a comparative perspective, setting Western and Chinese philological traditions in dialogue on problems they share. Proceeding in three stages, it traces a path from the simplest editorial situation to the most complex, where competing traditions reflect the succes-sive interventions of distinct communities of interpretation. At each stage, it first examines the difficulties that confront editors: attribution and authentic-ity, transcription and translation, the treatment of variants, and, in some cas-es, the progressive dissolution of the notion of a stable original; before brief-ly introducing the methods developed to face these problems. Rather than advocating for a single approach, the article suggests that the tools devel-oped by the history of philology in different fields are valuable but not uni-versally applicable, and that editors might use and adapt them case by case. In conclusion, a scholarly edition may be recognized by the transparency and accountability of the reasoning and sources it makes available to its readers.