Sylvain Lévi | |
---|---|
Born |
Paris, France |
March 28, 1863
Died | October 30, 1935 Paris, France |
(aged 72)
Fields | Sanskrit language, literature, Buddhism |
Institutions | Collège de France |
Notable students | Paul Demiéville, Paul Pelliot. Marcel Mauss |
Sylvain Lévi (March 28, 1863 – October 30, 1935) was an orientalist and indologist.
His book Théâtre Indien is an important work on the subject. Lévi also conducted some of the earliest analysis of Tokharian fragments discovered in Western China.
Sylvain Lévi was a co-founder of the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi.
According to the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Lévi was the (one of the) founder(s) of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East) in Hanoi. The École française d'Extrême-Orient's website notes that the school was founded in Hanoi in 1902.
He was also an early opponent of the traditionalist author René Guénon, citing the latter's uncritical belief in a "Perennial philosophy", that a primal truth revealed directly to primitive humanity, based on an extreme reductionist view of Hinduism, which was the subject of Guénon's first book, L'Introduction générale a l'étude des doctrines hindoues. That was a thesis delivered to Lévi at the Sorbonne and rejected.