All Concepts defined in the TLS have been assigned a definition and a location in a hierarchical taxonomy of concepts.
This taxonomy is inspired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) idea of an alphabet of human thought (Latin: alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) as a method to break down and analyze our understanding of the world by breaking it down in concepts and establishing a logical relation between them. By design, these are a-historical, that is as concepts they are not part of the historical process, but as elements of a pure logical realm are outside of history, natural laws to be discovered, but not created. Quite separate from this is of course the understanding of these concepts, the history of its discovery, which, together with the words we use to explain them, is in fact very much part of the cultural and historical process.
For this reason, our taxonomic tree has itself no temporal aspect, the concepts, definitions and relationships are deemed to be self-evident and unchanging. We even consider them to be outside of specific cultural settings, but universal. A more thorough exploration of this has been set forward in [1].
However, this abstract and a-historical skeleton is brought to life and into the realm of historic and linguistic observation by populating the labels that serve to represent the concepts with historically observed usage in the texts we pay attention to, where we, for every piece of evidence, painstakingly note the exact syntactic function and semantic field of each word we encounter and deem worth of this observation.
As a result of this, we hope to achieve something of an asymptotic approach to the squaring of the circle, avoiding cultural and historical narrow-mindedness without losing the attention to detail, while still drawing attention to an universal and unchanging reality that lies beyond the words.
[1] Harbsmeier, Christoph. “Philological Reflections on Chinese Conceptual History: Introducing Thesaurus Linguae Sericae.” In Keywords in Chinese Culture, 381–403. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. 2020.