Multicivilizational Exchanges in the Making of Modern Science
Description
This book explores how and why exchanges across civilizations have come to enrich science today. The dialogical dimension of the history of science has long been marginalized by an excessive concern on why modern science emerged in Europe, but not in any of the advanced civilizations of the East. This focus upon what has been called Joseph Needham's "Grand Comparative Question" ignores his other project, focused on showing how dialogues between civilizations have nurtured science. Needham's "Grand Dialogical Question" - if we may call it that by parity - has directly or indirectly inspired a vast body of literature showing how interconnections of civilizations over the last three thousand years, and exchanges of cosmological, mathematical, geographical, physical, biological and medical technologies, techniques, practices and knowledge, have been woven together to produce current science. Bringing together scholars whose research range across multiple civilizations and disciplines, this book investigates the scope and limits of Needham's dialogical vision for science.
Reviews / Votes
"Inspired by Needham's dialogical vision, in which flows of knowledge move across civilizations, the contributors to this volume develop a new framework for the history of science that avoids eurocentrism. Going beyond Needham's focus on China, these analyses of the history of science, medicine, and mathematics offer fascinating multicivilizational studies spanning ancient times to modernity. Since global history of science has become so important, this is a timely volume that provides a ground-breaking contribution to the scholarship." (Bernard Lightman, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Past President, History of Science Society, and York University Distinguished Research Professor)
"This is an exceedingly interesting and coherent collection of essays, which is highly relevant for the debate on the development of science in a global perspective. This collection of essays promises to be a seminal contribution to the history of science because it offers for the first time a wide-ranging, systematic exploration of a 'dialogical approach' to the development of science in a global perspective." (Karel Davids, Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
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Persons
Arun Bala is a physicist and philosopher of science. He is the author and editor of multiple books, including Complementarity Beyond Physics (2017) and Asia, Europe and the Emergence of Modern Science (2012). He is Director (Research) with Joseph Needham Foundation for Science and Civilization, and a Visiting Scholar with the Institute of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in University of Toronto.
Raymond W. K. Lau is a sociologist by training. His research interests focus on ancient Chinese thoughts and comparative intellectual developments. He retired as full professor of sociology from the Open University of Hong Kong, and now serves as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Hong Kong Shue Yan University as well as senior advisor to The Joseph Needham Foundation for Science and Civilization.
Jianjun Mei is an archaeo-metallurgist, specializing in the origins and role of metallurgy in Early China, and cultural interactions between China and the West. He is President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine, and Director of the Needham Research Institute.
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part 1:Historical Sociology in Dialogue .- Chapter 2. An Oceanic Paradigm of Historical Flows.- Chapter 3. The Needham Question: A Non-Eurocentric Approach Transcending Dialogism.- Chapter 4. The Need to Extend Needham's Vision of Science: A Decolonial Perspective.- Part 2: Cosmologies in Dialogue .- Chapter 5.The Circulation of Babylonian Astral Science.- Chapter 6. Scientific Exchanges with Qing China and the Formation of a Local Science in Eighteenth-Century Korea.- Chapter 7. Practical and "Precise" World Geographical Knowledge Developed in Premodern Chinese and Islamic Worlds through Multi-Civilizational Connections and Contact.- Part 3: Natural Sciences in Dialogue .- Chapter 8. Liberating Mathematics from Civilizations.- Chapter 9. Ancient Chinese Origins of Modern Western Science; or, The Early History of Linear Algebra.- Chapter 10. Ibn al-Haytham's Optics and European Perspectiva Legacies in Science and Art.- Chapter 11. The Survival of Old Book Forms on the Periphery: Chinese Book Forms in Dunhuang and Beyond.- Part 4: Medical Traditions in Dialogue .- Chapter 12. Healing Traditions and Medicinal Products in the Market of Health, Healing, Beauty, and Vigor in the Dutch East Indies.- Chapter 13. Needham's Legacy in Clinical Research Revisited: Refashioning Acupuncture with Biomedicine.- Chapter 14. Classical Chinese Medicine and The Needham Question.- Part 5: Modes of Inquiry in Dialogue .- Chapter 15. Mathematics in India: Pluralism and the Possibility of Dialogue.- Chapter 16. Explaining the Rise of Modern Science: A Dialogical Perspective.- Chapter 17. Webs, Trees and Knowledge: Bunzo Hayata's Eastern Perspectival Model of Nature.- Chapter 18. Dialogue and Comparison Compared.