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Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections
... Avicenna também foi um dos pioneiros na observação e discussão do princípio da superposição dos estratos, que serviu de base para a confecção das escalas do tempo geológico, em seu livro denominado O Livro da Cura, de 1027, onde discutia a formação das montanhas (Al-Rawi, 2002;Fischer & Garrison, 2008). Já Kuo, foi um dos primeiros a reconhecer a existência de um "tempo profundo" (Sivin, 1995). A noção de "tempo profundo", até os dias de hoje, é de difícil percepção, devido ao curto tempo de vida humano. ...
Você já se perguntou do que realmente se trata a Paleontologia? Ou sobre como ela surgiu como ciência e quem foram os seus cientistas pioneiros? Ou ainda, quando essa ciência desembarcou em terras brasileiras e qual o papel do país na consolidação da Paleontologia? Bom, estas e outras discussões serão abordadas ao longo de todo o livro, porém, neste capítulo vamos nos ater a uma breve retrospectiva histórica da Paleontologia e de como ela se desenvolveu no Brasil. Comecemos pelo significado de Paleontologia. A palavra Paleontologia é resultante da junção das palavras, de origem grega, palaiós = antigo + óntos = ser + logos = estudo, logo de modo simplificado, esta é a ciência que estuda toda e qualquer evidência de vida (direta ou indireta) que tenha resistido por um período superior a 11 mil anos, aos processos de decomposição por microorganismos e as ações intempéricas (vento, chuva, sol, gelo, dentre outros). Quando nos referimos a evidências de vida direta, partimos da prerrogativa de que o achado em questão trata-se de uma evidência incontestável da presença daquele indivíduo no local, o que não implica necessariamente em sua morte. Para esse tipo de evidência fóssil, os paleontólogos dão o nome de somatofóssil. Ossos, dentes, asas de insetos, folhas e troncos, são alguns exemplos de somatofósseis que podemos citar. As
... Furthermore, these models and methods have been used to form a complete epistemological system of geomorphology, which can further provide the theoretical basis of geomorphological research (Walsh et al., 1998;Ru-Lan et al., 2009). The research of geomorphological ontology and its theoretical construction can be traced back to the ancient Greek period and the Northern Song Dynasty, in which Herodotus and Kuo Shen can be viewed as the two representative scientists, respectively (Wilcock et al., 2003;Chu, 2010). The term "geomorphology" was first proposed by Lauman, a German geographer, in 1858 and has since been widely used in related research (Needham and Ling, 1959;Tinkler, 1985). ...
Digital terrain analysis (DTA) is one of the most important contents in the research of geographical information science (GIS). However, on the basis of the digital elevation model (DEM), many problems exist in the current research of DTA in geomorphological studies. For instance, the current DTA research appears to be focused more on morphology, phenomenon, and modern surface rather than mechanism, process, and underlying terrain. The current DTA research needs to be urgently transformed from the study of landform morphology to one focusing on landform process and mechanism. On this basis, this study summarizes the current research status of geomorphology-oriented DTA and systematically reviews and analyzes the research about the knowledge of geomorphological ontology, terrain modeling, terrain derivative calculation, and terrain analytical methods. With the help of DEM data, DTA research has the advantage of carrying out geomorphological studies from the perspective of surface morphology. However, the study of DTA has inherent defects in terms of data expression and analytic patterns. Thus, breakthroughs in basic theories and key technologies are necessary. Moreover, scholars need to realize that DTA research must be transformed from phenomenon to mechanism, from morphology to process, and from terrain to landform. At present, the research development of earth science has reached the critical stage in which the DTA research should focus more on geomorphological ontology. Consequently, this study proposes several prospects of geomorphology-oriented DTA from the aspects of value-added DEM data model, terrain derivatives and their spatial relations, and macro-terrain analysis. The study of DTA based on DEM is at a critical period along with the issue on whether the current GIS technology can truly support the development of geography. The research idea of geomorphology-oriented DTA is expected to be an important exploration and practice in the field of GIS.
... A few, like the cosmologies of ancient China and India, applied temporal quantification to cycles rather than to linear time. Others, like the ancient Greeks, did not make significant attempts to quantify universal time, even when a single universal beginning followed by linear time was proposed (Sivin, 1995;Wyse Jackson, 2006). The first discernible cosmic count to reach us is found in the ancient biblical tradition. ...
The scientific discovery of our universe’s immense cosmological history and Earth’s vast geologic history has radically altered common perceptions of time, prompting us to think in terms of millions and billions of years rather than hundreds and thousands. Meanwhile human societies impact the Earth System at accelerating rates and more comprehensively than ever before, leading scientists to propose the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. These two contrasting temporal transformations have mostly been considered separately: the expanding awareness of cosmological and geologic duration, on the one hand, and the acute sense of swift technological change, on the other. However, their contrast and coexistence are important to recognize. The challenge of understanding the Anthropocene’s complex timescales is partly due to the inability of human institutions to reconcile this twofold disruption whereby time has both expanded (into deep time) and compressed (in techno-social acceleration). After theorizing this transformation, I evaluate the current cosmic stories helping human beings reconceptualize the new timescape.
... Đến thời nhà T ng (960-1279), Tất Thă g ( Bi Sheng 990-1051) đã sá g chế ra chữ rời (hoạt tự) từ nguyên liệu đất sét (g m), làm cho việc in ấn trở nên nhanh chóng và dễ dàng hơ. Cô g ghệ in ấ ày đã truyền sang Triều Tiên, Nh t Bả sau đó thô g qua Đế qu c Mông Cổ ó được truyề sa g phươ g Tây đẩy mạnh việc giao ưu vă hóa giữa các châu lục [1]. Tuy nhiên, công nghệ in ấn theo sáng chế của Tất Thă g vẫn thuộc dạng thủ công, chi phí cao, t c độ in ch m do đó việc sao chép trái phép tác phẩm chưa diễn ra nhiều. ...
Sự ra đời của internet đã tác động không nhỏ đến lĩnh vực quyền tác giả, internet có thể giúp tác giả đưa tác phẩm của mình tới công chúng một cách thuận tiện, nhanh chóng. Nhưng internet cũng cho phép các hành vi sao chép trái phép tác phẩm, gây phương hại đến quyền tài sản của chủ sở hữu tác phẩm. Trong lĩnh vực nghiên cứu khoa học, việc nhanh chóng chia sẻ kết quả nghiên cứu là cần thiết, nó giúp ích cho sự phát triển của khoa học và công nghệ, từ đó hình thành nhu cầu “truy cập mở” (Open Access). Trong lĩnh vực giáo dục và đào tạo, việc nhanh chóng đưa tri thức khoa học và công nghệ vào trường học là việc làm cấp bách, từ đó hình thành nhu cầu về “tài nguyên giáo dục mở” (Open Educational Resources). Truy cập mở và tài nguyên giáo dục mở không thể tách rời công cụ truy cập là internet, nhưng như đã nêu có những mâu thuẫn trong việc bảo hộ quyền tác giả và sự phát triển của internet. Bài viết phân tích những rào cản trong quy định về bảo hộ quyền tác giả đối với truy cập mở và tài nguyên giáo dục mở.
... In Shen Kuo s book Dream Pool Essays written in 1088, the polymathic scientist and statesman Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty coined the word Shiyou (literally rock oil ) for petroleum, which remains the term used in contemporary Chinese [5]. Shen Kuo found this near Yanhe River near Yanan ...
The first CCS-EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) pilot project in Shaanxi Province of China is being conducted. Although there are still many technical obstacles need to be solved, the major concern with this CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) project is the risks of CO2 leaking from the subsurface storage site. While the industry worries about the efficiency of CO2-EOR in such low porosity and ultra- low permeability reservoir. In the present work, we assess the potential risks as well as reservoir properties in CO2 geological storage site in Jingbian Field, North of Shaanxi. We design a comprehensive monitoring system, which covers geophysical, geological and surface environmental monitoring, in order to detect plume behaviour and leakage of CO2 during different stages of CO2 sequestration. The study of monitoring data and CO2-EOR operation in Jingbian CCS pilot project will increase our understanding of underground process during CO2 injection and after site closure in Ordos Basin.
... The other facet is the recovery of time itself, the elusive concept that is only available to us through the material evidence of its passage, in the outer shell of our planet. While the expression "deep time" McPhee (1981) is appropriate for the concept generally thought to have arisen during the Scottish enlightenment (Hutton 1795), but which has roots as far back as the 11th century with such philosophers as the Islamic scholar Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna (Al Rawi 2002) and his Chinese contemporary Sen Kuo (Nathan 1995). It was, however, in Western Europe that the systematic study of rock successions as markers of time took hold, starting with the seminal works of Lyell (1830-33) and d 'Orbigny (1850). ...
Geological time is one of the most difficult concepts to comprehend, and its measurement is expressed both in relative and numerical terms. The modern geological time scale constitutes a framework for historical geology, and provides numerical ages in two forms. One is date; the other is duration. Most geoscientists use distinctive abbreviations (commonly 'Ma' and 'Myr') to specify date and duration, but some geochemists do not, using 'Ma' (mega-annus) interchangeably and are pressuring journals to follow suit. In an attempt to determine the usefulness of distinct symbols, the concept of geological time and its different expressions is reviewed, and the method- ology used to determine numerical ages of crucial datum levels in chronostratigraphy is discussed. Despite the important place given to dates, geological time scales are foremost about duration of intervals between dates, from which the age of key datum points are deduced. Durations are quantities, and it may someday be suitable to express them in terms of a non-SI unit. Dates, on the other hand, are merely geological instants, not quantities, and are not concerned with the SI.
Values-based medicine (VsBM) is an ethical concept, and bioethical framework has been developed to ensure that medical ethics and values are implemented, pervasive, and powerful parameters influencing decisions about health, clinical practice, teaching, medical industry, career development, malpractice, and research. Neurosurgeons tend to adopt ethics according to their own values and to what they see and learn from teachers. Neurosurgeons, in general, are aware about ethical codes and the patient’s rights. However, the philosophy, concept, and principles of medical ethics are rarely included in the training programs or in training courses. The impact of implementing, observing the medical ethics and the patients’ value and culture on the course, and outcome of patients’ management should not underestimate. The main principles of medical ethics are autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, dignity, and honesty, which should be strictly observed in every step of medical practice, research, teaching, and publication. Evidence-based medicine has been popularized in the last 40–50 years in order to raise up the standard of medical practice. Medical ethics and values have been associated with the medical practice for thousands of years since patients felt a need for treatment. There is no conflict between evidence-based medicine and values-based medicine, as a medical practice should always be performed within a frame of ethics and respect for patients’ values. Observing the principles of values-based medicine became very relevant as multicultural societies are dominant in some countries and hospitals in different corners of the world.
The points at which Greek mathematics in general and Archimedes' contributions in particular are exceptional are here assessed by way of a comparison with the extensive evidence from ancient China. While underlining the need for caution concerning the extent to which concrete conclusions are possible, the outcome is broadly to confirm Netz's argument that a key factor in Archimedes' success and influence was the way in which in a social and intellectual environment that favoured debate, he was able to contest an assumption found in both the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. Where they had imagined a sharp division (albeit differently defined) between what they assigned to ‘physics’ and to ‘mathematics’ respectively, Archimedes showed how those two inquiries could be treated as complementary to one another, thereby opening up the possibility of new styles of physical demonstration.
From 1580, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to China―an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. Drawing upon prefectural distributions of the Jesuits and Chinese scientific works, this paper demonstrates that the Jesuits stimulated Confucian literati to study science. On average, the literati’s scientific works increased four times in prefectures with Jesuit scientists after 1580. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723. Since China’s scholar-official system remained unchanged, the literati’s scientific research aimed to serve the needs of statecraft rather than translating into economic progress.
I am trying to do two things by posting this material from my book-in-progress titled Magic Matters: Science and Medicine in Chinese Popular Culture, 1600–1800. One is to invite constructive criticism 指正 (please respond directly to smithrj@rice.edu rather than to this website, unless you have something of general interest to say). And the other is to make my Asian-language and Western-language bibliographies available to anyone who might be interested. I have already imposed a draft preface and my preliminary bibliographies on a number of scholarly friends and colleagues, and have received valuable feedback. The preface is still no doubt incomplete (my fault, not theirs), but it should at least give an indication of what I am trying to do with my book. It also explains the title.
This article explores what kind of a role ‘the rise of China’ plays in negotiation and searches for common ground between Finnish and Chinese representatives in the context of Chinese investment, trade and cooperation facilitation initiatives in Finland. The study predominantly builds on the positioning theory, and the data collection methods of this study are interviewing and observation. Five styles of positioning regarding power and common ground are found – adjustment, use of existing common ground, autonomy, ‘soft’ power and pressure/hedging, the character of which corresponds to phases of Chinese five elements theory (wu xing). While data suggest that both Finnish and Chinese representatives use all these strategies, the trend is that Finnish representatives use active responses such as adjustment and pressure/hedging more, while Chinese representatives more often resort to autonomy stance. A variety of both external and internal factors influencing positioning could also be traced, such as organisational roles in situation, place of meeting, discourses about countries and considerations of ‘face’.
China had a long tradition of astronomy. But, like in other cultures, astronomy in ancient China was essentially positional. The study of the physical nature of celestial bodies has only been a recent development. Knowledge about astrophysics began to be transmitted to China in the middle of the nineteenth century by Western Christian missionaries. With the downfall of the Imperial Qing Dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 astronomy began to be seen not as paraphernalia of Imperial rule but as a science with its focus on astrophysics.
During recent 30 years, the international hot spots of Geomorphology have been focusing landform evolution histories based upon sedimentation, fluvial landforms and disaster occurrences due to sediments transportation and land surface erosion, landform evolution mechanism based upon modeling simulations. The main achievements of Geomorphology in China include long time scale landform evolution under tectonic and sedimentary controls; engineering landform studies relating with reservoirs, ports and soil and water conservations; past climatic changes based upon sediments’ proxies; loess, karst and other types of landform with China regional features; and landform evolution mechanisms by modeling simulations. In the future, the basic theories, crossing and anastomosing, model simulations are required to be paid more attentions.
The history of the rainbow is as old as that of science. The ancient Greek philosophers tried to describe the rainbow, and Aristotle was the first to fully include it among the phenomena studied by physicists. Sunlight reflected in the clouds, the incidence of light rays, the reason for the rainbow’s circular shape, the optical effect of an infinite depth are aspects that have for centuries intrigued scholars, who studied the rainbow with a mixture science and alchemy, sense and sensibility. In the 17th century the rainbow became a strictly physical phenomenon, the object of rigorous investigations according to the law of reflection and refraction. Here we survey this often forgotten history, from ancient Greeks to modern scientists, the rainbow’s colours belonging to the world of physics but also—as Thomas Young wrote in 1803—to the world of speculation and imagination.
La storia dell’arcobaleno è antica quanto la storia della scienza. Già Alessandro di Afrodisia (III sec. – II sec a.C.) aveva cercato di descrivere l’arcobaleno come fenomeno di luce e colori e a lui si assegna la paternità della scoperta della zona scura tra l’arcobaleno primario e quello secondario. Si deve invece ad Aristotele (384 o 383 – 322 a.C.) una prima completa descrizione del fenomeno ottico: «L’arcobaleno non forma mai un’intera circonferenza e nemmeno un arco maggiore di una semicirconferenza. Al tramonto e all’alba lo spessore dell’arco è stretto e l’arco ha la massima estensione. Quando il sole si alza maggiormente nel cielo lo spessore si allarga e la lunghezza dell’arco si riduce. Dopo l’equinozio d’autunno, nei giorni più corti, può essere visto a qualunque ora del giorno; in estate non può essere visto nelle ore del mezzogiorno. Non ci sono mai più di due arcobaleni nello stesso tempo. Ognuno di essi ha tre colori. I colori sono gli stessi in entrambi e il loro numero è identico, ma nell’arcobaleno esterno sono più deboli e la loro posizione è invertita. Nell’arcobaleno interno la prima e più larga striscia è rossa; in quello esterno la striscia più vicina a quello interno è dello stesso colore ma più stretta. Per le altre strisce vale lo stesso principio. Queste hanno gli unici colori che i pittori non possono fabbricarsi, dato che ci sono colori da essi creati con misture, ma nessuna mistura può dare il rosso, il verde e il blu. Questi sono i colori dell’arcobaleno, per quanto talora tra il rosso e il verde si possa vedere il giallo » [Aristotele, Meteorologia: Libro III]. In questo modo, l’arcobaleno entra a pieno titolo tra i fenomeni oggetto di studio da parte dei fisici anche se, secondo Lee e Fraser: « Despite its many flaws and its appeal to Pythagorean numerology, Aristotle’s qualitative explanation showed an inventiveness and relative consistency that was unmatched for centuries. After Aristotle’s death, much rainbow theory consisted of reaction to his work, although not all of this was uncritical » [Raymond L. Lee, Alistair B. Fraser. The rainbow bridge: rainbows in art, myth, and science. Penn State Press, 2001 p. 109 ]. La descrizione aristotelica dei colori dell’arcobaleno riduce a tre il loro numero e questa interpretazione fu accettata per molto tempo, con sottili differenze numerologiche associando i tre colori alla Trinità o altrimenti quattro colori associati ai quattro elementi della tradizione empedoclea. La riflessione della luce del sole tra le nuvole, lo studio dell’angolo di incidenza dei raggi luminosi, la spiegazione della forma circolare dell’arcobaleno, l’effetto ottico di profondità infinita rispetto all’origine del fenomeno luminoso sono tutte questioni che hanno incuriosito per secoli studiosi di differenti discipline.
When one reflects on the problems that beset nature and the environment at the beginning of the 21 st century, it is clear that China, with its huge population and ongoing modernization and industrialization, is going to be one of the major contributors to those problems as well as an important factor in the search for solutions. What is striking about most of the current discussions of environmental questions is just how parochial are the terms in which they are conducted — presupposing a Cartesian-Newtonian view of the natural world as a mass of “dead matter in motion”, deriving from natural-scientific discourse that arose in western Europe during the seventeenth century. It is worth recalling that most human beings throughout most of human history have understood the natural world in a variety of quite different ways from this.
The authors of divination manuals dating to early China (c. 220 B.C.E.-c. 400 C.E.) treated divination as a technology to gain access to hidden empirical knowledge. By transcribing this knowledge in cosmological language and through the use of diagrams, the authors of these manuals attempted to standardize knowledge for capable readers. The manuals thereby mark a crucial departure from ancient China (c. 1600-c. 300 B.C.E.), when divination authority was invested in privileged individuals, whose skills were monopolized by the wealthy and powerful. The standardization of divinatory techniques and hidden knowledge in these manuals fits the context of bureaucratic expertise and the expanding scope of influence of written culture in the early imperial period. Using an historical approach, I argue that the knowledge recorded in divination manuals points to a view of divination as a perfectible technique for the discovery of practical knowledge. I carefully differentiate such information from the imagined perspective of the manual authors and the manual users.
Each chapter focuses on selections from texts containing divination manuals. The texts I will draw on originate from three caches: the "Dream Divination Book" from the Yuelu cache of bamboo slips dating to the Qin dynasty (221 B.C.E.-206 B.C.E.); five divination sections from tomb 6 at Yinwan, Jiangsu Province and dating to 11 B.C.E. (the Han Dynasty 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.); and a section from the manuscript P??lliot-Chinoise 2856 (Recto) discovered in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, Gansu Province, dating to c. 400 C.E. Using specific examples from each cache, I discuss how the texts disclose specific methods for using divination as a technique for readers to interpret their dreams, choose auspicious dates for various activities, and heal their bodies from illness.
Critical Regionalism is a notion which gained popularity in architectural debate as a synthesis of universal, ‘modern’ elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of ‘Transcultural Architecture’ and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is ‘softened’ and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. A further benefit is that several responses dependent on factors that initial definitions of Critical Regionalism never took into account can now be considered. At the book’s centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili Pietilä’s Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical ‘western’ exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. The book argues that there are different Critical Regionalisms and not all of them impose Western paradigms on non-Western cultures. Non-Western regionalists can also successfully participate in the Western enlightened discourse, even when they do not directly and consciously act against Western models. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain ‘architectural rationality’ can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort, or even tradition, but flowing out of a social game of which architecture is a part. The key concept is that of the ‘form of life’, as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thoughts are here linked to Critical Regionalism. Kenneth Frampton argues that Critical Regionalism offers something well beyond comfort and accommodation. What he has in mind are ethical prescripts closely linked to a culture of protest and resistance. This book shows that this is not a wrong assumption per se, but that Critical Regionalism can also go ‘beyond comfort and accommodation’ by investing in the search for the ‘right way of living’ or a form of life.
Smogulecki and Xue constructed the first Chinese table of logarithms of number around 1653. The table gave the logarithms of all numbers up to 100000 and is reconstructed here.
This article introduces Pulse Project (2011–), a doctoral performance research project that engages in critical discourse between art and science through the creation of digital soundscapes that weave together artistic, medical, technological, ancient and modern methodologies. Pulse ‘reading’, case histories, notations of pulses and programming soundscape compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between artist, participants and diverse medical practices. Pulse Project seeks to provide an examination of the means with which the temporal materiality of touch can be used together with audio programming to form a translation and synthesis of different ecologies and disciplines, e.g. medicine and art, Eastern and Western practices, touch and digitality, etc. Drawing upon my experience as a clinical acupuncturist (with training in biomedicine), I use Chinese pulse diagnostics together with SuperCollider (an audio synthesis programming language) to inform the composition process of each soundscape. In this way, Pulse Project interrogates the aesthetic and philosophical axioms underpinning contemporary medicine, technology and cognitive embodiment through the exploration of their corollary ‘others’—traditional Chinese medicine and music theory—in order to generate a fresh approach to embodiment and soundscape composition.
The purpose of this study is to provide a critical and historically grounded perspective on the institutional fabric for knowledge generation and innovative activities in Chinese society. Utilizing theoretical and methodological insights from social epistemology, it explores legacies of traditional Chinese perceptions of the utility of scientific knowledge, the balance of exploitation/exploration, the prestige of innovation, and the division of labour in knowledge production and application. It is argued that these legacies have continued to shape emerging contemporary institutions of knowledge and innovation. They contribute to tensions between the search for knowledge and requirements of power; they bias innovative activities towards exploitation; and they constrain creative entrepreneurship in the transitional innovation system.
The publication of two volumes of collected papers by Nathan Sivin is an event that should be welcomed by every centre where Chinese studies are taken seriously. For all his considerable reputation in a difficult area of specialized research namely the history of Chinese science, he has never sought to capitalize on his status as a specialist to “blind us with science”, but rather has written with an eye to broader problems, problems of concern at least to anyone professionally interested in the Chinese element in human experience, and (one would hope) many more besides. The spread of his concerns has meant in the past that many smaller college libraries have not possessed the periodicals and conference volumes in which his work has appeared, so this set of republished papers serves a useful function in itself. But in the second of these volumes in particular we find a number of previously unpublished works, including one of over seventy pages on a topic of considerable importance. Rather than leave this unexpected bounty simply for college librarians to acquire in order to make good existing gaps (and to have on the record the full Sivin bibliography to 1995 which may be found in the second volume), there would seem to be every reason to draw the attention of a broader number of readers to the appearance of important work which has existed for a while in draft form, but which has not been made generally available until now.
The Argument
The circulation of science across cultural boundaries involves the construction of various representations by the various actors, who each account for their involvement in the process. The historiography of the transmission of European science to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has long been dominated by one particular narrative: that of the Jesuit missionaries who were the main go-betweens for these two centuries. This fact has contributed to shaping Western images of China's history and science up to the present day.
To retrieve the multifaceted history of this transmission, more than one discourse needs to be taken into account. Even within the Society of Jesus, representations changed with the evolution of patronage of the mission, and the concomitant building up of state-sponsored science in Europe. Chinese sources yield different pictures, accounting for the reception of Western learning — rather than “European science” — in terms of integration rather than of conversion, and legitimizing it first by the Jesuits' status as scholars, then by the idea that Western learning was of Chinese origin. This shift corresponded to the imperial appropriation of this learning.
In a recent paper, Luc Faucher and others have argued for the existence of deep cultural differences between ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ ways of understanding the world and those of ‘ancient Greeks’ and ‘Americans’. Rejecting Alison Gopnik’s speculation that the development of modern science was driven by the increasing availability of leisure and information in the late Renaissance, they claim instead—following Richard Nisbett—that the birth of mathematical science was aided by ‘Greek’, or ‘Western’, cultural norms that encouraged analytic, abstract and rational theorizing. They argue that ‘Chinese’ and ‘East Asian’ cultural norms favoured, by contrast, holistic, concrete and dialectical modes of thinking. After clarifying some of the things that can be meant by ‘culture’ and ‘mentality’, the present paper shows that Faucher and his colleagues make a number of appeals—to the authority of comparative studies and history of science, to the psychological studies of Nisbett and his colleagues, and to a hidden assumption of strong cultural continuity in the West. It is argued that every one of these appeals is misguided, and, further, that the psychological findings of Nisbett and others have little bearing on questions concerning the origins of modern science. Finally, it is suggested that the ‘Needham question’ about why the birth of modern science occurred in Europe rather than anywhere else is itself multiply confused to the extent that it may express no significant query.
In the forthcoming global environment, just as there seem to be two dominant economic global poles, China and the United States, so too it appears that two global languages, Chinese and English, will remain as the most dominant languages among the 6,912 languages in use. In this article, the author discusses why Chinese and English have taken on such significance globally, demonstrating their current and likely future impact linguistically, resulting in what might be called the G2 languages, Chinese and English. The author specifically discusses: Introduction of G2 languages: Chinese and English; The role of Chinese as a dominant world language; The role of English as a dominant world language; and Conclusion. References are included.
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