The Jesuits in Asia: Encounters between Eastern and Western Science

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

How is scientific fact distinguished from religious belief? What happens when two cultures meet who conceive these notions in different manners? When the Jesuits arrived in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they brought both new religious concepts and new scientific ideas. For them, the difference between the two was relatively clear and unproblematic. However, subsequent interactions with the Chinese and Japanese would demonstrate that the matter was not so simple. On the one hand, Chengsheng Sun describes how the Jesuits themselves began to alter Aristotelian science as part of their efforts to reach the Chinese scholars. On the other hand, Qiong Zhang shows that these Chinese scholars did not always take this science in the ways that the missionaries wished, using Western meteorology for the purposes of divination. James Fujitani examines how the Jesuit missionaries in Japan succeeded in combining European and Sino-Japanese medical techniques, but also how this provoked scandal due to differing cultural views of the human body. How should we understand these situations? Were they cases of scientific misunderstanding, or of productive intercultural collaboration? This panel, then, delves into the extraordinary and unpredictable forms of knowledge and belief that grew out of the first contacts between Europe and East Asia.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• James Fujitani, Azusa Pacific University

Chair

• James Fujitani, Azusa Pacific University

Individual Presentations

• Aristotle’s Problems in China: A Case Study on Feilu dahui - Chengsheng Sun, Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Twice Made in China: Renaissance Meteorology in the Late Ming and Early Qing - Qiong Zhang, Wake Forest University

• Eastern and Western Medicine in the Jesuit Mission to Japan - James Fujitani, Azusa Pacific University

Discussant

• Hui-hung Chen, National Taiwan University