ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘Sciences from Enlightenment Studio’: A Philosophy of Science in Rural China, 1860-1890

• In Event: Late Nineteenth-century Sciences

English Abstract

In the early 1890s, a local official in the hills of Western Jiangxi province travelled to a small village near the foot of a karst sandstone mountain. In the household of a recently deceased scholar—the first recorded Chinese person to travel overland to India in 1,000 years—he found a collection of essays, letters, reports, and observations about astronomy, mathematics, natural history, musicology, linguistics, and physics. Later collated into a woodblock-printed book called Sciences from Enlightenment Studio (Deyi Zhai Suanxue, 1896), the writings, along with earlier manuscript reading notes by the same author, reveal what science meant to one man, living far from the centers of knowledge exchange, in a country already considered peripheral to nineteenth-century scientific project.
A close reading of these texts shows that at this liminal period (1860-1890) science was not yet fully coded as ‘Western’. The vocabularies, themes, methods, and epistemological systems used to understand things like the orbit of the planets, trigonometry, metrology, barometers, ballistics, chemistry, and meteorological phenomena could be seen as growing out of native Chinese systems of natural historical investigation. The author emphasizes continuity with Chinese inductive philosophies, particularly li or ‘reason,’ while remaining ambiguous about the reality of cultural difference. Discrete civilizational categories—namely, the “West” and “China”—remain important for his discourse, even while he argues that their conclusions and categorizations reflect the same material reality.

Author

• John Alekna, Peking University