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Curious Land
How the Jesuit accomodation to internal events in China laid the foundation for modern study of China in the West. First published as Studia Leibnitiana, Supplementa 25 (1985) by Fritz Steiner Verlag. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
A Global Enlightenment
A revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science. The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to...
The Jesuits, the Padroado and East Asian Science (1552-1773)
At the end of the 15th century, Portugal was given the oversight (Padroado) of all Catholic missions in Asia. The Society of Jesus played a major role in this enterprise of evangelization, which in Jesuit hands led to the transmission of major elements of European mathematical sciences to East Asia. The essays in this volume present important new data and analysis on the extent to and ways in which Jesuit scientific culture and Portuguese policies regarding education, trade and mission shaped the reception of OC Western learningOCO in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam in the early modern period. Sample Chapter(s). Foreword (89 KB). The Jesuit Mathematicians of the Portuguese Assistancy and the...
Ideas of Chinese Gardens
An annotated collection of essential texts written by European observers from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Ideas of Chinese Gardens chronicles the evolution of Western perceptions of gardens of China, from curiosity to admiration and ultimately to rejection, echoing the changes in European attitudes toward China.
Oedipus Against Freud
Sigmund Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus myth - that subconsciously, every man wants to kill his father in order to obtain his mother's undivided attention - is widely known. Arguing that the pervasiveness of Freud's ideas has unduly influenced scholars studying the works of Modernist writers, Bradley W. Buchanan re-examines the Oedipal narratives of authors such as D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce in order to explore their conflicted attitudes towards the humanism that underpins Freud's views. In the alternatives to the Freudian version of Oedipus offered by twentieth-century authors, Buchanan finds a complex examination of the limits of human understanding. Following the analyses of philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel and Frederick Nietzsche and anticipating critiques by writers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, British Modernists saw Oedipus as representative of the embattled humanist project. Closing with the concept of posthumanism as explored by authors such as Zadie Smith, Oedipus Against Freud demonstrates the lasting significance of the Oedipus story.
Qing Encounters
Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the contact between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures’ visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex new creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.
Searching the Heavens and the Earth
Jesuits established a large number of astronomical, geophysical and meteorological observatories during the 17th and 18th centuries and again during the 19th and 20th centuries throughout the world. The history of these observatories has never been published in a complete form. Many early European astronomical observatories were established in Jesuit colleges. During the 17th and 18th centuries Jesuits were the first western scientists to enter into contact with China and India. It was through them that western astronomy was first introduced in these countries. They made early astronomical observations in India and China and they directed for 150 years the Imperial Observatory of Beijing. In the 19th and 20th centuries a new set of observatories were established. Besides astronomy these now included meteorology and geophysics. Jesuits established some of the earliest observatories in Africa, South America and the Far East. Jesuit observatories constitute an often forgotten chapter of the history of these sciences.
On Their Own Terms
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
The Inner Opium War
Why did defeat in the Opium War not lead Ch'ing China to a more realistic appreciation of Western might and Chinese weakness? James Polachek's revisionist analysis exposes the behind-the-scenes political struggles that not only shaped foreign-policy decisions in the 1830s and 1840s but have continued to affect the history of Chinese nationalism in modern times. Polachek looks closely at the networks of literati and officials, self-consciously reminiscent of the late Ming era that sought and gained the ear of the emperor. Challenging the conventional view that Lin Tse-hsu and his supporters were selfless patriots who acted in China's best interests, Polachek agrues that, for reasons having more to do with their own domestic political agenda, these men advocated a futile policy of militant resistance to the West. Linking political intrigue, scholarly debates, and foreign affairs, local notables in Canton and literati lobbyists in Perking this book sets the Opium War for the first times in its "inner," domestic political context.
Jesuit Contribution to Science
This book presents a comprehensive history of the many contributions the Jesuits made to science from their founding to the present. It also links the Jesuits dedication to science with their specific spirituality which tries to find God in all things. The book begins with Christopher Clavius, professor of mathematics in the Roman College between 1567 and 1595, the initiator of this tradition. It covers Jesuits scientific contributions in mathematics, astronomy, physics and cartography up until the suppression of the order by the Pope in 1773. Next, the book details the scientific work the Jesuits pursued after their restoration in 1814. It examines the establishment of a network of observat...
