By Dagmar Schäfer
The final many years of the Ming dynasty, notwithstanding stricken by chaos and destruction, observed an important raise of courses that tested advances in wisdom and expertise. one of the various courses and reference books that seemed in this interval used to be a chain of texts by way of tune Yingxing (1587–1666?), a minor neighborhood authentic dwelling in southern China. His Tiangong kaiwu, the longest and so much well known of those works, files the extraction and processing of uncooked fabrics and the manufacture of products necessary to way of life, from yeast and wine to paper and ink to boats, carts, and firearms.
In The Crafting of the 10,000 Things, Dagmar Schäfer probes this attention-grabbing textual content and the legacy of its writer to shed new mild at the improvement of clinical considering in China, the aim of technical writing, and its function in and results on chinese language historical past. Meticulously unfolding the layers of Song’s own and cultural existence, Schäfer chronicles the criteria that influenced track to rework useful wisdom into written tradition. She then examines how track received, assessed, and eventually awarded wisdom, and in doing so articulates this era’s ways to rationality, fact, and trust within the research of nature and tradition alike. Finally, Schäfer areas Song’s efforts along side the paintings of different chinese language philosophers and writers, ahead of, in the course of, and after his time, and argues that those writings exhibit jointly a uniquely chinese language approach of authorizing know-how as a sound box of scholarly quandary and philosophical knowledge.
Offering an summary of 1000 years of scholarship, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things explains the position of know-how and crafts in a tradition that had an outstandingly profitable culture during this box and used to be a vital effect at the technical improvement of Europe at the eve of the commercial Revolution.
Read Online or Download The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China PDF
Best history & philosophy on science & nature books
Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Film and Culture Series)
From the architectural spectacle of the medieval cathedral and the romantic elegant of the nineteenth-century landscape to the techno-fetishism of trendy London technological know-how Museum, people have received a deeper figuring out of the flora and fauna via hugely illusionistic representations that engender new modes of seeing, listening, and pondering.
Evolution, video games, and God explores how cooperation and altruism, along mutation and normal choice, play a severe position in evolution, from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a bent to cooperate and self-sacrifice on behalf of others might be as priceless to a population’s survival because the self-preserving instincts of people.
Within the Eighties, philosophical, historic and social reports of technology underwent a transformation which later developed right into a flip to practice. Analysts of technology have been requested to concentrate on medical practices in meticulous element and alongside a number of dimensions, together with the cloth, social and mental.
Complex Geography by way of Ralph Stockman Tarr. This e-book is a duplicate of the unique ebook released in 1909 and should have a few imperfections similar to marks or hand-written notes.
- World's Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity, 1937–1942
- The Works of Charles Darwin: Vol 26: The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (Second Edition, 1884) (The Pickering Masters)
- The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism
- Routledge Revivals: Easy Lessons in Einstein (1922): A Discussion of the More Intelligible Features of the Theory of Relativity
- Beyond Technocracy: Science, Politics and Citizens
- Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification (Methodology & History in Anthropology)
Additional resources for The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China
Example text