The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology by Dagmar Schäfer

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.

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