ENGLISH

The knowledge of nature and the nature of knowledge in early modern Japan

By Federico , Marcon

Book information

Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
Year
2016
ISBN
9780226251905, 9780226252063, 022625206X
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
7 MB (7342726 bytes)
Series
Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Columbia University
Pages
illustrations (black and white)\429
Time added
2020-07-26 19:24:52
1600-1868;JapanNature study;Nature study--Japan--History;Science;

Description

Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity-and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In this book, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe's but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.

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