Project Overview
The Needham Revolution: Integrating toward Progressive Knowledge
Department(s)
East Asian Languages and Literatures
Abstract
This book project studies important writings of Joseph Needham (1900 - 1995), a British biochemist-evolved-historian who created a revolution of knowledge with his monumental accomplishment — the twenty-nine volume Science and Civilisation in China (SCC, 1954 - 2015). Seemingly focused on China, the work in actuality consists of detailed historical comparison (the chemist in Needham calls it “titration”) of the development and transmission of scientific thoughts and practices in and among multiple civilizations. His work shows that science is not a privilege to any single civilization but a cumulative force that belongs to humanity as a whole.
How did Needham come to envision and realize a work of such socio-historical scope and intellectual unconventionality? According to the accepted view, Needham started with a question in the 1930s in the biochemistry lab of Cambridge University, later referred to as the “Needham question”: “Why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilization (or Indian) but only in Europe?” It sounds like a strike from the Muse. Many scholars have tried, some still trying, to answer the question, disappointed that Needham falls short despite his SCC, to which he dedicated five decades of research and writing.
My book project does not attempt to answer this question. Rather, I am interested in where his question came from – I find the strike from the Muse incredible. My research shows that, after studying Chinese language and history in his spare time in the lab, Needham researched traditional science in China starting in 1943 in the midst of China’s raging war against fascism, leading eventually to SCC. I discovered that Needham was not a narrowly defined biologist within the walls of the discipline. On the contrary, he was an extremely prolific writer of books and articles constantly reflecting on his involvement in the delivery of biochemistry as a science in the early 20th century out of traditional Aristotelian biology. In so doing, he theorized a harmonization of religion and science as well as life and matter against traditional dualism; he also actively participated in the founding of science history as an academic field at Cambridge, with a keen interest in comprehensive science history of all cultures. By close reading of Needham’s earlier writings and parts of SCC in a comparative light, my current work explores: How was Needham intellectually situated as a biochemist so that he would later come up with his initial question and see the point of research on Chinese science (instead of taking for granted that China lacked science, like his colleagues at Cambridge as well as, alas, Einstein)? Since he did not answer the question he raised, what did he mean by it? How does it fit into his scheme of thought and practice as a whole? What did he actually do with it, so that it eventually led to SCC, a work embodying a methodology which no one wishing to debunk established perception and create new knowledge can afford to ignore? I argue that SCC as a multi-civilizational history of science is a further development of his earlier innovation in biochemistry that reconciled the spiritual and the physical, the organic and inorganic, and that both stages together constitute a continuous intellectual revolution toward integrative knowledge ranging from science to social science, none the less than those of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin.
Student Qualifications
I would appreciate a native speaker of English, a good reader of philosophy and history.
I would also appreciate a native speaker of Chinese, a good reader of philosophy and history.
Number of Student Researchers
2 students
Project Length
10 weeks
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