Science in Traditional China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Science in Traditional China write by Joseph Needham. This book was released on 1981. Science in Traditional China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The world's preeminent authority on Chinese science explores the philosophy, social structure, arts, crafts, and even military strategies that form our understanding of Chinese science, making instructive comparisons along the way to similar elements of Indian, Hellenistic, and Arabic cultures. A major portion of the book concentrates on Taoist alchemy that led not only to the invention of gunpowder and firearms, but also, through the search for macrobiotic life-elixirs, to the rise of modern medical chemistry.
Science in Traditional China
Science in Traditional China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Science in Traditional China write by Joseph Needham. This book was released on 1993. Science in Traditional China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5 - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5 write by Joseph Needham. This book was released on 1978. The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5 available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.
On Their Own Terms
On Their Own Terms - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook On Their Own Terms write by Benjamin A. Elman. This book was released on 2009-07-01. On Their Own Terms available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Chinese Science; Explorations of an Ancient Tradition
Chinese Science; Explorations of an Ancient Tradition - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Chinese Science; Explorations of an Ancient Tradition write by Shigeru Nakayama. This book was released on 1973. Chinese Science; Explorations of an Ancient Tradition available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Some readers will be drawn to this survey of traditional Chinese science by the idea that humanity has evolved more than one tradition of natural science that deserves to be taken seriously as a study in itself. Others will wish to explore the possibility that by reconstructing and imaginatively adopting the viewpoint of so different a culture, they might become more critical in judging what aspects of the West's Scientific Revolution grew out of local pressures and prejudices rather than out of the inner necessities of science itself.The volume falls naturally into two complementary parts. The first provides the reader with perspectives on the work of Joseph Needham, whose monumental, multi-volume "Science and Civilisation in China" is so largely responsible for the growing awareness on the part of inquiring people everywhere that the Chinese technical traditions reached a high level, and that the birth of modern science and technology owes a great deal to them. Needham's work has often been cited as the greatest one-man historical compilation of the twentieth century.Needham himself has contributed an opening "Meditation" to "Chinese Science, " in which he recapitulates the motive forces and ideals behind his life's work--of which the historical study of Chinese science is only one aspect. Derek J. de Solla Price then provides biographical material on Needham and gives an account of the genesis and evolution of his "magnum opus." Needham's central concern with the effect of social and economic factors on the rate of scientific and technological change is examined by A. C. Graham. Shigeru Nakayama demonstrates through a study of all of Needham's publications the presence of a connected philosophy of history and of science that Needham evolved as a young biochemist concerned with the organization and development of life.The more numerous essays in the second part of the book extend Needham's work of mapping out the areas of Chinese science, venturing into provinces hitherto "terra incognita." The contributors cover the Chinese world view, astronomy, optics, pharmacology, and medicine.In particular, they discuss the Chinese concept of nature (in an essay written by Mitukuni Yosida); the development, and limiting factors on the development, of Chinese astronomy (Kiyosi Yabuuti); the Mohist optics of ca. 300 B.C. (A. C. Graham and N. Sivin); the use of elixir plants, as described in the pharmaceutical manual of the adept Lu Ch'un-yang (Ho Peng Yoke, Beda Lim, and Francis Morsingh); "Man as a Medicine," the traditional therapy using drugs derived from the human body (William C. Cooper and N. Sivin); and the early history of anesthesia in China and Japan (Saburo Miyasita). The book closes with a critical bibliography citing books and articles in Western languages (N. Sivin).The book is the second in The MIT East Asian Science Series.
