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Date(s)： 2022/05/05
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Archives 1st Conference Hall + Webex
Speaker：Prof. Sean Hsiang-lin LEI (Research fellow and Director)
Disscussant： Prof. Peter Zarrow ( Department of History, UCONN )
Organizer： IMH
Webex Meeting：https://asmeet.webex.com/asmeet/j.php?MTID=m1d9106f034f38a646282d5038e14ae54 ID：2514 506 2931 Password：s62mxgx2R Abstract: There is an intriguing puzzle to be found in the historiography of science in modern China: While Yan Fu’s Tianyanlun 天演論 (On Heavenly Evolution), which was published in 1898 as the Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893), is universally celebrated as the most influential book in modern Chinese intellectual history, this science-based book receives little—if any—credit in the history of science. Challenging the conventional understanding of On Heavenly Evolution in terms of Social Darwinism, this article instead proposes to understand this text in terms of “Western science,” more precisely in terms of “Western gezhi” 西學格致 (Western-Style “Investigation of Things to Acquire Knowledge”)—the term Yan Fu 嚴復(1854-1921) coined to render “Western science” into Chinese so as to fashion On Heavenly Evolution as a representative text of “Western science.” By foregrounding Yan Fu’s concept of “Western gezhi,” this article re-contextualizes this crucial text of modern Chinese thought as a pivotal moment in a three-century-long struggle to fashion “Western science” as Neo-Confucian gezhi so as to win cultural authority for it in China.