Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-modern China

The Chinese have given the world paper, printing, porcelain, gunpowder, the mariner’s compass, and other inventions important in the history and development of science. Yet it was Europe, not China, that experienced the scientific and technological revolution that transformed the world from the seventeenth century onward. In this challenging work, Bodde examines the cultural requisites for science and technology in early China and other pre-modern civilizations. Bodde does not focus on Chinese science and technology per se but on the wide range of intellectual and social forces at work in China that may have favored or disfavored science and technology in pre-modern China—forces, Bodde argues, overwhelmingly humanistic: the written classical language known as Literary Chinese; concepts of time and space; religious attitudes; theories of government and society; moral and social values pertaining to sex, individualism, militarism, and competition; and Chinese attitudes toward nature. Comparisons and contrasts are drawn using similar factors in Western and other civilizations, thereby adding significantly to our view of the Western world, past and present, as well as that of China. Most impressive is Bodde’s familiarity with original sources and his insistence on providing his own translations of often highly technical work, making available to the reader valuable source material. Cogent, clear, and based on careful scholarship, Chinese Thought, Society, and Science 1s indispensable for reflection on the issue of receptivity of classical and contemporary China to scientific ideas, methods, and practice. Derk Bodde, professor emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a past president of the American Oriental Society and a recipient of the Association for Asian Studies’ Distinguished Scholar Award. Professor Bodde has published on a wide range of subjects, from China’s first empire in the third century B.c., to New Year festivals in classical China, Chinese philosophy and criminal law, the influence of China on Tolstoy, and communism in China in 1948-1949.