Joseph Needham, renowned sinologist, is famous for a question he once posed, now bearing his name: Why didn’t modern science develop in Asia, above all China, but possibly India or Islamic culture? Needham never found an answer that satisfied him. Neither, if a single solution be wanted, has any of the many other attempts to address the issue. In fact, it may be the wrong question to ask. Astounded by the achievements he saw in Chinese history, Needham wanted to know what prevented the birth of early modern science in Asia, and his question has directed similar efforts to discover what factor(s) were missing or weak in other great cultures. A problem with this approach is that it traps us into making comparisons that never end and that, at some level, aim at finding the essences of true science. I want to suggest something different. It begins with the premise that these cultures did not fail in some fundamental way, but that Europe succeeded more. It succeeded more, and in a greater number of domains, scientific and technological, because it gained access to more in the way
{"title":"Why Did Modern Science Emerge in Europe? An Essay in Intellectual History","authors":"S. Montgomery","doi":"10.1086/701903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/701903","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph Needham, renowned sinologist, is famous for a question he once posed, now bearing his name: Why didn’t modern science develop in Asia, above all China, but possibly India or Islamic culture? Needham never found an answer that satisfied him. Neither, if a single solution be wanted, has any of the many other attempts to address the issue. In fact, it may be the wrong question to ask. Astounded by the achievements he saw in Chinese history, Needham wanted to know what prevented the birth of early modern science in Asia, and his question has directed similar efforts to discover what factor(s) were missing or weak in other great cultures. A problem with this approach is that it traps us into making comparisons that never end and that, at some level, aim at finding the essences of true science. I want to suggest something different. It begins with the premise that these cultures did not fail in some fundamental way, but that Europe succeeded more. It succeeded more, and in a greater number of domains, scientific and technological, because it gained access to more in the way","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116624561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
O nce restricted to the privacy of the doctor’s office, ultrasound images of the fetus are now immediately recognizable in the public arena. They are commonplace in advertising and socialmedia, fromprovocative antichoice billboards featuring fetal imagery to Facebook posts tagged “baby’s first pic.” These depictions of the fetus in utero have become iconic and are arguably the most easily recognizedmedical image. How andwhy did this happen?And atwhat price and to what end? This article takes a longue durée historical approach to these questions and explores the complex evolution of the fetal image inWestern Christian culture from the late Middle Ages to the present. We show that before images of the fetus in utero entered the digital age, they had been curated and deployed in three distinctive ways over the past fivehundredyears. The resulting images fed into andwere theproducts of changing approaches to “reproduction.” We understand “reproduction” as both an embodied medical phenomenon and a material technique of image reproduction. Against the backdrop of evolving obstetri-
{"title":"The Fetus in Utero: From Mystery to Social Media","authors":"M. Carlyle, Brian C Callender","doi":"10.1086/703049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703049","url":null,"abstract":"O nce restricted to the privacy of the doctor’s office, ultrasound images of the fetus are now immediately recognizable in the public arena. They are commonplace in advertising and socialmedia, fromprovocative antichoice billboards featuring fetal imagery to Facebook posts tagged “baby’s first pic.” These depictions of the fetus in utero have become iconic and are arguably the most easily recognizedmedical image. How andwhy did this happen?And atwhat price and to what end? This article takes a longue durée historical approach to these questions and explores the complex evolution of the fetal image inWestern Christian culture from the late Middle Ages to the present. We show that before images of the fetus in utero entered the digital age, they had been curated and deployed in three distinctive ways over the past fivehundredyears. The resulting images fed into andwere theproducts of changing approaches to “reproduction.” We understand “reproduction” as both an embodied medical phenomenon and a material technique of image reproduction. Against the backdrop of evolving obstetri-","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127421982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M ost adherents of the world’s religions claim that their traditions place a premium on virtues like love, compassion, and forgiveness, and that the state toward which they aim is one of universal peace. History has shown us, however, that religious traditions are human affairs, and that no matter how noble they may be in their aspirations, they display a full range of both human virtues and human failings. While few sophisticated observers are shocked, then, by the occurrence of religious violence, there is one notable exception in this regard; there remains a persistent and widespread belief that Buddhist societies really are peaceful and harmonious. This presumption is evident in the reactions of astonishment many people have to events like those taking place in Myanmar. How, many wonder, could a Buddhist society—especially Buddhist monks!—have anything to do with something so monstrously violent as the ethnic cleansing now being perpetrated on Myanmar’s long-beleaguered Rohingya minority? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be compassionate and pacifist?
{"title":"Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?","authors":"D. Arnold, Alicia Turner","doi":"10.1086/701836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/701836","url":null,"abstract":"M ost adherents of the world’s religions claim that their traditions place a premium on virtues like love, compassion, and forgiveness, and that the state toward which they aim is one of universal peace. History has shown us, however, that religious traditions are human affairs, and that no matter how noble they may be in their aspirations, they display a full range of both human virtues and human failings. While few sophisticated observers are shocked, then, by the occurrence of religious violence, there is one notable exception in this regard; there remains a persistent and widespread belief that Buddhist societies really are peaceful and harmonious. This presumption is evident in the reactions of astonishment many people have to events like those taking place in Myanmar. How, many wonder, could a Buddhist society—especially Buddhist monks!—have anything to do with something so monstrously violent as the ethnic cleansing now being perpetrated on Myanmar’s long-beleaguered Rohingya minority? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be compassionate and pacifist?","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125556830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A t 5:14 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area, destroying hundreds of buildings. The damage was most heavily concentrated in San Francisco itself. Due to problems with the city’s water supply, several isolated conflagrationsmorphed into a giant firestorm that destroyed much of the city, including the entire working-class district south of Market Street and most of Chinatown. The catastrophe prompted an exodus of residents fromall walks of life, including several prominent writers and artists. The poet Ina Coolbrith was left homeless, and the photographer Carleton Watkins lost nearly his entire life’s work. An image of Watkins with a cane being helped from his studio as a fire rages in the background has become one of the iconic images of the disaster. The painter Xavier Martinez relocated to the Piedmont hills above Oakland, while others left for the fledgling bohemian colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea on the Monterey Peninsula to the south. In themidst of all this displacement, a story of knowledge production was unfolding in the burning city. As displaced residents looked
{"title":"Writing on Rubble: Dispatches from San Francisco, 1906","authors":"Alexander Olson","doi":"10.1086/702544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702544","url":null,"abstract":"A t 5:14 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area, destroying hundreds of buildings. The damage was most heavily concentrated in San Francisco itself. Due to problems with the city’s water supply, several isolated conflagrationsmorphed into a giant firestorm that destroyed much of the city, including the entire working-class district south of Market Street and most of Chinatown. The catastrophe prompted an exodus of residents fromall walks of life, including several prominent writers and artists. The poet Ina Coolbrith was left homeless, and the photographer Carleton Watkins lost nearly his entire life’s work. An image of Watkins with a cane being helped from his studio as a fire rages in the background has become one of the iconic images of the disaster. The painter Xavier Martinez relocated to the Piedmont hills above Oakland, while others left for the fledgling bohemian colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea on the Monterey Peninsula to the south. In themidst of all this displacement, a story of knowledge production was unfolding in the burning city. As displaced residents looked","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"48 189 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125945720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Of all the ancient philosophical and political texts that characterize the Western classics, Plato’s Republic stands at the forefront. Its topic, broadly speaking, is the nature of the ideal city-state, whose outline emerges as the outcome of a dialogue between Socrates and several Athenian and non-Athenian interlocutors. This ideal city-state depends (for Socrates) on a correct understanding and application of justice, which will provide the basis for all the subsequent arguments. But before Socrates launches into the description of the ideal and just citystate, he takes a fateful step: he asserts that whatever justice is in the individual, so it is too in the city-state. In striking contrast to modern, Rawlsian definitions of justice, Socrates ties justice in the individual to the proper hierarchy of three elements Plato takes to constitute any human soul: the rational, spirited, and appetitive elements. These elements are generally in competition with each other for control of the soul; the rational and spirited elements may sometimes work together, but the appetitive is more or less unredeemable. Justice in the soul
{"title":"Plato’s Republic in the People’s Republic of China","authors":"S. Bartsch","doi":"10.1086/701869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/701869","url":null,"abstract":"Of all the ancient philosophical and political texts that characterize the Western classics, Plato’s Republic stands at the forefront. Its topic, broadly speaking, is the nature of the ideal city-state, whose outline emerges as the outcome of a dialogue between Socrates and several Athenian and non-Athenian interlocutors. This ideal city-state depends (for Socrates) on a correct understanding and application of justice, which will provide the basis for all the subsequent arguments. But before Socrates launches into the description of the ideal and just citystate, he takes a fateful step: he asserts that whatever justice is in the individual, so it is too in the city-state. In striking contrast to modern, Rawlsian definitions of justice, Socrates ties justice in the individual to the proper hierarchy of three elements Plato takes to constitute any human soul: the rational, spirited, and appetitive elements. These elements are generally in competition with each other for control of the soul; the rational and spirited elements may sometimes work together, but the appetitive is more or less unredeemable. Justice in the soul","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125639692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
These Japanese are by nature spirited and fearless. They have something of that ancient ferocity of the Romans, who in their valor would take their own lives before falling into the hands of their enemies. But in this, the Japanese surpass the Romans because they not only consider it dishonorable to die at the hands of their enemies, but they also consider it an indignity to die in any manner that is not killing themselves with their own hands.
{"title":"Imperial History without Provincial Loyalty? Reading Roman History in Renaissance Japan","authors":"S. McManus","doi":"10.1086/702174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702174","url":null,"abstract":"These Japanese are by nature spirited and fearless. They have something of that ancient ferocity of the Romans, who in their valor would take their own lives before falling into the hands of their enemies. But in this, the Japanese surpass the Romans because they not only consider it dishonorable to die at the hands of their enemies, but they also consider it an indignity to die in any manner that is not killing themselves with their own hands.","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122044821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How are we to inherit? What are we to inherit? And to what purpose?—such are the questions that must be asked with particular urgency in China, a country that both inherits a civilization several millennia old and is slated to become the next dominant world power. Burdened with the immense weight of a tradition that reaches back to the age of the pyramids, China sees itself as launched on a phenomenal ascent in power that seems to encounter no obstacles. An extraordinary tension arises in this way between two contrary and contradictory movements: precisely themovements indicated by the title of this colloquium, the word “inheriting” suggesting an orientation toward the past, and the phrase “and then?” pointing toward the future. In the case of contemporary China, the question posed in these terms can only give rise to a series of paradoxes. If we begin by asking, “What is worth inheriting?” it quickly emerges that, unexpectedly, China has preserved immaterial monuments in preference to material ones. When we turn to the modernization process, we will see that the Chinese have had to face the dilemma of, on the one hand, needing to jettison their past into the
{"title":"The Future of Cultural Memory in an Amnesiac China","authors":"A. Cheng","doi":"10.1086/701947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/701947","url":null,"abstract":"How are we to inherit? What are we to inherit? And to what purpose?—such are the questions that must be asked with particular urgency in China, a country that both inherits a civilization several millennia old and is slated to become the next dominant world power. Burdened with the immense weight of a tradition that reaches back to the age of the pyramids, China sees itself as launched on a phenomenal ascent in power that seems to encounter no obstacles. An extraordinary tension arises in this way between two contrary and contradictory movements: precisely themovements indicated by the title of this colloquium, the word “inheriting” suggesting an orientation toward the past, and the phrase “and then?” pointing toward the future. In the case of contemporary China, the question posed in these terms can only give rise to a series of paradoxes. If we begin by asking, “What is worth inheriting?” it quickly emerges that, unexpectedly, China has preserved immaterial monuments in preference to material ones. When we turn to the modernization process, we will see that the Chinese have had to face the dilemma of, on the one hand, needing to jettison their past into the","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"8 9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130519244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I t ’s a series of average paintings, produced by an evidently average painter. Rendered between 1894 and 1901 by Ogden Rood, the chair of physics at Columbia University, watercolor landscapes unfold in flecks and smears of color. Splotches of trees materialize from the embrace of fog-filled valleys. Distant mountains shimmer hazily against vibrating foliage. A sharply drawn church steeple and a tall, blurry, pine tree vie for compositional primacy against splashes of rolling farmland. A low stable (or is it a peat hut?) protrudes from a copse of shrubs. An occasional lightning bolt or radiantly illuminated cloud— rendered in opaque, white gouache—splits the sky (see fig. 1). The scenes are in every way conventional—every way, that is, except for their justification. For rather than simply representing mountains and trees, or pastoral beauty—or, for that matter, reflecting a certain pride in facility with paint, or even the sheer pleasure of daubing pigment on paper—these paintings were an attempt by the aging scientist to prove to himself that his work in physics could not have inspired French impressionism.
{"title":"Seeing and Knowing: From Landscape Painting to Physics (and Back Again)","authors":"Michael Rossi","doi":"10.1086/699818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699818","url":null,"abstract":"I t ’s a series of average paintings, produced by an evidently average painter. Rendered between 1894 and 1901 by Ogden Rood, the chair of physics at Columbia University, watercolor landscapes unfold in flecks and smears of color. Splotches of trees materialize from the embrace of fog-filled valleys. Distant mountains shimmer hazily against vibrating foliage. A sharply drawn church steeple and a tall, blurry, pine tree vie for compositional primacy against splashes of rolling farmland. A low stable (or is it a peat hut?) protrudes from a copse of shrubs. An occasional lightning bolt or radiantly illuminated cloud— rendered in opaque, white gouache—splits the sky (see fig. 1). The scenes are in every way conventional—every way, that is, except for their justification. For rather than simply representing mountains and trees, or pastoral beauty—or, for that matter, reflecting a certain pride in facility with paint, or even the sheer pleasure of daubing pigment on paper—these paintings were an attempt by the aging scientist to prove to himself that his work in physics could not have inspired French impressionism.","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123788162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
n what sense is an exhibition the basis for knowledge? I ask myself the question because I have, for the fi rst time, curated a large show comprising major loans — the result of a long academic project entitled Empires of Faith (based at the British Museum and in Wolfson College, Oxford). The exhibition, called Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions , explores the ways the visual iden-tities of the world religions were formed during the fi rst millennium through interaction, dialogue, encounter, and self-conscious differ-entiation through divergence. 1 The curatorial team has focused on the formative periods in the arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Ju-daism, and Christianity across Eurasia from India to Ireland. The result has been on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between October 2017 and February 2018.
{"title":"Exhibitions and the Formation of Knowledge","authors":"J. Elsner","doi":"10.1086/699008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699008","url":null,"abstract":"n what sense is an exhibition the basis for knowledge? I ask myself the question because I have, for the fi rst time, curated a large show comprising major loans — the result of a long academic project entitled Empires of Faith (based at the British Museum and in Wolfson College, Oxford). The exhibition, called Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions , explores the ways the visual iden-tities of the world religions were formed during the fi rst millennium through interaction, dialogue, encounter, and self-conscious differ-entiation through divergence. 1 The curatorial team has focused on the formative periods in the arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Ju-daism, and Christianity across Eurasia from India to Ireland. The result has been on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between October 2017 and February 2018.","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133440770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/700613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/700613","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":187662,"journal":{"name":"KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122984229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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