Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780226251905
Subjects: Nature study; Science, japan; Japan, history
Description: Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzogaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity-and then seemingly disappeared. Or did it? In this book, Federico Marcon recounts how Japanese scholars developed a sophisticated discipline of natural history analogous to Europe's but created independently, without direct influence, and argues convincingly that Japanese natural history succumbed to Western science not because of suppression and substitution, as scholars traditionally have contended, but by adaptation and transformation.