MCLC: Benjamin Elman talk

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Melissa Dale <mdale3 at usfca.edu>
Subject: Benjamin Elman talk
***********************************************************

If you will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in early March, please join
us!

 
Prof. Benjamin Elman to speak at the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western
Cultural History at the University of San Francisco Center for the Pacific
Rim
 
March 6 (Thursday), 2014, 5:00 – 6:30 PM
University of San Francisco, Fromm Hall, Berman Room

 
 
Traduttore, Traditore: The Jesuit Construction of Science via Translation
in Ming-Qing China, 1600-1800
 
Dr. Benjamin Elman, Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton
University

 
When Europeans reached China during the age of exploration, the highest
learning (scientia) of their men of culture did not connote natural
science. For Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), natural philosophy, not natural
science, was a field of higher learning. Science was a medieval French
term, which was synonymous with accurate and systematized knowledge. When
Latinized the word became scientia and represented among scholastics and
early modern elites the specialized branches of Aristotelian moral and
natural philosophy. Included in the Scholastic regime for learning were
the seven sciences of medieval learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric,
arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Comparable to the classical
ideal of the six arts in ancient China (rites, music, archery,
charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics), these seven liberal arts
served in Roman education as preparation for more specialized training in
philosophy, medicine, or law.

 
Like contemporary Europeans and Islamic scholars, late imperial Chinese
also prioritized mathematical studies for their pre-modern exact sciences,
which informed Chinese astronomy, geography, cartography, and alchemy in
different ways. Literati also applied the naturalistic concepts of yin and
yang and the five evolutive phases (wuxing五行) to elucidate the spontaneous
(ziran自然) changes in the stuff of the world (qi氣). Rational and abstract
explanations of natural things and phenomena characterized the pre-modern
sciences worldwide, particularly Chinese elite traditions of natural
studies. I spotlight the early modern scientific texts translated jointly
by Christian missionaries and Chinese literati. These science translations
were not simply innocent byproducts of the missionary enterprise, however.
The science texts the missionaries successfully translated into classical
Chinese were encoded with Christian messages and religiously-induced
silences. Hence, I do not focus on translation as a futile exercise in
philosophical incommensurability. Instead, I point to the use of Christian
beliefs in the scientific textbooks translated into Chinese.

Melissa S. Dale, Ph.D.Executive Director & Assistant Professor
Center for the Pacific Rim
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton St., KA-180A

San Francisco, CA  94117-1080
(415) 422-2590