Locating a Center on the Surface of a Globe : Negotiating China's Position on the Spherical Earth in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century China and Korea(<Special Issue>New Perspectives in the History of East Asian Science)

概要

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The Jesuits in seventeenth-century China used the Western scientific ideas, especially the concept of a round earth, to disprove the Confucian idea of China's centrality in the world. They instead advanced an alternative worldview, in which Europe was presented as a region of high culture, at least comparable to that of China. This paper examines how Confucian literati of China and Korea, particularly who accepted the Western idea of a round earth, responded to the Jesuits' criticism of the Sino-centric worldview. I will highlight the literati's efforts to find a middle ground, upon which the tension between the Western idea and the Confucian belief in China's centrality could be resolved. The common strategy adopted by the literati was to find out the division of cosmic qualities hidden behind the geometrically even surface of the spherical earth and then to demonstrate that China's place was the most propitious in this cosmically wrinkled topography of the earth. In the course of their efforts, the literati relied upon a variety of empirical evidence drawn not only from the traditional cosmology, but also from Western science, such as the idea of climate zones and the geomagnetic variation of a magnetic compass.
日本科学史学会の論文
2008-03-31