Sela, Ori (Author)
This study focuses on the eighteenth-century polymath Qian Daxin. Qian's peers regarded him as the greatest scholar of their dynasty, yet during the twentieth century Qian Daxin was marginalized. I argue that in order to understand Qian Daxin, as well as the reasons for his marginalization, we need to analyze the nexus of knowledge and identity, and do so according to the terms of the historical actors, not according to anachronistic, and foreign, categories imposed on the actors. This nexus of knowledge and identity has had bearing on the ways Qian Daxin thought of his scholarship, on the contents of his studies, as well as on the history of his reception in the two centuries following his death. In order to enter Qian Daxin's world I therefore begin with his biography, examining the social history of scholars during the eighteenth century via Qian's changing and intricate web of social networks. Through his scholarship on history, classics, and science (astronomy and mathematics in particular), I demonstrate how Qian Daxin thought about his own identity - mainly as an Ancient Learning adherent - and how this identity interacted with his notions of knowledge. I also shed new light on interand intra-cultural encounters (with Western Learning, for example) that were part of what Qian confronted. I maintain that Qian perceived an identity crisis, a crisis related not to political or economic anxieties but to the cultural identity of the Ru ("Confucians"), and reacted to it both in terms of scholarship and in terms of the dissemination of his scholarship. A sense of anxiety over the cultural identity of the Ru was not unique to Qian or to eighteenth century scholars; during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, similar anxieties, albeit stimulated by different circumstances, continued to be a significant factor in the shaping of Ru knowledge and later in the critique of Ru ("Confucianism") as a whole. The question of what in the past, in history, a culture should remember and what could be forgotten, as well as how past events and personalities should be remembered, was influenced by such nexus of knowledge and identity. In my examination of the reception history of Qian Daxin I posit Qian's contemporary Dai Zhen as Qian's competitor in the historical narrative. The two competed already during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for "best Qing dynasty scholar" (Dai claimed to have won first place, others claimed Qian was the best); but Dai's twentieth-century victory was in totally new - modern and Western - categories, most significantly philosophy. My study problematizes the use of such categories, explores the genealogy of "philosophy," and traces its journey from Europe, through Japan, to China. Similarly, the notion that Qian Daxin was part of a "Han Learning" group or movement, a notion that began in the early nineteenth century and persisted during the twentieth century, is reexamined and refuted. This study tries to present a more nuanced narrative of the intellectual history and historiography of the Qing and early Republican China, one that is more sensitive to the changing terminology, anxieties, and complexities of the period, through the person and image of a prominent yet hitherto unexplored scholar - Qian Daxin.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3452628.
Thesis
Hu, Minghui;
(2004)
Cosmopolitan Confucianism: China's Road to Modern Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001561863/)
Book
Ori Sela;
(2018)
China's Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB127543370/)
Article
Jenkinson, Matt;
(2006)
Nathanael Vincent and Confucius's “Great Learning” in Restoration England
(/isis/citation/CBB000770133/)
Article
Lim, Jong-tae;
(2008)
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
(/isis/citation/CBB000850159/)
Article
Sela, Ori;
(2012)
Confucian Scientific Identity: Qian Daxin's (1728--1804) Ambivalence toward Western Learning and Its Adherents
(/isis/citation/CBB001251504/)
Article
Chu, Pingyi;
(2008)
Narrating a History for China's Medical Past: Christianity, Natural Philosophy and History in Wang Honghan's Gujin yishi (History of Medicine Past and Present)
(/isis/citation/CBB001021343/)
Article
Kiri Paramore;
(2017)
Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB072908346/)
Article
Shi, Yunli;
(2008)
Reforming Astronomy and Compiling Imperial Science in the Post-Kangxi Era: The Social Dimension of the Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng houbian
(/isis/citation/CBB001021344/)
Book
Lin, Xiaoqing Diana;
(2005)
Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB000772784/)
Article
Chu, Pingyi;
(2011)
Zhang Yongjing: A Strenuous Proponent of the Chinese Calendrical Methods
(/isis/citation/CBB001210067/)
Book
Makeham, John;
(2003)
Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects
(/isis/citation/CBB000501926/)
Article
Hsia, Florence C.;
(2008)
Chinese Astronomy for the Early Modern European Reader
(/isis/citation/CBB000850573/)
Article
Chen, Jiang-Ping Jeff;
(2011)
Re-examining Dai Zhen's Gougu geyuan ji in Terms of Construction and Mathematical Principles
(/isis/citation/CBB001210054/)
Article
Chen, Jiang-Ping Jeff;
(2010)
The Evolution of Transformation Media in Spherical Trigonometry in 17th- and 18th-Century China, and Its Relation to “Western Learning”
(/isis/citation/CBB000953085/)
Article
Yang, Zezhong;
(2005)
The introduction of the Elements in China
(/isis/citation/CBB000650784/)
Book
Jami, Catherine;
(2012)
The Emperor's New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (1662--1722)
(/isis/citation/CBB001250505/)
Article
Zhou, Chang;
Zhang, Jianke;
(2008)
Takebe's Mathematical Thought and Methodology
(/isis/citation/CBB000933525/)
Book
Cervera, José Antonio;
(2011)
Las varillas de Napier en China Reseña del libro: Giacomo Rho (1592--1638) y su trabajo como matemático y astrónomo en Beijing
(/isis/citation/CBB001214101/)
Article
Ying, Jia-Ming;
(2011)
The Kujang sulhae: Nam Pyong-Gil's Reinterpretation of the Mathematical Methods of the Jiuzhang suanshu
(/isis/citation/CBB001022168/)
Chapter
Catherine Jami;
(2013)
La carrière de Mei Wending (1633-1721) et le statut des sciences mathématiques dans le savoir lettré
(/isis/citation/CBB558549518/)
Be the first to comment!