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1、Seeking the Origins of Modern Science?Review Article by George Saliba, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. Toby E. Huff. The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University
2、Press, 1993. Pb. ed., 1995. xiv, 409 pp. Hb. ISBN 0 521 43496 3. Pb. 14.95 (US$19.95), ISBN 0 521 49833 3. “It is not altogether easy to break the habit of thinking of history as blindly groping toward a goal that the West alone was clever enough to reach. . . .” A. C. Graham1 The question of the or
3、igins of modern science has been debated for years and will continue to be debated as long as the history of science is still written as the history of various scientific traditions modified by cultural labels such as Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Indian and Arabic/ Islamic. And I am sure it
4、 is obvious to all that such terminology simply masks a clear ideological, political and, at times, even hegemonic language. For all pre-modern scientific traditions, the classificatory principle of a particular tradition seems to be linguistic in nature, contrary to what is usually done in the case
5、 of modern science itself. Yet, while it is easy to understand why a scientific book written in the pre-modern period, whether in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian or Turkish, may be readily classified as belonging to a particular culture and tradition, it is not quite
6、clear in which language a modern scientific text must be written to allow its affiliation with modern science. As historians of science survey the various scientific traditions, they seem to be constantly prepared to shift the criteria that they use to classify the scientific works which they encoun
7、ter. No one would dispute the classification of a scientific text written in Chinese or Greek as belonging to the Chinese or Greek cultural spheres respectively. But when it comes to other scientific works, say texts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, for example, the problem becomes sligh
8、tly more complicated and those same historians of science drop linguistic classificatory terminology to resort instead to a cultural/religious terminology which designates such works as Islamic. In the case of modern science, both linguistic and cultural/religious designators seem to be dropped and
9、French, English, Italian, German and even Japanese scientific works may be described as modern, with the underlying assumption that all these works must have something in common that is neither linguistic, nor cultural, nor religious, with the vague term Western, as in Western science, used to descr
10、ibe them. A corollary of this methodological chaos is the notion that there is a definable cultural entity out there that can be called the West, with its own independent characteristics, and an equally clearly definable scientific tradition that can be called modern science. In addition, no one see
11、ms to question the proposition that the modern scientific tradition made its first appearance in this very ambiguous West and research is ongoing to determine why this phenomenon took place there and nowhere else. Toby E. Huffs The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West is one more
12、 work which follows this line of enquiry. Huff is by no means the first person to attempt to explain why modern science arose in the West and not in the context of another culture. People like Joseph Needham, in his famous Grand Titration,2 or Max Weber, in several of his works, have made similar at
13、tempts in the past. In the case of Needham, the question gained much more urgency when he managed to demonstrate that, at the time when modern science was supposed to have been born in the Westnamely, during the European Renaissance of the sixteenth centuryboth the Chinese and Islamic civilizations
14、had attained a level of scientific knowledge, especially in natural science, which was superior to that in the West. And yet, modern science was born in the West and not in those other civilizations. Needhams attempt to understand why this happened had the unintended result of making the criteria fo
15、r modern science, and the vague definitions of it, identical to the criteria and definitions which would be applied to Western science. During that process, another unspoken and rather ill-considered principle also emerged, namely, that one should assess the value and contribution of the sciences of
16、 other cultures in terms of the specific aspects of those sciences that were incorporated within the accumulative body of modern science, while passing over other features of those same sciences in total silence. Thus, in the case of Chinese science, the discovery of the geographically-orienting mag
17、net became an acceptable Chinese scientific achievement because it could be translated, through intermediary steps, into the navigational compass, while the whole body of Chinese medicine would be discardeduntil very modern times, that isbecause it did not have the same impact in the West. The least
18、 that can be said about this methodology is that it does not yield the kind of history of science that allows a specific science to be spoken of and studied as just another facet of the culture that produced it to meet its own needs. Instead, the works of one cultural science are always evaluated in
19、 terms of the criteria of modern science. As a result, the history of science is studied for the sake of discovering the cumulative connecting links that led to the creation of modern science and not as an attempt to understand one more feature of the originating culture in order to comprehend it in
20、 its totality. Although superficially quite reasonable and legitimate, this manner of formulating the question of why modern science arose in the West, rather than in culture X or Y, hides further theoretical pitfalls. Chief among them is the circularity embedded in this kind of argumentation. For,
21、in order to answer the question, one must exhibit yet another culture, Z, that followed the same route as the Westwhatever that route may have beenand managed to produce modern science in the same way that the West did. Otherwise, the argument quickly collapses into a circular argument in the follow
22、ing manner. Most proponents of this view, whether consciously or not, look at science in our day and assign the term modern to that science without defining modernity, relying only on the sheer fact that it is contemporaneous with us. They then ask which leading centres produced this modern science
23、and find them in Europe and, by extension, the United States, or what is ambiguously called the West. From there, it becomes easy to jump to the conclusion that modern science is Western science. Thus, all other cultures, no matter where they are located and at what point in their history they are c
24、aptured, if they may be captured at all, could not possibly contain the roots of modern science, nor allow modern science to develop, by the mere fact that they are not Western cultures. Moreover, this argument, and the many variations upon it that range widely in sophistication and acuity, has been
25、 put forth now for more than a hundred years without ever an attempt being made first to define what is meant by science, in a culturally neutral fashion, or modernity itself, as it applies to science, or the relationship between science and culture, or, more potently, to determine what aspects of a
26、 culture, especially Western culture, are responsible for the rise of a modern science that is implicitly called Western science. Throughout this century and part of the previous one, attempts have been made to define the singularity of modern Western science by isolating factors responsible for its
27、 development. Such factors as the emphasis on “experimentation,” the “mathematization of nature” and “freedom from religion,” have been advanced at one point or another as being the key elements in the development of modern science. In the case of Huff, one may add to this list the emphasis on the “
28、institutionalization” or “legal context” of science, or the more general “philosophical world view,” or even his ambiguous “neutral space and free inquiry, concepts integral to modern science,” (Huff, i) as also being pivotal. But as knowledge of non-Western cultural sciences began to increase, espe
29、cially in the latter half of this centuryand here the work of Needham on Science and Civilization in China3 and the many new works on Islamic/Arabic science are crucialthe foundations of the argument for the singularity of modern science have been eroded. For it was found, for example, that both the
30、 Islamic and Chinese civilizations derived scientific results from experimentation at a time much earlier than the Renaissance, that they criticized other authoritative scientific theories on the basis of their own observations, and that they expressed the results of their findings in mathematical l
31、anguage; and yet, they did not manage to develop modern science in the manner in which this latter concept is so poorly articulated. In order to avoid the pitfalls of this simplistic line of argumentation, one must appeal to the more rigorous grounds upon which such arguments ought to be based. As i
32、ntimated above, these grounds require that one demonstrate the independence of Western science from other cultural sciences in order to be able to say that whatever factors led to the formulation of modern science in Western culture were, in fact, the product of Western culture itself, while simulta
33、neously determining that any other culture which embodies the same factors would indeed produce the same modern science under discussion. In addition, one must demonstrate the real existence of such a culture. When we learn, for example, that the most innovative mathematical and astronomical ideas t
34、hat were employed during the European Renaissance were themselves borrowed from Islamic/Arabic or Chinese civilizations through many circuitous routes that are now being investigated, then one is forced to ask about the very roots of modern science and whether they should be placed within the parame
35、ters of Western culture or the other cultures where those innovative ideas originated. This kind of predicament was easier to overcome in the last century, when many of the findings of the Islamic/Arabic or Chinese sciences were not really known in the West. During that time of ignorance, people cou
36、ld speak freely of the so-called modern science and its roots in the genius of Greek civilizationsometimes referred to as the Greek miracleand thus conceive of that science as a purely Western enterprise, thereby making a direct connection between classical Greek civilization and the modernity of Eu
37、rope and bypassing the intervening Roman, Islamic and medieval civilizations with impunity. But now, at the end of the twentieth century, we know that the most dynamic revolutionary ideas in astronomy, for example, were developed in the Islamic/Arabic domainand were developed explicitly to rebut the
38、 authority of the Greek astronomical traditionand yet, they were the very same ideas that made the astronomy of the European Renaissance possible, in the mathematical technical sense, after having been incorporated into that astronomy. This view is quite eloquently expressed by the sinologist A. C.
39、Graham, in the same article quoted at the beginning of this essay, where he says: “Indeed if we wish to find the best historical perspective for looking forward toward the Scientific Revolution, there is much to be said for choosing a viewpoint not in Greece but in the Islamic culture that from A.D.
40、 750 reached from Spain to Turkestan.”4 With Grahams words in mind, one can quite legitimately ask about the roots of modern science, and whether those roots should continue to be placed in the context of Western culture, with its far-reaching, a historical extension into classical antiquity. More p
41、articularly, one should also ask whether it makes much sense to speak of science, whether modern or not, in such cultural, linguistic, or national terms, when the very processes of science themselves respect no such boundaries and pay no heed to such sentiments. Moreover, since the terms defining th
42、e essential characteristics of both modern science and the West are so vaguely defined, is it not quite legitimate to examine as well the same question that was asked by Graham when he said: “The question may also be raised whether Ptolemy or even Copernicus and Kepler were in principle any nearer t
43、o modern science than the Chinese and the Maya, or indeed than the first astronomer, whoever he may have been, who allowed observations to outweigh numerological considerations of symmetry in his calculations of the month and the year.”5 Indeed, the empirical emphasis placed by that very first astro
44、nomer on the value of his observations set the inescapable course to modern science. So where would the origins of modern science then lie? In this context of trying to determine the building blocks of modern science, Huffs book is a refreshing and welcome contribution. This is not because it applie
45、s a better methodology than previous works on the subject, or because it answers the big question posed above more satisfactorily, but rather because it benefits from the research into the history of Islamic and Chinese sciences that has been going on for about half a century now. As a result, and b
46、y bringing to light the complexity of the scientific production itself and the dangers implicit in assigning national, linguistic or cultural tokens to that production, his work has had the unintended consequence of poking holes into the old arguments regarding the singularity of western modern scie
47、nce, or the autonomy of the western culture that produced it. In this regard, the present reviewer is very sympathetic to Huffs plight. After all, how could he be critical of someone who writes a book on the history of modern science, documenting in it a whole array of the achievements of Islamic an
48、d Chinese sciences and acknowledging the integral relationship between those sciences and modern sciencea good part of that relationship being based on research by the present reviewer on the history of Islamic planetary astronomywhen others writing on the same subject find no difficulty in jumping
49、from Ptolemy (c. AD 150) to Copernicus (d. AD 1543) without even blinking?6 Yet, writing general books of this nature, when neither one of the scientific traditions under scrutiny is well understood, has intrinsic difficulties. When one cannot yet demonstrate the exact cultural relationship between modern science
