Arun Bala challenges Eurocentric conceptions of history by showing how Chinese, Indian, Arabic, and ancient Egyptian ideas in philosophy, mathematics, cosmology and physics played an indispensable role in making possible the birth of modern science.
This volume brings together essays from leading thinkers to examine what role Asian traditions of knowledge played in the rise of modern science in Europe, the implications this has for the epistemology of science, and whether pre-modern Asian traditions can provide resources for advancing scientific knowledge in future.
Once upon a time 'The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century' was an innovative concept that inspired a stimulating narrative of how modern science came into the world. Half a century later, what we now know as 'the master narrative' serves rather as a strait-jacket - so often events and contexts just fail to fit in. No attempt has been made so far to replace the master narrative. H. Floris Cohen now comes up with precisely such a replacement. Key to his path-breaking analysis-cum-narrative is a vision of the Scientific Revolution as made up of six distinct yet narrowly interconnected, revolutionary transformations, each of some twenty-five to thirty years' duration. This vision enables him to explain how modern science could come about in Europe rather than in Greece, China, or the Islamic world. It also enables him to explain how half-way into the 17th century a vast crisis of legitimacy could arise and, in the end, be overcome.
Demonstrates the way in which the discovery, application, and adaptation of materials has shaped the course of human history and the routines of our daily existence.
This study revisits one of the most extensive examples of the spread of ideas in the history of civilization: the diffusion of Indian religious and political ideas to Southeast Asia before the advent of Islam and European colonialism. Hindu and Buddhist concepts and symbols of kingship and statecraft helped to legitimize Southeast Asian rulers, and transform the political institutions and authority of Southeast Asia. But the process of this diffusion was not accompanied by imperialism, political hegemony, or "colonization" as conventionally understood. This book investigates different explanations of the spread of Indian ideas offered by scholars, including why and how it occurred and what were its key political and institutional outcomes. It challenges the view that strategic competition is a recurring phenomenon when civilizations encounter each other.
Introducing the book that governments and mainstream academia donat want you to see. Evidence of Lost Ancient Civilizations: Case Closed is the ultimate reference guide for anyone interested in learning the true, unfiltered history of ancient civilization and of mankindas earliest origins. This definitive resource guide uniquely presents and explores evidence not included in conventional history or science textbooks. Revealing evidence consisting of compelling eyewitness accounts, media reports, scientific journal articles, as well as indisputable physical evidence, has never been made available to the general public. You will see by the overwhelming shocking evidence and data presented throughout this book it is apparent that modern science and history have been offering a less-than-accurate account of evolution and the origins of mankind on Earth. The basic questions this book attempts to answer are: Where did we come from? What is the true history of mankind? Where will the truth lead us? What humanity may first discover from this explosive ancient evidence may shake the foundations of established world order and religion, and will certainly be difficult to comprehend or rationalize. However, what we may learn from our forgotten past could guide us in determining the direction of our future.
Science in the Forest, Science in the Past: Further Interdisciplinary Explorations comprises of papers from the second of two workshops involving a group of scholars united in the conviction that the great diversity of knowledge claims and practices for which we have evidence must be taken seriously in their own terms rather than by the yardstick of Western modernity. Bringing to bear social anthropology, history and philosophy of science, computer science, classics and sinology among other fields, they argue that the use of such dismissive labels as ‘magic’, ‘superstition’ and the ‘irrational’ masks rather than solves the problem and reject counsels of despair which assume or argue that radically alien beliefs are strictly unintelligible to outsiders and can be understood only from within the system in question. At the same time, they accept that how to proceed to a better understanding of the data in question poses a formidable challenge. Key problems identified in the inaugural workshop, whose proceedings were published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2019) and in HAU Books (2020), provided the basis for asking how obvious pitfalls might be avoided and a new or revised framework within which to pursue these problems proposed. The chapters in this book were originally published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews.
This book gives voice to outstanding scholars from three major Eastern civilizations-Chinese, Arabic, and Indian-who have entered into dialogue with equally distinguished scholars from the West. The themes of the book include challenges to knowledge in the late modern era; Eastern contributions to scientific knowledge; knowledge transfer across regions and civilizations; indigenous knowledge and modern education; and past and present influences from China.