What is a Text? -- Spatial Organization of Ancient Chinese Texts (Preliminary Remarks) -- The Constitution of Scientific Texts: from Draft to -- Leibniz and the Use of Manuscripts: Text as Process -- Opera Omnia: The Production of Cultural Authority -- Writing Works: A Reaction to Michael Cahn's Paper -- How Scientific and Technical Texts Adhere to Local Cultures -- Text, Representation and Technique in Early Modern China -- The Algebraic Art of Discourse Algebraic Dispositio, Invention and Imitation in Sixteenth-Century France -- Ancient Sanskrit Mathematics: An Oral Tradition and a Written Literature -- Reading Texts -- The Limits of Text in Greek Mathematics -- Reading Strasbourg 368: A Thrice-Told Tale -- What is the Content of This Book? A Plea for Developing History of Science and History of Text Conjointly -- Epilogue -- Knowledge and its Artifacts.

This book explores the hypothesis that the types of inscription or text used by a given community of practitioners are designed in the very same process as the one producing concepts and results. The book sets out to show how, in exactly the same way as for the other outcomes of scientific activity, all kinds of factors, cognitive as well as cultural, technological, social or institutional, conjoin in shaping the various types of writings and texts used by the practitioners of the sciences. To make this point, the book opts for a genuinely multicultural approach to the texts produced in the context of practices of knowledge. It is predicated on the conviction that, in order to approach any topic in the history of science from a theoretical point of view, it may be fruitful to consider it from a global perspective. The book hence does not only gather papers dealing with geometrical papyri of antiquity, sixteenth century French books in algebra, seventeenth century scientific manuscripts and paintings, eighteenth and nineteenth century memoirs published by European academies or scientific journals, and Western Opera Omnia. It also considers the problems of interpretation relating to reading Babylonian clay tablets, Sanskrit oral scriptures and Chinese books and illustrations. Thus it enables the reader to explore the diversity of forms which texts have taken in history and the wide range of uses they have inspired. This volume will be of interest to historians, philosophers of science, linguists and anthropologists.

Online via Gleeson Library
Local access dig.pdf, [Chemla-History Science and Text.pdf]

Introduction / Feza Günergun and Dhruv Raina
PART I. ON TECHNOLOGIES -- Reflections on the Transmission and Transformation of Technologies: Agriculture, Printing and Gunpowder between East and West / Christopher Cullen -- The Ottoman Empire and the Technological Dialogue Between Europe and Asia: The Case of Military Technologyand Know-How in the Gunpowder Age / Gabor Agoston -- General Observations on the Ottoman Military Industry, 1774-1839: Problems of Organization and Standardization / Kahraman Şakul -- Cultural Attitudes and Horse Technologies: A View on Chariots and Stirrups from the Eastern End of the Eurasian Continent / Nanny Kim
PART II. ON MAPS, ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTS, CLOCKS AND CALENDARS -- Patchwork-The Norm of Mapmaking Practices for Western Asia in Catholic and Protestant Europe As Well As in Istanbul Between 1550 and 1750? / Sonja Brentjes -- The Ottoman Ambassador's Curiosity Coffer: Eclipse Prediction with De La Hire's "Machine" Crafted by Bion of Paris / Feza Günergun -- The Clockmaker Family Meyer and Their Watch Keeping the alla turca Time / Atilla Bir, Şinasi Acar, and Mustafa Kaçar -- The Adoption and Adaptation of Mechanical Clocks in Japan / Takehiko Hashimoto -- Adoption and Resistance: Zhang Yongjing and Ancient Chinese Calendrical Methods / Pingyi Chu
PART III. ON LOCALIZING, APPROPRIATING AND TRANSLATING NEW KNOWLEDGE -- Travelling Both Ways: The Adaptation of Disciplines, Scientific Textbooks and Institutions / Dhruv Raina -- Between Translation and Adaptation: Turkish Editions of Ganot's Traite / Meltem Akbaş -- Eclecticism and Appropriation of the New Scientific Methods by the Greek-Speaking Scholars in the Ottoman Empire / Manolis Patiniotis
PART IV. ON MEDICINE AND MEDICAL PRACTICES -- Conveying Chinese Medicine to Seventeenth-Century Europe / Harold J. Cook -- Adoption and Adaption: A Study of Medical Ideas and Techniques in Colonial India / Deepak Kumar -- How Electricity Energizes the Body: Electrotherapeutics and its Analogy of Life in the Japanese Medical Context / Akiko Ito -- What is 'Islamic' in Islamic Medicine? An Overview / Hormoz Ebrahimnejad -- Index.

Access online via Gleeson Library
Local access dig.pdf. [Science between Europe and Asia.pdf]

The desecularisation of science = Kexue de tuosu yanbian 科學的脫俗演變  / Peter Hodgson 何哲遜著 ; translated by Ignatius Tsai [Cai Bingzheng] 蔡秉正譯.

Parallel text in English and Chinese.
Includes bibliographical references.

"This publication is translated from a chapter of a book After the Deluge edited by W. Oddie and published by the S.P.C.K...."