Asia, Europe, and the Emergence of Modern Science: Knowledge Crossing Boundaries ed. by Arun Bala (review)

This volume emerged from a conference intended to bring the history, philosophy, and sociology of science to bear on the question of the “dialogical encounters that enriched modern science” (p. 3). Its purpose and topic are thus timely and important. Unfortunately, however, this edited book does not do justice to the subject, in large part because neither the individual authors nor the editor pays attention to the sizable body of literature now available on this and related topics. From the introduction, one would never know that such material existed. In characterizing the current state of the field, Arun Bala suggests that the “mainstream view” in the history of science “is more concerned with the modernist and postmodern debate in science studies typified by the Popper versus Kuhn controversy” (p. 1). However deficient mainstream literature may be, it has changed a good deal since the 1960s. If one omission may stand for many, it might be noted that Kapil Raj’s recent work—entirely concerned with dialogical encounters and the circulation of knowledge—is unmentioned.

The volume is divided into three sections, corresponding (ostensibly) to the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spirit of Joseph Needham looms large over the papers in the historical section. Roddam Narasimha offers a crisp and clear summary of various Indic philosophical systems on the way to offering part of an answer to the “Needham question” (why did the Scientific Revolution happen in Europe, rather than China?) as applied to India, pointing to the importance of understanding not just different forms of knowledge, but of epistemology. After an interesting discussion of various forms of Eurocentrism, both old and new, John Hobson suggests that one might find an explanation for modern European dominance in the development of forms of identity, offering that “Eurocentric restlessness” was the key (p. 25). Andrew Brennan critiques the question later in the volume, after systematically dismantling the claims of cultural psychologists to be able provide an answer. Two other papers, by George Gheverghese Joseph and Richard T. W. Arthur, take up another Needham-esque question, looking respectively for possible Keralan and Ash’arite origins for concepts and results developed in Europe during the Scientific Revolution. Neither, however, can provide evidence of any direct contributions.

Arun Bala and Anjam Khursheed provide more straightforward examples of dialogic exchange in part 2. Bala’s essay sets forth an extension of the Lakatosian model of research programs as a means of understanding the multicultural—Indian, Chinese, Arabic—roots of the Copernican Revolution. Khursheed reminds us of the importance of both Chinese and Arabic technologies and forms of knowledge for the rise of modern science. He provides little evidence, however, to prove the claim that this rise was due “primarily to the impact and transfer of Asian science and technology” and that the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato were, in comparison “at best, marginal” (p. 184).

I wish the various contributors had engaged more explicitly with one another, for there are tensions that run through the volume. Several of the papers in later sections offer a kind of realist analysis that would seem to run against the historicism and culturalism of part 1. James Robert Brown takes up the roles played by “traditional” and “modern” knowledge within smallpox eradication campaigns, declaring himself to be on the side of modern science and then suggesting that the question to be asked is “how should someone with such a background view traditional knowledge?” (p. 115). Ali Paya asks whether it is legitimate to speak of “Islamic science” as something distinct from Western science and answers, concisely, that it is not. Beginning with “a critical rationalist and realist framework,” he asserts that science is objective, universal, and (ideally) publicly accessible. Indigenous sciences that might make dissenting claims are then a “myth” (p. 159). Donald Wiebe quite explicitly asserts that the scientific study of religion emerged first in Europe and without...