Joseph Needham

Joseph Needham
Born	Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham 6 December 1900 (1900-12-06) London, England
Died	24 March 1995 (1995-03-25) (aged 94) Cambridge, England
Alma mater	Oundle School Gonville and Caius College Cambridge University
Occupation	Historian
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Moyle Needham (m. 1924–1987) «start: (1924)–end+1: (1988)»"Marriage: Dorothy Moyle Needham to Joseph Needham" Location:United Kingdom (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham) Lu Gwei-Djen (m. 1989–1991) «start: (1989)–end+1: (1992)»"Marriage: Lu Gwei-Djen to Joseph Needham" Location:United Kingdom (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Needham)

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA (9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995), also known as Li Yuese (simplified Chinese: 李约瑟; traditional Chinese: 李約瑟; pinyin: Lǐ Yuēsè: Wade-Giles: Li Yüeh-Sê), was a British academic and sinologist known for his research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941;^[1] and he was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971.^[2] In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles.^[3]

Biography

Early years

Needham was the only child of a London family: his father was a Scottish doctor and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde Montgomery (1863–1945) was a French-Irish composer and music teacher. Needham was educated at Oundle School, before receiving his bachelor's degree in 1921 from Cambridge University, master's degree in January 1925 and doctorate in October 1925. After graduation, he worked in F.G. Hopkins's laboratory at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis. Although his career as biochemist and an academic was well established, his career developed in unanticipated directions during and after World War II.

Career

Three Chinese scientists came to work with Needham in 1936: Lu Gwei-djen (traditional Chinese: 鲁桂珍; pinyin: Lu Gui-zhen), Wang Ying-lai (王應睞), and Chen Shi-zhang (沈詩章). Lu (1904–91), daughter of a Nanjingese pharmacist, taught Needham Classical Chinese. This ignited Needham's interest in China's technological and scientific past.

Under the Royal Society's direction, Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. Needham collaborated with the historian Wang Ling (王玲), who solidified Needham's passion for Chinese scientific history.

Needham wrote his first book on the history of Chinese technology in 1945, titled Chinese Science. He also met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuo ren (吳作人), and travelled to sites in western China, including Dunhuang and Yunnan. He also visited educational institutions, from which large amounts of references and materials were collected, which would aid his editing of Science and Civilisation in China Series.

After two years' tenure as the first head of the Natural Science division at UNESCO in Paris, France — indeed, it was Needham who insisted that Science should be included in the organisation's mandate — he returned to Gonville and Caius College in 1948, when Cambridge University Press partially funded his Science and Civilisation in China series. He devoted much energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach biochemistry until 1966.

In 1965, with Derek Bryan, a retired diplomat, Needham established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic of China.

Science and Civilisation in China

In 1943, Needham with an international team of collaborators, started a project to study the science and civilisation of ancient China. This project produced a series of volumes titled Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) published by the Cambridge University Press. The project is now proceeding under the guidance of the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute, chaired by Christopher Cullen.^[4]

The massive project produced a series of volumes under Needham's direct supervision; and the regular production of further volumes continued after his death in 1995. Successive volumes have been published as they became ready, which means that they have not appeared in the order originally contemplated in the project's prospectus—see Needham's SCC organizating scheme:

• Vol. I. Introductory Orientations
• Vol. II. History of Scientific Thought
• Vol. III. Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth
• Vol. IV. Physics and Physical Technology
• Vol. V. Chemistry and Chemical Technology
• Vol. VI. Biology and Biological Technology
• Vol. VII. The Social Background

Evaluations and critiques

"Needham's Grand Question", also known as "The Needham Question", is why China had been overtaken by the West in science and technology, despite its earlier successes. His works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasizes what it describes as the 'diffusionist' approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world.

Needham's work has been criticized by some scholars for its strong inclination to exaggerate Chinese technological achievements and its propensity to prove a Chinese origin for the wide range of objects his work covered.^[5] Nathan Sivin, one of Needham's collaborators, while agreeing that Needham's achievement was monumental, suggested that the "Needham question," as a counterfactual hypothesis, was not susceptible of a useful answer: "It is striking that this question – Why didn't the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution? – happens to be one of the few questions that people often ask in public places about why something didn't happen in history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today's newspaper." ^[6] Sivin's criticism can arguably be rejected as ruling out all discussion of causes in history, on the basis that the cause of every historical event is that if it hadn't occurred that would be counterfactual, and thus supposedly not susceptible of a useful answer.

Needham's accusations against Confucianism and Taoism can arguably be seen as simply reflecting early Chinese Communist hostility to these rival thought systems^[7][8][9]. A common (though disputed) alternative answer ^[10] to the Needham Question is that China had no equivalent of the alphabet. Among other alleged consequences, it could not gain the full benefits of movable type printing. Among other disadvantages (such as allegedly making it harder for people to learn to read and write ^[11]), complete type-sets were very expensive. For instance, in 1725, the Qing Dynasty government had to make 250,000 bronze movable type characters to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times 《古今图书集成》/《古今圖書集成》^[12]. The Needham question then arguably must be re-phrased to ask why the distant West was able to beat every other civilisation with an alphabet (such as Islam's Arabic alphabet), or with other small character sets (such as the 247 characters used in the Tamil script), bearing in mind that proximity to China usually meant that these civilisations tended to get developments such as block printing before the West^[13].

Needham's political views were unorthodox and his lifestyle controversial. His work in science was based in an idiosyncratic form of Christian socialism and after 1949 his sympathy with Chinese culture was extended to the new government. Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea (1952-53) during the Korean War and in his report he supported the controversial Chinese communist claims that the Americans had used biological warfare there. Needham's biographer Simon Winchester comments that "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him".^[14] Winchester also notes that because of his assertions Needham was blacklisted by the U.S. government until well into the 1970s.

Personal life

Needham was first married to Dorothy Moyle (1896–1987). Simon Winchester notes that, in his younger days, Needham was an avid gymnosophist.^[15] In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Needham married Lu Gwei-djen (1904-1991). He suffered from Parkinson's disease from 1982, and died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home. In 2008 the Chair of Chinese in the University of Cambridge was endowed in honour of Joseph Needham as the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization.^[16]

Honours and awards

In 1961, Needham was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society and in 1966 he became Master of Gonville and Caius College. In 1984, Needham became the fourth recipient of the J.D. Bernal Award, awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science. In 1990, he was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize by Fukuoka City.

The Needham Research Institute, devoted to the study of China's scientific history, was opened in 1985 by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

• Order of the Companions of Honour, 1992.^[3]
• British Academy, 1971.^[2]
• Royal Society, 1941.^[1]

Bibliography

• Science, Religion and Reality (1925)
• Chemical Embryology (1931)
• The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science (1931)
• Perspectives in Biochemistry: Thirty-One Essays Presented to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins by Past and Present Members of His Laboratory (1937)
• Time: The Refreshing River (Essays and Addresses, 1932-1942) (1943)
• Chinese Science (1945)
• History Is On Our Side (1947)
• Science Outpost; Papers of the Sino-British Science Co-Operation Office (British Council Scientific Office in China) 1942-1946 (1948)
• Science and Civilisation in China (1954, etc) - 25 volumes to date
• Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham, with the research assistance [and collaboration] of Wang Ling (1954-59) (2 volumes)
• A History of Embryology (1959)
• The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (1969)
• Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West (1969)
• Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology (1970)
• Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (1973)
• Moulds of Understanding: A Pattern of Natural Philosophy (1976)
• The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China (3 volumes) (1978) - an abridgement of the 1954- version.
• Science in Traditional China : A Comparative Perspective (1982)
• The Genius of China (1986)
• Heavenly Clockwork : The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China (1986)
• The Hall of Heavenly Records : Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks, 1380-1780 (1986)

Science and Civilisation in China volumes

See also

• List of Sinologists
• List of historians
• Rise of the West
• G.E.R. Lloyd
• Four Great Inventions of ancient China

Notes

References

• Lyall, Sarah. "Joseph Needham, China Scholar From Britain, Dies at 94," New York Times. March 27, 1995.
• Winchester, Simon. (2008). The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.. New York: HarperCollins. 13-ISBN 978-0-06-088459-8
• Sterckx, Roel, In the Fields of Shennong: An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Cambridge on 30 September 2008 to mark the establishment of the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science and Civilization. Cambridge: Needham Research Institute, 2008 (ISBN 0-9546771-1-0).

External links

English

• Interview with biographer Simon Winchester on ABC Brisbane September 2000
• Joseph Needham and the rise of the West
• Needham Research Institute (NRI)
• Science and Civilisation in China
• Asian Philosophy and Critical Thinking Divergence or Convergence?
• Guide to manuscripts by British scientists: N, O.
• BBC Radio4 'In Our Time' audio stream on the Needham Question.
• Works by Joseph Needham at Internet Archive
• Question marks: Chinese invention - The Economist, Jun 5th 2008, review of Needham biography by Simon Winchester

Chinese

• Xinhua：Today's NRI
• Papers in Chinese 1991-2004 on Needham and his Grand Question
• Needham and his early knowledge on Chinese culture
• Brief introduction of the exhibition in Taipei on "Needham and Chinese science during the Second Sino-Japanese War"
• Brief biography