Seeking the Origins of Modern Science：寻找现代科学的起源.doc

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 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 origins 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 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 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 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 encounter. 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