2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
embraced the reassuring image of the intimate and trustworthy bedside friend.
It is difficult to establish exactly how successful was the rhetoric employed by
such physiologists. Legislation, the consolidation of the profession, and the
therapeutic advances of the early twentieth century came to their rescue.
Jongtae Lim Harvard-Yenching Institute
Taming the Spherical Earth and “Globalizing” the Traditional Cosmology
in the Late Choson Dynasty Korea
This paper examines how Korean intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries dealt with the discrepancies between traditional cosmology and a newly
introduced Western concept, the sphericity of the earth. This concept apparently
conflicted with the major indigenous cosmological schemes such as Sinocentric
geographical thought and the correlative relationship between heaven and earth.
These schemes, implicitly or explicitly, assumed a relatively small, square earth,
at the center of which lay China, the only civilization of the world. The concept
of the spherical earth associated with the Jesuit world maps, however, negated
any special center on the surface of the earth and suggested much wider world
of the “Five Continents.” How did Korean intellectuals, who thought of
themselves as the inheritors of the Chinese civilization after the fall of the Ming
dynasty, solve these discrepancies? Most of them tried to find a middle ground
by incorporating the concept of the spherical earth into traditional cosmology.
They accepted the concept concerning just the physical shape of the earth, while
excluding its heretical implications. However, the traditional cosmology had
also to be revised without giving up its core, the centricity of Chinese civilization.
Korean intellectuals, thus, proposed several revised schemes in which the
traditional cosmology could be applied to the global level. Yi Ik (1681-1763), a
good representative of this kind of enterprise, used the geomagnetic variances
reported by a Jesuit missionaries to draw a new metaphysical demarcation of
yin and yang on the surface of the earth and placed China at the center of the
yang region. This case shows that Jesuit science, however cogent it seemed,
was not sufficient to replace traditional worldview, which had enough flexibility
to incorporate foreign elements into its own web.
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David␣ C. Lindberg University of Wisconsin, Madison
Teaching the History of Science and Religion in a Public University:
Pitfalls and Opportunities
Opportunities and challenges encountered in a course on the historical relations
of science and religion taught at the University of Wisconsin by David Lindberg
and Ronald Numbers.