1. Asian Appropriations of Science and Technology

2. China: Nationalist Hubris

3. Japan: Pragmatic Hybrids

4. India: Hubris and Hybrids

5. Hubris and Hybrids
hubris: ”impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe”
hybrids: ”offspring of parents that differ in genetically determined traits”

6. Hubris in History The myths of Icarus and Prometheus
The scientific revolution: ”New Atlantis”
Industrialization: ”Prometheus Unbound”
Atomic energy: ”Science - The Endless Frontier”
The arms race and the Apollo Mission

7. Hybrids in History Medieval monks: artificial people
The ”renaissance men”: artists-engineers
Experimental philosophers: scholar-craftsmen
Professional engineers: theoretical technicians
Environmentalists: activist academics

8. A Brief History of Science
Ancient, or Traditional science, up to about 1600
spiritual knowledge, distinctive regional modes
gap between theory (episteme) and practice (techne)
Modern, or Western science, from about 1600 to 1970
instrumental, rational, universal knowledge
functional interdependence of science and technology
Global, or Technoscience, from about 1970
multiple forms of knowledge, commercial networks of innovation
combinations of science and technology

9. Science and Technology in ”Traditional” Asia
On the discursive, or macro level
ideas of order, authority and control - Confucianism
an underlying philosophy of life – Taoism, Buddhism
On the institutional, or meso level
systems of infrastructural maintenance and management
hierarchical forms of education and knowledge making – mandarins in China, brahmans in India, samurais in Japan
On the practical, or micro level
advanced forms of artisanal practical knowledge (techne)
spriritual and naturalist theories (episteme)

10. Encountering the West India: the crown of the empire
colonization, occupation, national liberation
China: the middle kingdom
commercialization, resistance, revolution
Japan: keeping distance
isolation, confrontation, competition

11. The Indian Case A long struggle for independence
British and Soviet influences
Pluralist civilization, multiple cultures
Scientism and spiritualism: a dual society
The invention of tradition

12. The Chinese Case A sequence of revolutions
American and Soviet influences
hydraulic civilization, bureaucratic culture
The four modernizations
The destruction of tradition

13. The Japanese Case A series of military confrontations
Chinese and American influences
island civilization, Samurai culture
A national system of innovation
The mobilization of tradition

14. Indian Minds Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
poet, philosopher, artist, Nobel Prize, 1913
M.K. (Mahatma) Gandhi ( )
independence leader: ”experiments with truth”
Jawaharlal Nehru ( )
India’s first prime minister: ”scientific temper”

15. Tagore What I object to is the artificial arrangement by
which the foreign education tends to occupy all the space of our national mind and thus kills, or hampers, the great
opportunity for the creation
of new thought by a new combination of truths..

16. Just as matter displaced becomes dirt, Reason misplaced becomes lunacy.
Mahatma Gandhi

17. I do not see any way out of our vicious circle of poverty except by utilizing the new sources of power which science has placed at our disposal
Jawaharlal Nehru

18. Chinese Minds Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)
Founder of China’s nationalist party
Mao Tse-tung ( )
Chairman of communist party
Deng Xiaoping ( )
Party leader from 1978 to 1997

19. I saw the outside world and I began to wonder how it was that foreigners, that Englishmen could do such things as they had done, for example, with the barren rock of Hong Kong, within 70 or 80 years, while China, in 4,000 years, had no places like Hong Kong.
Sun Yat-sen

20. The great Chinese revolutionary, our precursor Mr Sun Yat-sen, said at the beginning of the century that in China there would come a Great Leap Forward. This prediction of his will certainly be realized within a few decades.
Mao Tse-tung (1964)

21. The key to achieving modenization is the development of science and technology.
Deng Xiaoping

22. Japanese Minds Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945)
philosopher, cultural theorist
Yasunari Kawabata ( )
novelist, Nobel Prize for literature, 1968
Akio Morita ( )
physicist, co-founder of Sony, writer

23. To become global Oriental culture must not stop at its own specificity but rather it must shed a new light on Western culture amd a new world culture must be created.
Kitaro Nishida

24. Yasanuri Kawabata (The Master of Go)
The Master was plagued... by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the Beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled.
Yasanuri Kawabata
(The Master of Go)

25. Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology.
Akio Morita