Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea: Humanity and Nature, 1706-1814

by Sang-ho Ro

Overview

Historians of late premodern Korea have tended to regard it as a hermit kingdom, isolated from its neighbours and the wider world. In fact, as Ro argues in this book, Korean intellectuals were heavily influenced by both Chinese Neo-Confucianism and the European Enlightenment in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

In the late Choson period the regime felt threatened by the new, more empirical, approaches to knowledge emerging from both the East and the West. For this reason many Korean intellectuals felt it necessary to work in the shadows and formed secret societies for the study of nature. Because of the secrecy of these societies, much of their work has remained unknown even in Korea until recent years. Ho looks at the work of these intellectuals and analyses the impact their thinking and experimentation had on knowledge production in Korea.

A fascinating insight into the largely overlooked story of how globalization affected intellectual life in Korea before the 20th century. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Korean history and of Asian intellectual history more broadly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367441005
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/06/2021
Series:	Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sang-ho Ro is Assistant Professor of Korean and East Asian Studies in the Division of International Studies at Ewha Woman’s University.

Table of Contents

List of figures vi

Acknowledgments vii

Prologue x

1 Measuring the old universe with new math 1

2 Observing the animal kingdom 23

3 Evolution of Korean agrarian writing 46

4 A banished man and morphology of fish 69

5 Daoist alchemy and female empirical knowledge 91

Epilogue 116

Appendix A Chong Yak-chon's Chasan obo (Encyclopedia on Aquatic Creatures in Huksan Island) 123

Appendix B Romanization - East Asian characters 187

Index 195