When historians speak of legal influences on Chinese science, they tend to do so in negative terms. They highlight what features of Western law were missing in the Chinese tradition and explain the specific content of the Chinese tradition in terms of those absences. Joseph Needham, for example, pointed out that the Chinese lacked a notion of a divine lawgiver; Chinese natural thinkers were thus not inclined to seek laws of nature. In this presentation, I propose that we can also investigate the relationship between law and science in positive terms: What features were present in the Chinese legal tradition, and how did these features shape the scientific tradition?
Time: 12:00 pm -1:00 pm
Miranda Brown is U-M Associate Professor of Early Chinese Culture in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Culture. She received her doctorate in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, and joined the faculty at the University of Michigan at that time. Her book The Politics of Mourning in Early China, was published by Albany: State University of New York Press in 2007.
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