Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan
What was unique and worthy of further inquiry in Tagore’s effort was his approach to linking locality and local identity with the transcendent goal.
Prasenjit Duara • The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)
The world of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconceivable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, “in depth,” the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great... See more
The Marginalian • Pioneering Biochemist Erwin Chargaff on the Poetics of Curiosity, the Crucial Difference Between Understanding and Explanation, and What Makes a Scientist
Other industrial institutions have passed through the same two watersheds. This is certainly true for the major social agencies that have been reorganized according to scientific criteria during the last 150 years. Education, the mails, social work, transportation, and even civil engineering have followed this evolution. At first, new knowledge is
... See moreIvan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state established in northeast China (1932–1945), exemplified an all too transparent effort to build a nation-state from these East Asian circulations.