Yoichi Isahaya

Rikkyo University

Biography

Yoichi Isahaya (PhD at the University of Tokyo in 2015) is currently a post-doctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Rikkyô University, after working as a post-doctoral fellow of the ERC project “Mobility, Empire and Cross Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interest is in the exchange of knowledge in pre-modern Eurasia. His publications include “Entangled Representation of Heaven: A Chinese Divination Text from a Tenth-Century Dunhuang Fragment (P. 4071) (with Jyuh Fuh Lin, Historia Scientiarum 26/3 (2017): 153–171) and “The Tārīkh-i Qitā in the Zīj-i Īlkhānī: the Chinese Calendar in Persian” (SCIAMVS 14 (2013): 149–258). He is also the second author of the Thābit ibn Qurra’s Restoration of Euclid’s Data (Kitāb Uqlīdis fī al-Muʿṭayāt): Text, Translation, Commentary (with Nathan Sidoli, New York: Springer, 2018).

「 The “Second” Impact on Chinese Astral Tradition: Islamicate Astral Knowledge in the Yuan-Ming Period. 」

In this paper, I aim to single out the uniqueness of the impact of Islamicate astral knowledge on the Chinese astral tradition in the Yuan and early Ming periods in comparison with the “first” impact from Buddhist corpus and the “third” impact from Jesuit missionaries. To calibrate each impact, I introduce the concept of the “translation-naturalization paradigm.” The paradigm is defined as a typical pattern of the long-standing integration process of “foreign” sciences into a certain culture, which consists of the initial translation and the following naturalization—albeit, in general, the two processes overlap to some extent. This paradigm can be well applied to the “first” and “third” impacts on the Chinese astral tradition, while the “second” impact from the Islamicate astral sciences did not develop the paradigm in the sense that, first of all, no foreign text was translated into Chinese in this period as far as extant sources are concerned. In considering the characteristics of the “second” impact, I attach a certain importance to the attitude of the Mongol rulers. The Mongols were ultimately responsible for the remarkable expansion of Islamicate astral knowledge on the Chinse astral tradition; on the other hand, their attitude towards these sciences might have also functioned as an obstacle for the integration of Eurasian scientific knowledge.

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© 2018 All Rights Reserved

© 2018 All Rights Reserved

            CONTACT US

      Email: cga@nyu.edu

      Phone Number: +86 (21) 20595032

      WeChat: NYUShanghaiCGA

      Address: 1555 Century Avenue,

      Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China.