A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. The book offers regional surveys of Europe, China and India, as well as comparative studies of building, porcelain manufacturing, instrument making, printing, and shipbuilding. The authors engage with the on-going debate about the ‘great divergence’ between Asia and Europe, and its possible causes. Technology has so far had a minor role in that debate. This book is bound to change that, through the bold claims made by various contributors. Contributors are: Karel Davids, S.R. Epstein †, Gijs Kessler, Jan Lucassen, Christine Moll-Murata, Patrick O'Brien, Kenneth Pomeranz, Maarten Prak, Tirthankar Roy, Richard Unger, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.

This volume situates itself within the context of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field that is dedicated to the study of the complex interactions between science and religion. It presents an innovative approach insofar as it addresses the Eurocentrism that is still prevalent in this field. At the same time it reveals how science develops in the space that emerges between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. The volume examines a range of themes central to the interaction between science and religion: ‘Eastern’ thought within ‘Western’ science and religion and vice versa, and revisits thinkers who sought to integrate ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ thinking. It studies Zen Buddhism and its relation to psychotherapy, Islamic science, Vedantic science, atheism in India, and Darwinism, offering in turn new perspectives on a variety of approaches to nature. Part of the Science and Technology Studies series, this volume brings together original perspectives from major scholars from across disciplines and will be of great interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, history of science, philosophy of science, religious studies, and sociology.