Volume 14, Issue 2

In the first half of the twentieth century, it took a long time for modern historiographic footnotes to be accepted as a standard practice of Chinese historiography in professionalization. Although the word “footnote” as a foreign loanword entered Japanese and Chinese dictionaries as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, most historical journals did not adopt footnotes as a typical style requirement. In 1928, when Academia Sinica started publishing its flagship history journal, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology , footnote style was not required. However, some linguists and archaeologists published their papers in this journal with modern footnotes. Gradually, this practice was also accepted by historians. Though many scholars published their works with footnotes in the West, once they returned to Japan, the vertically printed publications pushed them back to the Japanese tradition of no footnotes. However, since the 1930s, footnotes have been accepted more widely. In the 1950s, with the publication of state-sponsored history journals, the modern academic style with footnotes was gradually established. Marxist historians played a vital role in accepting and implementing footnotes by citing classical Marxist works in a standard format to guarantee quotation accuracy.

In 19th century, the concept of “cholera”, which had been connected with Chinese cosmology for thousands of years, was firstly accepted by modern science through a process of conceptual discontinuity and reconstruction. As the result of adding new scientific knowledge to the old traditional connotations, the “collective” and “inevitable” nature of Cholera, once synonymous with “epidemic”, developed new characteristics and was thus accepted within the structure and parlance of modern science. This transformation is the reason why the new “Cholera” gradually separated itself from the traditional cosmology and eventually constructed a connection with modern science. The turning point which distinguished the traditional approach to the scientific one can be traced back to the imperialist modernity in 19th century. This “birth” of medical science not only changed China, but also the countries that shared the same medical philosophy, spatial orientation, national customs, and group culture through the pre-modern Chinese cultural circle. In view of the above premises, this article takes the work An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical Officers to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, from 1871 to 1882 as basic research material and Japan as an example, to explore the conceptual discontinuity and reconstruction of the concept of “Cholera” in the middle of 19th century.

In this paper, I will explain the characteristics of “pure experience” in Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy. This pure experience was a very fundamental concept in Nishida’s philosophy, and was an important thought that was consistently at the core of his philosophy from the beginning through his later years. In his important work, An Inquiry into the Good , Nishida uses “the moment of seeing the color or hearing a sound …” as the initial perception to explain the only reality that developed into many categories by the self-developing characteristics of pure experience. Thus, he discusses “knowing” and “love.” At the very same time, Suzuki Daisetz (D.T. Suzuki) explains the same topic by using the “logic of Prajñāpāramitā.” The “logic of Prajñāpāramitā” states that everything that is affirmative is negative at the same time. It is generally believed that this “logic of Prajñāpāramitā” is very similar to the characteristics of the pure experience mentioned above. The reason for comparing these thoughts was that Kitarō Nishida and D. T. Suzuki were close friends and exchanged ideas with each other. Therefore, to understand Nishida’s “pure experience” and early philosophy thoroughly, the author has also examined the “logic of Prajñāpāramitā.”

This paper will focus on Miura Baien (1723–1789) to have a glimpse of how Edo intellectuals viewed Western and traditional Chinese knowledge, and how they thought about the world and nature in the middle of Tokugawa period. Miura is a thinker who has created an exquisite system that is almost unmatched by others in Japanese intellectual history. Maeno was a Japanese physician and pioneer of Dutch learning. Both of them deny the view of nature and the body based on the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing, and accepted the intellectual shock brought about by Dutch learning. Therefore, I will use the views of these two Edo scholars to discuss the criticism and application of the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing in Edo Japan, and their understanding of Western knowledge. Furthermore, I will also compare Miura Baien with Dai Zhen (1724–1777), a Chinese thinker who was born around the same period, to argue that Western learning in Qing China, and the theory of Yin-Yang and Wuxing were how to be used. By doing so, this paper would like to illustrate the unique thoughts of Miura Baien and characteristics of 18th century Japanese intellectual history.