Between Truth and Accuracy: Nature Knowledge in Late Tokugawa Japan

Between Truth and Accuracy: Nature Knowledge in Late Tokugawa Japan

Federico Marcon - Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and History, Princeton University

Friday, November 7, 2014 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511

Between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth century, a field of natural history in Japan separated itself from the discipline of medicine, produced nature knowledge that questioned the traditional religious and philosophical understandings of the world, developed into a system (called honzōgaku) that rivaled Western science in complexity, and then seemingly disappeared. Its practitioners established protocols of observation and description able to convey authoritative knowledge about plants and animals. Faithful and accurate pictorial representations played a fundamental role in revealing species-specific morphological properties, but also in training scholars to “see systematically,” to such an extent that by the late Tokugawa period, accuracy in descriptions became as important as textual and lexicographical research to produce truthful (shin) knowledge.

Federico Marcon studies early modern Japan and is interested in the interaction of social, economic, and intellectual dynamics in the creation of scientific knowledge in the early modern world. Professor Marcon was born and raised in Italy, where he began his studies in Japanese culture and Philosophy at “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice. In 2008 he joined the History faculty of the University of Virginia, after receiving a PhD in History—East Asia from Columbia University and serving as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies of Harvard University. In 2011 he joined Princeton University as Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and History.

Professor Marcon is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, which reconstructs the development of new ways of conceptualizing, manipulating, representing, and relating to nature in Tokugawa Japan.

While Japan is Marcon’s main area of expertise and the field of his empirical research, he is also interested in various issues related to the comparative history of science and the history of philosophy. He is currently writing an article about the irreducibility of the Western notion of “nature” to the constellation of concepts used in Tokugawa Japan to express various aspects of the natural environment. His next research project focuses on the financial and accounting mathematical techniques that merchants and samurai elites developed to calculate profits and organize and control the economy in early modern Japan.

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