"Joseph Needham, has stated, "Future research on the history of science and technology in Asia will in fact reveal that the achievements of these peoples contribute far more in all pre-Renaissance periods to the development of world science than has yet been realized."
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. He called attention to what has come to be known as the Needham Question, of why and how China had ceded its leadership in sci
"Cambridge scientist historian Joseph Needham’s loyalty was to Mao’s version of Stalinism as a system, but he got enamoured with China itself and wrote a very Sinocentric history of Science and Civilization in China, highlighting the unexpectedly large contribution which China has made to human progress."
Joseph Needham"J Needhams (1971) monumental work on Chinese nautics offers by far the most scholarly synthesis on the subjects of Chinese shipbuilding and navigation. His propensity to view the Chinese as the initiators of all things and his constant references to the superiority of Chinese over the rest of the worlds techniques does at times detract from his argument.[28]"
Joseph Needham"Alas, it was also originally Needhams Marxist and Weberian point of departure. As Needham found more and more evidence about science and technology in China, he struggled to liberate himself from his Eurocentric original sin, which he had inherited directly from Marx, as Cohen also observes. But Needham never quite succeeded, perhaps because his concentration on China prevented him from sufficiently revising his still ethnocentric view of Europe itself.[29]"
Joseph Needham"He had a tendency — not entirely justified in the light of more recent research — to think well of Taoism, because he saw it as playing a part that could not be found elsewhere in Chinese civilization. The mainstream school of thinking of the bureaucratic Chinese elite, or Confucianism (another problematic term) in his vocabulary, seemed to him to be less interested in science and technology, and to have turned its face away from Nature. Ironically, the dynasty that apparently turned away from printing from 706 till its demise in 907 was as Taoist as any in Chinese history, though perhaps its state Taoism would have seemed a corrupt and inauthentic business to Needham.[31]"
Joseph Needham"However critical I gradually turned of most of Needham’s views, it was his work above all that convinced me of the indispensable aid cross-culturally comparative history of science..."
Joseph Needham