Our starting point is the suspicion that a certain way of relating the formation of science studies since the late ‘70s to post-truth conditions today may hide more than it reveals about why sociocultural studies of science, in their varied forms around the world, emerge as critical objects of political contention. Put differently, our project is motivated by the following questions. Is there a way to rethink “science wars” through a longer global history that decenters late modern Western academia’s internal trials and tribulations? How might doing so diversify the stakes of battles over the sociocultural study of science in ways that go beyond the seemingly intractable impasse of “Enlightenment” and “Cold War universalism” versus “postmodernity”? And how can recovering these diverse stakes, as well as the concepts and contexts which structured them, contribute to new practices of writing global histories of science?

Our special issue represents an initial response to these questions. Specifically, the articles gathered here situate the meaning of “science wars” in a much longer and plural history of modernity in East Asia since the nineteenth century. We show contingencies of historical experience in late imperial and Republican China, post-Meiji Japan, and the two Koreas pose fundamental challenges to the terms on which “science wars” debates have been conducted, contributing both to a new genealogy of science studies and an alternative politics of universality. 

First, East Asia’s entrance into global modernity occurred during a particular historical conjuncture when science itself was beginning to be defined and theorized as a sui generis object of historical and cultural inquiry. The same long nineteenth century that Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel have positioned as the crucible of an interconnected modern world was also the crucible for what Richard Yeo, in reference to Whewell’s œuvre, has labeled “metascience”: a practice of commentary and criticism that sought “to influence the way in which science, its method, epistemology, and values, was defined and promoted.” Unsurprisingly, such “metascience” was also a core activity in East Asia. The suddenness of a perceived rupture of modernity meant that as a matter of imminent urgency, almost all nineteenth-century East Asian intellectuals, in some way or form, were confronted with the task of giving sense and historical significance to modern Western science relative to their own societies and cultures. That is to say, an early kind of science studies in East Asia was initially pursued not as an academic discipline, but as an existential practice in the face of geopolitical turmoil. By recovering a more complex and globally entangled history of this "metascience," the special issue lays the groundwork for changing our very understanding of what “science studies” is and has been: not a field which Latour and others helped invent in the late ‘70s which was then decried in the ‘90s Science Wars, but a set of variegated discourses in response to global modernity.

Second, our issue shifts the question of modern Western science's universality toward a future-oriented process of global co-construction. East Asian thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were far less invested than scholars today in either problematizing the existence of modern science or debating whether or not it was really a Western invention. They did, to be sure, offer different—and often quite novel—accounts of what “modern science” was. However, their interest in doing so was less about revolutionizing an accepted narrative of what came before, than a matter of determining what role they might play in shaping the story of that which would come thereafter. Ownership over science’s past was not the important issue at stake. Modern Western science contained with it some aspect of the universal, but represented an incomplete universality in which East Asians might participate. Put differently, we argue that the oft-noted feeling of “backwardness” vis-à-vis the West shared amongst East Asian thinkers always had to it another face—one oriented toward agency in the future. 

On this basis, we ultimately propose an approach to the global history of science in the form of "strategic teleologies." What if this much-vaunted entity called “modern science” was merely a blip, a passing phase, a moment of transition on the way to something else? What if this “modern science” which we have spent so much time seeking to explain, attack, or else deconstruct was but one short-lived stage in a longer and ongoing “unfinished project,” the ultimate outcome of which might look quite different, and even unrecognizable, to our present?  And if so, what is that other science? Global histories of science might, we suggest, apply these questions toward shaping their historical analysis. The goal of writing a global history of science would be to find new geographies and a new cast of relevant actors whose ideas and practices might help explain the emergence, still in progress, of a new "science" on the horizon. That is, rather than showing that modern science really was present in non-Western societies; rather than recounting the costs of the indigenous epistemologies and ways of being modern science erased; rather than recovering how and by what means non-Western participants actually contributed to modern science’s construction, we might take seriously the conviction of the thinkers treated in our special issue, and situate the crux of the matter in a more ambitious imagination of—and hope for—the many possible futures of science. Precisely by recapturing the spirit of future-oriented agency and strategizing teleology, we might find ways to give the global history of science a fundamental narrative coherence and deeper historical meaning. We might find that the modern science which has so dogged us was just one spectacular stop—a marvelous roadside attraction—along a much longer journey.

This article examines Nishi Amane’s 1874 “Discourse on Knowledge,” positioning it as a key theorization of the meaning of “modern science” (科學) and thus a key—albeit forgotten—text in the genealogy of Japanese science studies (科学論). Science, for Nishi, was a “war of the intellect.” As a war, it required strategies for the rational management of resources and infrastructure. Science overall thus became “modern” by becoming the object of planning by experts in the social sciences specifically. However, creating such experts required breaking from prior Neo-Confucian frameworks which took the act of knowing nature as a process of transforming individual moral subjectivity. On this basis, I make two contentions. First, I argue that the concept of “modern science” in Japan was defined less by changes internal to the natural sciences themselves, and more by the renegotiation of the meaning of Confucian techniques of governance relative to new social sciences. Second, I suggest that the rupture of moral subjectivity inaugurated by Nishi is a crucial, unresolvedthread of science studies in Japan. 

Keywords: Japanese science studies, Meiji period, Nishi Amane, global history of science

The present article first offers a revisionist account of Tianyan lun 天演論 (On Heavenly Evolution), Yan Fu’s 嚴復 (1854‒1921) 1898 translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893). While Tianyan lun is widely recognized as one of the most influential books in modern Chinese thought, it is little acknowledged that Yan Fu constructed within it a theory of civilization by creating the twin concepts of zhihua 治化 and zhigong 治功 to translate the modern notion of civilization into Chinese. With this new understanding, the opposition Yan Fu posed between two competing visions for reforming China̶—Civilization and Ti-yong 體用 (Essence-Function)—emerged as a defining and consequential tension. For Yan, the crux lies in contrasting stances toward Western civilization: one advocating its adoption as a unified entity embodying universality; and the other, exemplified by Zhang Zhidong’s 張之洞 (1837‒1909) official doctrine of Essence-Function, rejecting such a holistic and universalist conception.

This central stake explains why a fundamental—but largely unrecognized—“science war” over the proper conceptions of science and technology lies at the heart of the tension between the two reform visions. In challenging the doctrine of Essence-Function, Yan repudiated Zhang’s concept of yi 藝，which roughly referred to mechanical arts or technology. By prioritizing technology over science, yi represents an unusual resistance to the two-century-long Western consensus that science takes precedence. As Yan’s theory of civilization relies on science to ensure the universality and holism of Western civilization, he drew on a Neo-Confucian framework to construct a concept of science as “Western gezhi” 西學格致, advancing the revolutionary argument that “science is the foundation of Western institutions.”

By making this “science war” visible, this article foregrounds the role of science and technology in the enduring tension between China’s two historical approaches to engaging with the universalist and holistic characterization of Western civilization—an issue later framed as modernity and universal values, and one that remains more urgent than ever today. In this light, the emergence of compound terms denoting “sciencetechnology,” namely kexue-jishu 科學技術 and keji 科技, in the 1950s—predating the concept of technoscience in Western science studies—may have originated from this unresolved tension and merit further investigation.

Keyword: civilization discourse, Yan Fu, Tianyan lun, Zhang Zhidong, keji (Technoscience)

Amid China’s New Culture Movement, a campaign that sought to enlighten the nation with “Mr. Science,” a spiritualist-divinatory group claimed success in photographing immortal spirits. For the spiritualists, these photographs provided undeniable evidence of the immortals’ existence, thereby legitimizing lingxue (靈學), the scientific study of the numinous. This article examines the epistemological significance of lingxue by looking at how lingxue practitioners re-imagined photography’s object, semiotics, and instrumentality. For them, immortal spirit photography captured lingguang 靈光, or numinous light, whose shape and intensity indexed a spirit’s position on a cosmic moral spectrum. Situating this practice at the intersection of the spectrum theory of light, religious worldviews, global spiritualism, and the translingual study of the numinous (ling/rei 靈) in East Asia, I show how lingxue understood seeing and knowing as extension of one’s moral selfhood. Immortal spirit photography thus charted an epistemological stance that was easily dismissed during the two “science wars” in modern China. Both the 1918‒1919 “Debunking lingxue” polemic and the 1923‒1924 “Science and Metaphysics” debate focused on defending the boundaries of modern science rather than questioning its epistemic claims. In contrast, immortal spirit photography posited what I call “the epistemology of the spectral,” which problematized the mechanical objectivity and linear temporality of photography as a central instrument of modern science. Instead, it reframed the camera as a morally sensitive medium, anticipating the becoming of a new self. In doing so, it offered a broader critique of the epistemic violence of modernization, lamenting the unfinished transformation of the knowing subject as the unfinished project of the Chinese enlightenment.

In the Japanese Empire’s “science wars” from the late 1930s to 1945, Kyoto School philosopher of science Shimomura Toratarō waged war on the Eurocentric historiography of science. Unlike today’s global historians of science who seek to document non-Western scientific contributions, Shimomura showed little interest in Japan’s scientific achievements before its modernization. He even readily accepted the European origins of “modern science.” His critique of the conventional history of science instead targeted Europe’s exclusive ownership of the historical narrative, which, in his view, stemmed from a misunderstanding that assumed historians were already equipped with a fully developed concept of science. To challenge this narrative, Shimomura proposed a new historiography called “history toward science.” This approach recast science as being in a state of becoming, with its trajectory punctuated by “world-historical events”̶each introducing new ways of reasoning and reconceptualizing science. Shifting his focus from first-order knowledge production to a second-order theorization of science, Shimomura’s history toward science remained open to the possibility of another event that might dramatically reshape the concept of science. Shimomura regarded “backward” actors in knowledge production as having theoretical advantages because their experiences of assimilating foreign epistemic techniques forced them to deeply reflect on the nature of science. This opened up the possibility for backward actors, specifically Japan, to become leading figures in the theorization of future science. He envisioned a distant future in which a pluralist conception of science would take shape, embracing every cultural group as a meaningful contributor. Conceiving of science as a key basis for creating the common world, his pluralist world history of science was strikingly aligned with the Japanese Empire’s supposedly pluralist world-making, ultimately leading him to embrace the problematic “Greater East Asian War.” Shimomura’s original yet dangerous history toward science offers a powerful anti-Eurocentric critique of the global history of science, which highlights the conception of science and the act of narration as key topics for further scrutiny. It in turn reveals the unsettling affinity between the global history of science and global imperialism.

Keywords: history toward science, styles of scientific reasoning, phenomenotechnique, Ian Hacking, Needham Question

The cultural wars during the Cold War have already drawn the attention of historians, particularly regarding the different ways the concept of science was framed by the communist and capitalist regimes. This paper contributes to this literature by exploring how Chosŏn Korea’s Confucian scholar, Choe Han-Gi (崔漢綺，1803‒1879) and his work were interpreted differently by philosophers in North and South Korea during the 1960s. Specifically, it examines how philosophers related Choe’s theory, known as the Learning of Qi (氣學), to Western science. Despite apparent contradictions in North and South Korean philosophers’ views of Choe Han-Gi, there were more commonalities and connections than conflicts. This paper shows how during the late 1950s and early 1960s, philosophers in both Koreas initiated research on Choe Han-Gi in response to their respective postcolonial attempts to address Chuch’esŏng (主體性), which can be roughly translated as subjectivity, independence, or self-reliance. Both countries’ philosophers were concerned with establishing foundations for modern science within their respective national contexts, and they sought to present Choe Hangi and his work as a historical example of scientific indigeneity. I argue that Kim Cheol-Ang (金哲央，b. 1929), a Zainichi Korean (在日朝鮮人) philosopher, played a critical role in advancing and mediating philosophical research on Choe Han-Gi across the politically divided peninsula, contributing to there being greater similarities in the arguments of both Koreas. However, his mediating role was not acknowledged by the philosophical communities in either country. Ultimately, while the geopolitical rivalry between capitalist and socialist conceptions of science did not result in a cultural war, Zainichi scholars were subjected to epistemic violence through the systematic erasure of their contributions.

Keywords: Choe Han-Gi, Learning of Qi, Practical Learning, Western Science, Zainichi Koreans