Shen Gua's Empiricism.

• Author: Rao, Xiao

Shen Gua's Empiricism. By YA ZUO. Cambridge. MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2018. Pp. xiii + 333. $49.95.

Song-dynasty scholar-official Shen Gua (sometimes rendered as Shen Kua or Shen Kuo [phrase omitted] 1031-1095) is regarded as "China's Greatest Scientist." His Brush Talks from Dream Brook (Mengxi bitan [phrase omitted]) is an important title for anyone interested in the history of science in traditional China. Shen Gua's Empiricism by Ya Zuo makes an important contribution to scholarship on Shen Gua. especially to work by Hu Daojing [phrase omitted], Donald Holzman. and Nathan Sivin, by presenting Shen as an "empiricist" rather than a "scientist." Zuo's careful construction of a comprehensive framework on Shen's empirical stance has important implications for studying Song intellectual history.

Shen's Brush Talks belongs to a group of anecdotal writing known as biji (notebooks, lit., brush jottings), a genre that can only be loosely defined. These anecdotal writings, generally without clear structural traits, provide literati a flexible mode to record gossip, musings, and personal queries they may have felt reluctant to include in more formal forms of writing. During the Song, a huge number of these biji texts were produced; around five hundred titles are extant today. Although Shen's Brush Talks shares many of the generic features of biji, it stands out in this corpus because of its unique characteristics. Some of the most distinctive points of Brush Talks are its taxonomic headings (which are absent in most Song biji), its rich content on the natural world, and its attention to various fields of technical knowledge rarely seen in writings of the literati class. Due to these unique materials, the significance of Brush Talks in the eyes of modern readers has for a long time been its "scientific value." Breaking new ground in the study of Shen Gua and Brush Talks, Zuo's analysis of the collection is commendable for redirecting scholarly attention to its textual features as a biji and to Shen's highly idiosyncratic epistemic interests. In this review, I summarize Zuo's main theses in Shen Gua's Empiricism and discuss a few questions arising from the book's sections on Brush Talks.

Shen Gua's Empiricism, comprising an introduction, eleven substantive chapters, and three appendixes, is organized as an account of two intertwined narratives of Shen Gua's life and his thinking. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, and 8 are dedicated to a biography of...