On The Needham Puzzle In Needham's Texts

As a famous academic problem, Needham Puzzle attracts a lot of attention from many scholars, it also generates a lot of research results. But it is still an unsolved mystery. In history there have been several studies climax, until the publication of the last volume of "Science and Civilization in China," there has not been a huge breakthrough. However, on the academic theoretical and practical significance, Needham Puzzle are been held a basically positive attitude, a lot of scholars think it is worthy of study. This paper insists binding "Needham Puzzle" on Needham related texts to re-examine, not only for further complement to the existing research, also appeared to have a reflection on existing research "bottleneck". This paper attempts to explore the essence in "Needham Puzzle" and the causes of its difficulty by sorting Needham related texts, which is the basic position of this paper.Before starting new exploration on "Needham Puzzle", we currently have a systematic classification of the many "answers" or point of views, which is from the external environment in the development of science and technology, the internal perspective of science and technology and puzzle perspective on “Needham Puzzle” self. The three related research aspects have been divided. And an objective evaluation and summary has been done to the results of previous research, within which including the discussion among the many differences relate to Eastern and Western Thinking method, Chinese traditional culture defects, Chinese feudal economic system, Chinese imperial examination system and Chinese geographical environment. But these arguments have their shortcomings, their common feature is to show Chinese people do not pursue science or the motive of pursuing science was suppressed by the Chinese traditional culture. But these views did not prove what kind of motivation can result in the generation of modern science. The view of trying to solve problems from internal laws of the development science and technology also has limitations. As Jin Guantao, Liu Qingfeng proposed two internal circular scientific acceleration mechanism. Attempt by the method of "comprehensive study" to examine the internal evolution of science and technology, their viewpoint is novel, empirical analysis should be encouraged, but this perspective neglect the analysis of social factors in the external environment of science and technology, and this internal law of development of scientific perspective needs further scrutiny. As for the challenging views on "Needham Puzzle", although they insist that Needham did not made a clear distinction on the concept of "science" and "technology" is the main reason of "Needham Puzzle" being "wrong", or it is a key factor of its being a pseudo-problem, scholars who hold such a view are lack of Needham's own intellectual development as the background and combing with Needham related texts to verify the doubt.Taking Marx's history and logic of research methods, using text analysis and comparative analysis, based on carding Second Volume "History of Scientific Thought" of "Science and Civilization in China," which is the best embodies of his scientific concept of development, we focus on discovery of Needham scientific concept of development, which is the research goal. And also we do analysis of Needham writing background in the relevant texts. We found the main writing line of second volume "History of scientific thought" of " Science and Civilization in China " is to clarify the three conditions for the scientific development exist in China, and the ideological foundation of Needham is that science is universal, An important research perspective of Needham is characterized by comparative perspective between the Western and Eastern research, and the perspective from external environment of science and technology. More important finding is that the Needham thinks the West produced a capitalist society is one of the important reasons of modern science developed in West, meanwhile, Needham thinks China does not have the third condition, which is necessary for the development of science. Then we combine this finding of "Needham Puzzle" by the re-inspection of "Needham Puzzle ". The first part, namely "why modern science was born in the West, not China," is due to the Chinese do not have the third condition of scientific development and the environment of capitalist society. The second part does not directly connect with "science", when the second part is associated with the first part, there is a logical fault. This shows there is a certain defect in the statement of "Needham Question". We think this is one of the reasons causing the problem has no satisfactory answer. In Joseph Needham's late study, he focused on comparison of difference in social environment of Chinese and Western society, which is full of unimaginable complexities, and it is difficult to measure the problem and a non-human force can be solved, we guess this is why he did not get a satisfactory explanation finally.Last but not least, we made an evaluation of the "Needham Puzzle", although it is believed there are some "problems" on the statements, but it involves many academic issues widely, and the discussion it stimulated is good for academia, the masterpiece of Needham also combines the ancient Chinese scientific and technological achievements systematically and comprehensively, which has a great research value. More importantly, "Needham Puzzle" refers to Modern China's backwardness in Science, it has a guiding role for China to achieve a leading position in international competition. Finally, the paper attempts to make all the above exploration on Needham Puzzle applies to today's practice, and trying to study the reference role of Needham Puzzle in today's Chinese scientific development, such as the building basic disciplines, innovating talent incentive Mechanism, the communication and popularization of science, academic exchanges both domestic and abroad.