Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 2: History of Scientific Thought

Joseph Needham was a biochemist who became the founding scholar of the history of Chinese science, and this volume, part of his multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China series published by Cambridge University Press, surveys the history of scientific and philosophical thought in China, including material relevant to Daoist and cosmological ideas about nature. Its landmark strength was making a vast range of Chinese primary material available to Western scholarship for the first time in this kind of systematic detail, drawing on classical Chinese texts directly. Its limit is that it is a mid twentieth century synthesis by one extraordinarily wide ranging scholar, and subsequent specialist research has refined or revised individual points, so it should be read as a foundational survey rather than the final word on any single topic within it.