Mansel Davies
A Selection from the Writings of Joseph Needham by Mansel Davies.
Notes from the jacket end flaps
A SELECTION FROM THE WRITINGS OF JOSEPH NEEDHAM
Mansel Davies’s selection from Joseph Needham's work provides a rich introduction to an immense corpus of scholarship.
Needham’s range is prodigious. In Chemical Embryology (1931) he defined what was virtually a new field of study, and his parallel interests in the history and philosophy of science encouraged the recognition of the need for international scientific cooperation which led to his ensuring recognition for and the placing of science in the title of UNESCO. One of Needham’s greatest contributions to the twentieth century has been his capacity to encompass different ‘universes of discourse’ in his thinking and his encyclopaedic mind has the gift of linking apparently disparate strands of scholarship. ‘Who else but Needham’, Mansel Davies asks, ‘can connect elements of Persian, Jewish, Czech, Aristotelian, Cartesian and Harveyan thinking within one clear interesting paragraph?’ Contemporary ecological disasters might well have been averted if we had heeded this eminent scientist’s early warning - that for survival we need a basic attitude of piety towards the universe into which we are born.
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Dr Joseph Needham, F.R.S., F.B.A., was born in 1900 and at Cambridge he has been a scholar, tutor, Fellow and Master of Gonville and Caius College. For twenty years he was an internationally recognized research biochemist.
He has cultivated wide interests: his studies have embraced the classics, history, humanist philosophy and religion, and especially the overlap between these and science. Gifted with great clarity of expression and an exceptional range of reference, his many volumes of essays have enlightened lay readers since the 1930s.
For more than forty years he has travelled extensively in China, searching out the original accounts and current practices in science and technology. Thus his greatest work, which will carry his name down the centuries, is a massive study entitled Science and Civilization in China. This encyclopaedic effort has become a legend of contemporary scholarship, but this Selection derives essentially from his general essays.
Mansel Davies who has chosen and introduced this selection from Needham’s writings was, until his retirement, Professor of Chemistry in the University of Wales. He avers that only a quarter of the pleasure he had in making this Selection would give the reader a very happy time.
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