Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire – UMR 7219, laboratoire SPHERE

Researcher (chargé de recherche), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), laboratoire SPHERE (UMR 7219), Université Paris Diderot. Contact me : daniel.ptrk.morgan [at] gmail.com  Collective projects  Academic career  Publications  Communications (since 2015)  Gestion de la recherche (since 2015)  Valorisation

Research topics

I work on the history of the astral and mathematical sciences, religion, ritual, sports, and intellectual and manuscript culture in ancient China, at the heart of my work being a period – that of the decline, fragmentation, and reconsolidation of empire between the first and seventh century CE – and the very question of fragmentation and the construction of unity.

Incubated in the ERC project Mathematical Sciences in the Ancient World (SAW), my research aims to problematise monolithic discourses about the history of the exact sciences in China and to furnish a robust alternative based on plurality and the individual. In short, my goal is to decompose the ‘science’ and ‘civilisation’ that are so often the subject of such studies into their constituent elements – into actors’ categories, legends, literary genres, public institutions, communities of experts, and individual practitioners –
so as to reveal the ways in which these elements come together, pull apart, and evolve in parallel. Once broken down, for example, ‘Chinese science’ gives way to the distinct categories actually used by our historical subjects – e.g. tiānwén (‘heavenly patterns’), lì (‘sequencing’), suàn (‘calculation’), and hemerology (calendar divination), the latter of which was clearly distinguished from the sciences of heaven and numbers. None of these fields developed in a vacuum, of course, but it is only in recognising the nature of their circumscription that we can understand what passed from one to the other. Given the number of contemporary figures who worked across these domains, the phenomenon of polymathy gives us a natural vector by which to examine the transfer of ideas between them. The question of polymathy brings us also to that of the mental universe of the polymath, asking how the individual acted to reconcile and compartmentalise the diverse épistémès within which they worked both within and beyond the history of science.

Two examples suffice to clarify what this looks like.

The first is my collaborative work with Karine Chemla on the bamboo manuscript Suàn shù shù (Writings on Mathematical Procedures) from Zhangjiashan tomb no. 247 (sealed ≥ 186 BCE). Our graphological analysis of the manuscript has revealed two scribal hands alternating both between and within textually and codicologically integral units of the manuscript, and that one of these hands also appears in four of the seven other texts in this tomb library – texts on medicine, philosophy, law, and the personal journal of the deceased. Previously treated as an arbitrary collection of mingqi – funerary ‘fakes’ – and divvied up between modern academic specialties, this corpus unveils the red thread of its unity in the light of graphology : the unity of its having belonged to and having been created by this one particular man. Read as such, the written traces of that hand help us to identify its interactions with the other members of the community of hands present in this tomb and to reconstruct something of the identity of this man through archaeology, manuscript studies, medicine, philosophy, law, and mathematics.

The second is my research on the historiography of the astral sciences in the pre-modern period. Faced with our post-modern sensibilities on the subject of ‘empiricism’ and ‘progress’, I am interested in the question of how to treat similar concepts as the appear at the centre of medieval discussions about the history of astronomy : the obsessional pursuit of predictive ‘tightness’ (mì) as ‘verified’ by ‘experience’ (yàn) and the ‘accumulation’ (jì / lèi) of knowledge realised through a chain of historical ‘awakenings’ (wù). That these ideas are found on the other side of the cordone sanitaire that we have erected around the Occident and modernity is interesting, but more interesting is the question of where this comes from and what it implies for our historical subjects. As to ‘tightness’, I trace the conceptual vocabulary of accuracy and the ‘rules of the game’ involved in its ‘verification’ by public trial to the model established by the ritual archery competition – the ‘Big Shoot’ (dà shè), a competition run by the very same bureau as that charged with astronomical testing. As to the ‘awakening’ and ‘accumulation’ of human knowledge, I examine the way in which certain figures equally famous with the history of science and the history of religion write on said subject across separate magisteria. ‘Progress’, it turns out, was very much a religious preoccupation, and ‘scientific progress’, it turns out, posed a theological dilemma : that man could attain ‘what the ancient [Sages] had yet to learn’ (Monk Yīxíng, 683–727). Each arrived at their own solution, and the compromises, priorities, and conflicts that this intractable dilemma forced reveal a great deal of the complexity of the individual’s mental universe.

For a complete bibliography, including abstracts and documents for download, click here.

Collective projects

Academic career

Publications

Collective volumes

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

Book chapters

Book reviews

Translations

Other publications

Communications (since 2015)

Gestion de la recherche (since 2015)

Organisation

Editorial work

Valorisation