Thinking with Cases
Charlotte FurthThe study of cases reveals historically specific epistemologies that offer insight into how Chinese experts dealt with the tensions between classical norms and practice-based judgment and between techno/magical and literati/scholarly styles of constructing authority. By the late Ming dynasty, case collections, defined as an , were a recognized genre of writing in a variety of fields, becoming a sign of the historical sociology of emerging occupational specialties in China, those of the physician, judge, official, priest.
The innovative and productive explorations gathered here present a coherent set of interlocking arguments that will be of interest to comparativists as well as specialists on premodern East Asia. For China scholars, they examine the interaction of different fields of learning in the late imperial period, the relationship of evidential reasoning and literary forms, and the philosophical frameworks that linked knowledge to experience and action. For comparativists, the essays bring China into a global conversation about the methodologies of the human sciences, where the records of a civilization without an indigenous history of experimental science provide new insight into the resources of action-oriented strategies of practical reason.