Daiwie Fu: A Brief Intellectual Biography
1, Brief introduction
Daiwie Fu, (傅大為 birth in 1953, Sep.) is a Taiwanese academic, the founding editor in chief of an international STS academic
journal East Asian Science, Technology and Society, and a
self-appointed radical intellectual. Former
Distinguished Professor of the graduate institute of STS, now Emeritus
Professor in National Yang-Ming Chao-Tong University. His research areas are:
science and technology studies, gender and medicine in modern Taiwan, gender
and science, East Asian STS, history and philosophy of science, and also
history of Chinese science (mainly
on biji, Mengxi Bitan and the cultural history of science in the Song Dynasty), and recently he extends his research on actions of contemporary radical intellectuals. He published papers widely in Chinese, English,
Italian, Korean, and Japanese. He published three academic books, a few books
of social criticisms, and have founded several academic journals (including a
radical journal in Taiwan, Taiwan: a Radical Quarterly in
Social Studies) and several magazines in Taiwan. Ever since the lifting of
Taiwan’s martial law, he had participated in some social movements and has
engaged in social and gender criticisms, on and off. But he also had plunged
into Taiwan’s university bureaucracy/structure
as dean of humanities and social sciences for some years. Now he is an emeritus
professor, a senior citizen of Taiwan, and is still looking for the next stage
of actions and researches after a university life for more than 30 years.
e-mail:
dwfu@mx.nthu.edu.tw
2, education.
B.S. Physics, National Tsing Hua University,
Taiwan 1975.
M.A. Philosophy, Ohio State University, USA, 1980.
Ph.D.
Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA, 1986.
3, teaching and university career
-
Associate/Professor, History, Division of History
of Science, and Division of STS. National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, 1986-2009.
-
Professor, Institute of Science, Technology, and
Society, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, TAIWAN, 2007/09-2019.
-
Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, National
Yang-Ming University, Taipei, TAIWAN, 2009-2015.
- Emeritus Professor, National Yang-Ming and Chao-Tong University, 2019~
-
Visiting Scholars, in Harvard, SOAS, Maison des
Sciences de l’Homme, and Univ. Paris 7, and EHESS.
4, areas of research, social studies, engagements
-
Science and Technology Studies, Science,
technology, and Society, and STS Studies of East Asia.
-
Cultural History of Chinese Science in China’s Middle Period (from Tang
to Song), including biji Texts and especially Mengxi Bitan.
-
History of Modern Medicine in Taiwan and its
Gender/Sexuality Aspects.
-
Gender & Science, and Gender & Medicine.
-
History of postwar Taiwanese intellectuals.
-
Social and political criticisms after the lifting
of Taiwan’s martial law.
Editor-in-Chief,
East Asian Science, Technology, and
Society –An International Journal (EASTS, Quarterly, published by
Springer and later by Duke University Press from 2010), 2007 summer to the end
of 2012.
President,
Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly on Social
Studies,（台灣社會研究季刊）1988 to
1992?
Editor-in-Chief,
Philosophy and the History of Science,
1995-1998 (Taiwan, Yuan-Liou)
5, a brief books list of academic works
and social criticisms.
Knowledge Pursuits in Heterogeneous Spaces and
Times: Collections of Papers in History and Philosophy of Science
(1992 in Chinese《異時空裡的知識追逐》東大), Philosophy and Conceptual History of Science
in Taiwan, co-eds. with Lin Cheng-Hung (1992, Kluwer, BSPS
series), Assembling the Asiastic New Body:
Gender/Sexuality, Medicine, and Modern Taiwan (2005 in Chinese 《亞細亞的新身體》群學), A
Genealogical History of STS and Its Multiple Constructions: To Weave an Extensive Network for Gazing
upon the Modern Sciences (2019 in Chinese 《STS的緣起與多重建構》臺大出版中心)。
Books/collections
in social criticisms and edited collection including:
Radical Notes (《基進筆記》 1990桂冠)，The
Spaces of Knowledge and Power (《知識與權力的空間》1990桂冠)，Knowledge,
Power, and Women (《知識、權力、與女人》
1993自立)，Three Answers to the Question of What is Science
(《回答科學是什麼的三個答案》
2006-09群學)，Kuhn’s
Critical Reader in
Taiwan (2001
in Chinese《孔恩評論集》巨流) co-edited
with Chu Yuan-Hong.
His
current middle-range research project is to write a book to describe and
understand the actions and ways of doing things of two radical intellectuals he
admires: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault.
He would then reflect upon, together with his Taiwan
experience as a radical scholar during the years after lifting the martial law,
what could be constituted as a radical intellectual/scholar
in the contemporary world.
Translations: Thomas
Kuhn’s The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1985, with Cheng Shude, Wang daohuan, also the newest 4th edition
in 2021)
6, influenced by (Yeh
Hsin-yun 葉新雲, Li
Chao 李喬,
Edward, T. Ch’ien 錢新祖,
Thomas Kuhn, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Evelyn F. Keller,
Steve Shapin, Donald MacKenzie). And
Influencing?… (to be filled out by others)
7, a life, works and debates
Daiwie Fu was born in Taiwan. His parents came from
mainland China. His father was a two terms
Committee Member of Taiwan’s Examination
Yuan. Fu’s undergraduate was major in physics. He liked physics, chemistry, and
biology in high school, but later in Tsing-Hua
University his interests in
literature and philosophy grew. Following Taiwan’s student trends then to study abroad
for Ph.D degree after graduation, he went to US
graduate school in 1978, first in OSU to study logic and analytic philosophy and
later in Columbia University to study history, philosophy and sociology of
science. During his graduate studies, he encountered Kuhn’s classic The Structure and was excited about it, as that book explained
why Fu gradually distanced himself from physics and moved to history and
philosophy of science. He also met Professor Robert Merton in Columbia for
sociology of science and was encouraged to read Ludwik Fleck. As stayed in NYC
for long, Fu was also politically enlightened, reading Chomsky and Said, and
met Taiwanese political exiles and oversea activists. He got his ph.D degree
with a thesis on history and philosophy of science of the 17th
century Europe: the competition between Newtonian and Huygensian
optics. Dr. Fu returned to Taiwan in 1986 and began to teach in National Tsing-Hua
University, his alma mater. He became a professor in the institute of history,
section of history of science, and also started promoting history of science as adjunct professor in many universities, as history of science was a new
branch of history in Taiwan during late 80s.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s late 80s was a period of social
movements and democratization. After continued challenges from Taiwan’s
liberals and oppositional movements, KMT finally lifted its long term
Martial-Law and freed the society from controls and repressions. Fu took the
opportunities and actively participated in the democratization movements, and
promoted radical scholarship. He wrote quite a few newspaper columns and published
several small collections of social criticism. He had also spent time to
gather Taiwan’s radical intellectuals to establish a new journal, Taiwan: a Radical Journal in Social Studies,
which had had strong impacts on social
sciences and humanities graduate students of
later generations. On the other hand, Fu’s academic works continued and
developed, ranging from history and philosophy of science to Taiwan’s cultural
and intellectual history. He also open a research path, informed by Fu’s own philosophy of science, into Chinese history of science. Later his
interests focused on a new reading and analysis of Song’s biji (筆記) classic Mengxi
Bitan (夢溪筆談), and he had made his name for this research in international
circles of sinology. Fu’s methodology of analyzing biji text is to understand one jotting of interest, not as isolated
but as contextualized in the category (門類) of that jotting was embedded, and also to
understand that category within the overall classificatory or taxonomic
structure of categories of that biji.
This research path seems to to be
inspired from late Kuhn and Foucault.
Fu later continued to develop his interest in social
studies of science, which overlapped with Taiwan government’s concerns with
Taiwan’s long term technology controversies in society, such as the long and intensive
social debates about nuclear power. This brought about the formation of Taiwan’s
STS (Science and Technology Studies) intellectual movements. In cooperating
with other like-minded intellectuals in
social sciences and feminists, Fu had
thus helped to establish an international
journal, sponsored by Taiwan’s ministry of science
and technology: East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal
(EASTS). Fu’s engagements of STS in recent decades had also helped to
form the first STS graduate institute, plus the first school of humanities and
social sciences in National Yang-Ming University (Now National Yang-Ming and Chia-Tong University), also to establish Taiwan’s STS Society, and finally accumulated
to one of his major publications: A
Genealogical History of STS and Its Multiple Constructions.
As
a
social-oriented scholar who was benefited early from Taiwan’s
democratization and it open-minded atmosphere, Fu also had the opportunities to
explore and helped to open some new fields in Taiwan: gender and science,
gender and medicine. Fu’s interests and concerns in issues of gender and sex
stemmed partly from his personal life and past marriage. During this process, he
had invited or introduced important feminists of science studies like Sandra
Harding and Evelyn Keller to Taiwan, and had also participated to establish a
new Gender Studies Graduate Institute in Kaohsiung Medical University from
2002-04. Coupled with his inspiration of Foucault’s works in sexuality, he had
done some extensive research of gender and medicine in modern Taiwan, ranging
from late Qing Taiwan (on Dr.MaKay’s Presbyterian religious medicine), colonial
medicine under Japan, and post war Pax-American medicine. One of its focus was on
the classic issues of competition and complement between midwives and
obstetrician-gynecologists in Taiwan’s modern history. Fu’s contention
was that there is a gender-biased medical structure in Taiwan’s OBGYN-related
medicine rooted in Taiwan’s colonial modernity and perpetuated later, which can
only be deconstructed and reformed by contemporary feminist-oriented movements.
There were naturally some debates concerning Fu’s
ideas and researches. From his earlier social criticism and his current book
project research, he has been constructing a conception of “radicality” with a
special Chinese phrase（基進）. This conception was
partly inspired by Foucault’s works on historical marginalities, thus Fu had
proposed a conception of “marginal struggle” to emphasize the importance
of marginalities and its subversive power. It had gained some importance in the
early phases of Taiwan’s democratic movements. He advised activists engaging
social criticism from the margins and not to be seduced to become part of the
center: i.e., parliament or state. But this position was not popular among
social activists who work with political oppositions and eager to become
elected congressmen or ministers. Only by taking control of the state machine,
they argued, can we really change or reform the society. A brief reflection of
Fu’s idea of radicality in the last three decades and his further theoretical
notes was addressed in his “Radicality 2.0” (基進 2.0, 2019). Another
debate, or at least tension, is between Fu’s position concerning the
relationship between philosophy of science (PS) and STS. Although coming to Taiwan’s academic
world as a philosopher of science, he later switched to history of science and
especially to STS in his second half of academic life. This switch did not
please some younger philosophers of science, who had considered Fu an important
ally. Similar to the tension between PS and STS in Euro-America contexts, PS in
Taiwan is often suspicious of STS being relativism and
excessive constructivism, whereas STS is quick to dismiss PS as
egg-headed academic and irrelevant to social issues of science, technology and
medicine. Sometimes Fu indeed gave others impressions like that, but he also
wrote papers concerning this tension and looked for ways to respect or
complement each other, as can be seen from his 2013 paper on
“boundary-crossings” and his new 2021 General Introduction to the fourth
edition of Taiwanese translation of Kuhn’s
Structure Fu had helped to translate back to 1985.
Daiwie
Fu has a son Allen Fu with his family in New York City, and Fu now lives with
his partner Jui-Ch’i Liu in Danshui of New Taipei City, Taiwan.
8, Selected research works in four parts
(for a fuller
list, or a list of the most recent 15 years, look
into Fu’s materials in the website of STS graduate institute of Taiwan’s NYCU)
-
a), philosophy of science, and
other social studies of Taiwan
1.
1986, Sep., "Problem Domain and
Developmental Strategies──a Study on the Logic of Competition and Development
of Scientific Programs", Ph. D Thesis, Columbia University, New York,
U.S.A. (Microfilms Inc., Account No. DA 058785. Ann Arbor, MI.)
2.
1989, Jan, "The Dialectic of the History of
Positivistic Science as a Discourse: From Enlightenment in the West to Yin
Hai-Kuang in Taiwan", Taiwan: A
Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, Vol.1, 4, pp.11-56
3.
1994, “H2O 的一個不可共量史──重論「不可共量性」及其與意義理論之爭”(“A History of Incommensurability for ‘H2O’”)《第四屆美國文學與思想研討會論文選集》，哲學篇，中央研究院歐美所,
pp. 95 - 122。
4.
1995, Sep., “Higher Taxonomy and Higher
Incommensurability” Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 273 - 294.
5.
1997, 「百朗森林裡的文字獵人──試讀台灣原住民的漢文書寫」收入《身份認同與公共文化》 ("Words Hunters in
the Jungle of BAI-LANG--- A Reading on the Chinese Writings by Taiwan's
aborigines", originally published in Con-Temporary
magazine, and later published in Oxford Univ. Press Hong Kong) 陳清橋編，1997，牛津大學出版社。pp.385-412。
6.
2019,「基進2.0」(“Radicality, 2.0”)《臺灣理論關鍵詞》史書美、梅家玲、廖朝陽、陳東升主編，頁205-217（聯經）
7.
2021, “Kuhn in the humanities and social studies of
science”, a General Introduction for the fourth edition of the Taiwanese
translation of T. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962),
published by Yuan-Liou, Taipei.
-
b), Chinese history of science
1.
1988, June, "A Study on the Historical
Development and Transformation of ZHOU-BI（周髀）Research Tradition", Tsing
Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, new series 18, no.1, pp.1-41.
2.
1991, May, "Why Did Liu Hui Fail to Derive
the Volume of a Sphere?" Historica Mathematica, Vol. 18, pp.
212 - 238.
3.
1993-4, Nov., “A Contextual and Taxonomic Study
on the 'Divine Marvels' and 'Strange Occurrences' in Mengxi Bitan”, Chinese
Science, No. 11, pp. 3 - 35.
4.
1998, July, “On Crossing Taxonomies and
Boundaries: A Critical Note on Comparative History of Science and Zhao Youqin’s
‘Optics’”, Taiwanese Journal for Philosophy and History of Science, No. 8, (1996-1997), pp.103- 127.
5.
1999, “On Mengxi
Bitan’s [夢溪筆談] World
of Marginalities and ‘South-Pointing Needles’: Fragment Translation vs.
Contextual Translation” De l’Un au Multiple. De la traduction du
Chinois dans les langues Europeennes, edited by Viviane Alleton and
Michael Lackner, pp.175-201, Editions de la Maison de Sciences de l’Homme.
6.
2001, “An Early Geomantic Theory and its Relation
to Compass Deviation”, Ch.11.2, History of Science in China Volume, Encyclopedia
for History of Science, sponsored by Enciclopedia Italiana and Académie
internationale d’histoire des sciences. (Italian version: Storia Della
Scienza, Vol.II, Sezione I, La Scienza in Cina, ch.11.2, pp.119-25. Its
English original manuscript is available upon request.)
7.
2007, “The Flourishing of Biji or Pen-Notes Texts and its Relations to History of Knowledge
in Song China (960-1279)”, in a special issue “What did it mean to write an
Encyclopedia in China?”, pp.103-130, Hors Serie, Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident, 2007, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes.
8.
2010, “When Shen Gua Encountered the ‘Natural
World’--- A Preliminary Discusson on Mengxi
Bitan and the Concept of Nature”, eds., by Hans Ulrich Vogel and Günter
Dux, in Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-European Cross-Cultural Perspective,
Brill:
-
c), gender and science, gender
and medicine in modern Taiwan
1.
1996, April, (與王秀雲合作)「台灣女性科學家的九零年代風貌──試析「科學／女性／社會脈絡」諸相關領域」(“Women
Scientists in Taiwan and their Current Situations in Science,Gender, and
Society”)，Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, no.22,
pp.1-58。
2.
1999, June,“融會在玉米田裡的「非男性」科學──關於「女性科學」的哲學論爭與新發展”(“A Feeling for Corn Field in Keller’s
‘Non-Masculine’ Science”)，《歐美研究》，第29卷第二期，pp.1-40. 中研院歐美研究所。
3.
2006, “CS, VBAC, and an Ironic Past in Taiwan’s
Obstetrics” in No.2, Gender and Sexuality, pp.25-41, CGS,
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan.
4.
2009, “대만의 1세대 남녀 산부인과 의사: 식민지적 의료근대화와 젠더 구조”
translated and revised from the SNUH symposium (2nd International
Symposium: The First Generation of Native Doctors in East Asian Countries,
Seoul National University Hospital) article “Two first-generation Obstetrics-Gyneacology doctors in Taiwan:
Colonial Medical Modernity and Gender Structure”, 동아시아 1세대 의사들의 생애, pp.200-257.
5.
2017，「『醫療化』論點的當代多元演化，與來自性別與社會研究的商榷」(Contemporary
multiple evolutions of the ‘medicalization’ thesis and commentaries from gender
and social studies of medicine)，《東亞醫療史：殖民、性別與現代性》聯經出版社。
-
d), science and technology
studies, East Asian STS, genealogy of SSK/STS.
1.
2007, “How far can East Asian STS
go?”, position paper, 1st issue of EASTS (East Asian Science,
Technology and Society: an International Journal), Vol.1, no.1, pp.1-14.
2.
2013,「定位與多重越界：回首重看STS與科哲」(Positions and Multiple Boundary-Crossings ---A
Reflection on the Relationship between STS and Philosophy of Science)，《科技、醫療與社會》，No.16.
pp.49-102.
3.
2020, June “Emergence, Social and Cognitive Trends, and
the Next Step? Two Decades of STS in Contemporary Taiwan,” EASTS, vol.14, no.2: 411-418
4.
2020, “A
genealogical explication on the emergence and constructions of STS: a view
from East Asia,” Tapuya: Latin American
Science, Technology and Society, Vol.3, no.1, (pp.1-11)
(postscript:
This brief intellectual biography was prepared and written with great helps
from a friend, a former student 王珮瑩. Although it did not publish in a place we originally intended to, it
at least goes and stays in Fu’s blog “New Radical Notes”, which is a fine place
for locating Fu’s many short articles and social criticisms in recent years.)
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