Abstract
Panel no. 18 at the 14 International Conference on History of Science in East Asia, Paris, 6-10 July 2015 In this panel, we explored a range of Chinese sources from late Imperial and early Republican period to show how important actors of disciplinary modernization negotiated the keenly felt connection to traditional scholarship on the one hand, and the increasingly prominent universal epistemic criteria and objectives on the other hand. This perspective challenges the distinction between figures seen as ""last Confucians"" versus those who became ""fathers of modern scientific disciplines"".
By putting together papers on scholars firmly embedded in the nineteenth-century ""traditional"" forms of enquiry with exploration of the new intellectuals of early twentieth century, we try to capture the pervasive interconnectedness of tradition and modernity throughout the transitional period of Chinese intellectual history.