I am also working on a longer-term project, an intellectual history of the Hegelian and positivist concept of “the spirit of science” (kexue jingshen), focusing on its political deployment in twentieth-century and contemporary China, and drawing on my experience living and working in Beijing.

Beginning with the reinvention of spiritus-esprit-geist by Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, and Comte, the project pivots to Asia with two key events: the semantic pairing of spirit with 精神 in the early nineteenth century, and the 1915 translation of an 1866 Positivist speech by Thomas Huxley.

The remainder of the work examines the currency and power of the idea in twentieth century China, across regimes and philosophies. A graduate course based on this project is in development.