15.05.2025

Mrs. Anna Strob, M.A., Dr. des., Completed her PhD Thesis

Anna Strob successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled "Translating Renaissance Science and Philosophy to Late Ming China: Alfonso Vagnone’s Kongji gezhi (空際格致, Investigation into Phenomena in the Atmosphere, c. 1633)".

On 20 January 2025, Anna Strob successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled “Translating Renaissance Science and Philosophy to Late Ming China: Alfonso Vagnone’s Kongji gezhi (空際格致, Investigation into Phenomena in the Atmosphere, c. 1633).” In her thesis, she analyzes the transmission of Aristotelian natural philosophy to China through the works of Jesuit missionaries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. With the Aristotelian corpus being one of the most influential aspects of the Jesuits' scientific and philosophical canon, the Kongji gezhi stands as a remarkable example of how Renaissance science and philosophy were adapted to Chinese intellectual traditions. In this Chinese source text, the Jesuit missionary Alfonso Vagnone translated and synthesized key elements of Aristotle’s cosmology, particularly the theory of the four elements, along with related cosmological and philosophical concepts from the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentric worldview. Vagnone’s work not only demonstrates the Jesuit mission’s role in the transmission of Western knowledge to China, but also highlights the complexities of cultural translation in an era of early globalization. Anna Strob’s research sheds new light on how Western scientific concepts were not merely imported, but carefully recontextualized and integrated into Chinese thought during this pivotal period of cross-cultural exchange. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich Vogel and Prof. Dr. Achim Mittag.