Year: 2009

Contracts and Spells in Love

Life & Notes2009.05.18
Contracts and Spells in Love
This article is meant to lay out some matters. Since bringing these things up still leaves me with a thousand tangled threads, this essay has no fixed theme; I’ll write as far as I get. As for my own romantic experiences, I already gave some account of them in some earlier articles, but clearly that was not enough, and I also did not devote a special treatment to them in the “Talking Love — Speaking of Love” folder, which makes it seem insufficiently sincere. So here I’ll write a dedicated piece to gather my thoughts. When I was a sophomore, I had a little, short-lived romance, and afterward I lay…
philosophy autobiography pluralism self
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2009年5月18日
Treating Concepts as Toys and Glasses as Toys

Philosophy & Thought2009.05.17
Treating Concepts as Toys and Glasses as Toys
In the last part of the previous essay, “Philosophy and Poetry,” I had originally wanted to mention “taking concepts as toys rather than regarding them as higher or lower,” but in the finished version I ended up deleting it because the writing never naturally flowed there. It just happened that a later chat touched on the related topic, so I’m putting it here as a supplement. At first I felt that the analogy between eyeglasses and language was not very convincing, but after thinking it over, it seems to be a pretty good analogy, actually rather interesting. Like eyeglasses, many concepts, pieces of knowledge, articles of faith, and so on…
philosophy language meaning philosophy talk
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2009年5月17日
Philosophy and Poetry

Philosophy & Thought2009.05.17
Philosophy and Poetry
I had long wanted to write an article about poetry, but I kept putting pen to paper, and the folder I had created called “Music—Poetry” had never lived up to its name. One reason I kept not writing was that I felt I was, after all, a complete illiterate, utterly ignorant; how could I presume to talk about poetry? Apart from the Tang poems I learned in class as a child, and the poetry collections by Bei Dao, Hai Zi, and the like that I now very occasionally flip through at random, I have virtually no firsthand experience of reading poetry at all. At the same time, as for criticism…
philosophy pluralism Plato reason
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2009年5月17日
Today’s Xindao Salon Jottings 09-05-16

Life & Notes2009.05.16
Today’s Xindao Salon Jottings 09-05-16
With finals approaching, maybe this was a dying flash of the setting sun? This issue of New Island saw an astonishing number of people showing up, especially those rare and hard-to-see exotic beasts, including four old-timers I had summoned, as well as Senior Brother Botian, who parachuted in on his own! Originally I had pulled those folks together for lunch; as it happened, there are usually no outsiders around before and after noon, which gave the old-timers plenty of room to let loose. Who would have thought that a certain group of people wouldn’t show up for lunch until around half past one or two o’clock = =||| In the…
everyday life China scholarship blog
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2009年5月16日
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-05-09

Life & Notes2009.05.09
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-05-09
Today’s salon was just as bleak; dr didn’t come either T_T. Only byz and xxj showed up to lend support, in the afternoon and evening respectively. But byz basically didn’t talk about anything; he spent ages reading books, while I was writing the reading notes from the previous post. As for xxj, who just left, we didn’t chat much either, including the relationship between life and reading (I believe reading is itself a part of life and should not be split off into some other activity that is either above or below life), and we also touched on a few questions about games (and childhood), as well as some strange…
philosophy everyday life book reading discussion
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2009年5月9日
Reading an Einstein Biography

History of Science & Scholarship2009.05.09
Reading an Einstein Biography
[U.S.] Walter Isaacson: Einstein: Life and the Universe, translated by Zhang Butian I had originally promised to write a review for Senior Brother Butian, but I have kept putting it off again and again. It seems I really just cannot squeeze one out; at least, not before the end of this term. So let me just write a few random lines here as an explanation… There are several reasons for this procrastination: First, this spring I unfortunately developed allergic rhinitis. Since I had never had allergies before, I never got the right treatment at the beginning, and it took me more than half a month of fussing around before I…
book reading notes history of science historiography
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2009年5月9日
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 09-05-02

Life & Notes2009.05.02
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 09-05-02
Today the throne was actually occupied; apparently it had been booked two days in advance. So I had no choice but to sit in the middle seat by the window next to it instead of in the corner. If a stranger happened to come by looking for me and failed to find me, then there was nothing to be done. This time it was even more miserable than last time: there was practically no one at all. Of course, it is perfectly normal for comrades to be busy and lazy in the latter part of the semester, and this sort of fluctuation in turnout was something I had expected from…
philosophy everyday life history Christianity
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2009年5月2日
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.28
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report
Postscript: The report’s effect should not count as bad, and it also received Teacher Ren’s highest praise. Still, I feel that many things were not explained clearly, because I myself was only able to read this article through after reading Science in Action. However, since the issues discussed in this article are not the same as those in Science in Action in terms of emphasis, when explaining this article it was very hard to weave in material from Science in Action and similar books. I tried to introduce some of it, but the result may not have been very good: on the one hand, a few words do not make…
book reading science notes history of science
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2009年4月28日
Reading Notes on “Science in Action” (Prepared for the classroom report on Latour: Drawing Things Together)

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.27
Reading Notes on “Science in Action” (Prepared for the classroom report on Latour: Drawing Things Together)
[French]Bruno Latour: Science in Action, translated by Liu Wenxuan and Zheng Kai, Dongfang Publishing House, 2005 Although for the original course in the sociology of science the only assignment was to report on Latour: Drawing things together, if I had not first gone through this book, it would have been truly impossible to imagine myself managing to read that article… um… now I’ve finally figured out what Latour wants to do~~ 113[68] Any set-up or organizational structure, no matter how large or small, what sort of thing it is, or how much it costs, so long as it can provide any kind of visible display in a scientific text, I…
book reading notes nature instrument
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2009年4月27日
Miscellaneous Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-04-25

Life & Notes2009.04.25
Miscellaneous Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-04-25
Given that not many people came today and I’ve had a pretty heavy load these past two days = =, I won’t write much…… In the afternoon and evening, one person came each time, but the exchanges both seemed to feel pretty good. In the afternoon we discussed political philosophy, and in the evening we talked about aesthetics—both fields where I am extremely weak and am just about to start wading into, so what I said seemed rather superficial, but by and large the direction was still fairly on target, right? I’ll keep honing myself slowly…… Spotted here today: dr/xxj Next time I’ll try to proactively drag in a few…
philosophy everyday life scholarship politics
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2009年4月25日