Year: 2010

The Blind Spots of Modern Medicine as Seen from “Double-Blind Experiments”

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.30
The Blind Spots of Modern Medicine as Seen from “Double-Blind Experiments”
Is medicine a science? The usual answer is yes, or at least that “medicine is not merely a science,” but in any case, one believes that medicine is first of all a science, or at least “scientific.” Like other modern sciences, the “scientificness” of medicine is embodied in its goals and methods: the goal of science is to reveal the (natural, reductionist) causes and laws of things; the method of science is quantitative and experimental. The scientificness of modern medicine is first grounded in biology and physiology. But even the most stubborn reductionists will admit that medicine is not physiology, and that besides studying physiological phenomena, the basic theme…
culture history of science science philosophy of science
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2010年12月30日
Some Thoughts on the Future of Energy

AI & the Future of Technology2010.12.26
Some Thoughts on the Future of Energy
Today the science-technology-philosophy group discussed energy issues. I’ve jotted down some thoughts here. The present energy system cannot possibly be sustained forever; within a few decades major adjustments will have to be made, and this is beyond dispute. But how exactly to adjust it, and how to anticipate and act, remain questions to be explored. The usual modern Western mode of imagining things is Christian + classical mechanics. By the Christian mode of imagining, I mean a messianic complex: the belief that human beings will eventually be saved, that our fallenness and incompetence do not really matter, and that there will always be some savior who comes to save…
philosophy technology Heidegger Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2010年12月26日
The Handy and the In-Hand

Philosophy & Thought2010.12.23
The Handy and the In-Hand
Out of the blue, I found myself thinking about Heidegger’s two concepts: ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. The Chinese translations are hard to convey. “Shangshou” does a decent job of expressing the idea, but it seems to point more to the user’s state; when we say “shangshou zhuangtai” (“being in a ready-to-use state”), we are more inclined to think it refers to someone’s skillful state. We say that someone has gotten the hang of something, rather than saying that something is ready-to-hand for someone. Of course, a ready-to-hand state implies a coordinated state between human beings and things, or even, one might say, a state in which subject and object have…
philosophy Heidegger intentionality truth
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2010年12月23日
What Can Chinese Tradition Bring to Modern Politics?

Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese2010.12.21
What Can Chinese Tradition Bring to Modern Politics?
Of course, restoring China’s traditional Confucian ritual order and bureaucratic politics is impossible. That would first require the restoration of the imperial system and the revival of the clan order. A wholesale return to the old is hopeless, and unnecessary as well. No matter how Chinese politics develops in the future, it is bound to be Westernized and modernized. So, amid all this, what can Chinese tradition still bring, what elements can it still provide? Of course, you may think that not a single element of so-called Chinese tradition is needed at all, and that it would be enough simply to introduce Western modern democratic institutions. But a complete…
China culture democracy Arendt
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2010年12月21日
A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.20
A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture
Textbook-style history of science takes the achievements of modern science as its standard, and describes the course of science as a great chronology in which people one by one attained those achievements. But history of science in this sense is in a certain way not history at all; what it confronts is not the process by which science succeeded one another, but is always simply the task of praising modern science. Such history of science assigns to each component of modern science a discoverer and a date of discovery, and thus introduces modern science according to the order of discovery rather than the logical order. Yet this kind of narrative…
history of science book reading history book review
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2010年12月20日
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.19
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)
I suddenly realized that I still hadn’t posted this article…… This piece was originally supposed to appear in Dushu Bao, but by some strange twist of fate it somehow ended up being published in Zhongguo Tushu Shangbao, and I don’t know exactly how much was cut from it. To this day I still haven’t seen the newspaper or the fee…… I’m told that in the next couple of days I’ll be rewriting it and submitting a new version to senior brother Bu Tian…… If I’m going to revise it, I might as well revise it more thoroughly—why not try a different line of thought and rewrite it from scratch?…… It’s…
history of science book reading book review Whig history
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2010年12月19日
“Co-being” and the Horse of Seahorse-ism

Philosophy & Thought2010.12.18
“Co-being” and the Horse of Seahorse-ism
The progress of the Being and Time reading group has been fairly smooth so far, and we have now reached the part on being-with and the Anyone. At the time, I stopped where I did in “A Preliminary Exploration of Heidegger’s Ontology of Media,” and I wrote then: “Speaking of the ‘Anyone,’ Heidegger’s related discussions of ‘being-with,’ ‘falling,’ and so on will also be drawn in. Dasein’s being-in-the-world is not only always dealing with things, but is also always dealing with others, and this is precisely where the concepts of ‘dealing with’ and ‘media’ ought to apply. However, as a very preliminary glimpse into Heidegger’s ontology of media, this article…
philosophy media philosophy of science Heidegger
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2010年12月18日
The Tower of Babel and the Accelerator — Reflections on Ma Boqiang’s Lecture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.17
The Tower of Babel and the Accelerator — Reflections on Ma Boqiang’s Lecture
Today Professor Ma brought us a lecture in popular frontier science, mainly introducing the scientific achievements and latest developments in particle physics and cosmology. People build ever more precise astronomical instruments and vast particle accelerators in order to probe the mysteries of the universe. The still unobserved particle left over in gauge theory—the Higgs particle—has also been called the God particle. Why go looking for such particles? In a certain sense, physicists really are searching for “God.” The Higgs particle is used to patch up the defects of the current theory, playing a role similar to that of God: “The Higgs field once represented all the energy that created…
science pursuit religion physics
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2010年12月17日
Thought, History, Poetry — One of the Explanations of This Version of the Categorical Scheme

Site Matters2010.12.16
Thought, History, Poetry — One of the Explanations of This Version of the Categorical Scheme
For the new classification scheme and why I call it “categories,” see “Categories and Hypertext Scholarship in the Network Age.” The present structure was built up while I was moving house; it has not yet undergone any deeper reflection or polishing, and is merely its roughest version. It will certainly keep being adjusted in the future. By the way, since copying the category structure when a blog is imported or exported is the most troublesome part and difficult to handle, when I make minor tweaks on the main blog, the sub-base and the backup probably will not be updated in sync right away; I’ll likely only synchronize them when there…
philosophy phenomenology website intentionality
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2010年12月16日
Blogcn Really Does Have Log Review After All

Site Matters2010.12.15
Blogcn Really Does Have Log Review After All
This is precisely why it can only serve as a subsidiary base. Yesterday, after the import was finished, I didn’t look too closely. Today, when I checked, I saw that the number of posts under each category had dropped quite a bit. Going into the backend again, it was plainly supposed to have 871 blog entries—so why were there only 641? I went in once more and, sure enough, Chinese-style WordPress is just different: in the entries there was an extra column called “Under Review,” and there lay my missing 227 posts… I suppose they were screened out according to keywords and some algorithm. Even after a day they still…
blog website
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2010年12月15日