Year: 2010

Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.12
Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty
Philosophy, or “love of wisdom,” is fundamentally an activity of love. I have always said that love is like philosophy, and philosophy is like love; related remarks can be found in the blog folder “谈情——说爱.” I also once wrote “Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love,” in which I crudely mapped various philosophical styles across ancient and modern times onto various attitudes toward love. This was not some offhand joke of mine, The resemblance between philosophy and love is by no means merely a literary analogy; rather, it means that these two activities share something in certain fundamental senses. A culture, or a thinker, who has a certain philosophy will also…
philosophy pursuit Plato love
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2010年2月12日
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork

Culture & Public Commentary2010.02.08
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork
I just bought a new laptop, ASUS’s new UL30V. A 13-inch widescreen, much lighter and more portable than my old laptop. ASUS’s biggest selling point is its super-durable battery: in power-saving mode, it is said to last 12 hours. It has both discrete and integrated graphics; when saving power, you can switch off the discrete card, and it still plays games just fine. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I bought it at a nearby computer market. The first shop quoted 6,000; after bargaining, I got it down to 5,750. The second shop opened at 5,250, and after haggling for ages I finally closed the deal at 5,000—yet it still…
technology culture children information
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2010年2月8日
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.01
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility
Speaking of which, Kantian ethics contains a very rigid conception of duty—for example, the command “do not lie.” This injunction is an absolute duty: even if a murderer asks you where your beloved is, and you know that if you tell the truth and do not lie to mislead him your beloved will be killed, you still must not lie. Moral duty is that hard. For, in any case, murder is the murderer’s fault, whereas lying is your fault; whether or not there is a murder, lying is always wrong. If your beloved happens to appear at the very place you falsely claimed she was, then would her being killed…
philosophy Kant human nature emotion
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2010年2月1日
Winter Break Essay No. 2: Relativism

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.01
Winter Break Essay No. 2: Relativism
Modernity is accompanied by a certain nihilism, and that is natural: because the past is severed from the future, the present becomes a void point. But relativism is not necessarily nihilism; or rather, its aim is precisely the opposite. Relativism, or “relationism,” emphasizes not rupture but connection. Relativism does not accept an isolated point; any node has meaning only in the midst of the network of relations that interconnect it. Nihilism loses all aspiration, but relativism is not without aspiration; what it aspires to is connection. Relativism does not reject certainty, but what is called certainty can be understood as those important “nodes” in the whole web of relations. These…
philosophy ontology God relativism
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2010年2月1日
Winter Vacation Miscellany I: What Is Modernity?

Culture & Public Commentary2010.02.01
Winter Vacation Miscellany I: What Is Modernity?
The blog has been neglected for quite a long time. I’ve been at home over winter break without much in the way of momentum, and before I knew it I was about to welcome the New Year in a state of neglect—that won’t do at all. No matter what, I should at least make an effort to update it a bit. Let me first write down some scattered bits and pieces I’d accumulated earlier but never got around to writing. Winter Break Essay No. 1: What Is Modernity? Back when the science-and-metaphysics discussion group was meeting, there was a classmate who rather arrogantly criticized everyone for talking at length about…
philosophy culture history modernity
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2010年2月1日
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 10-01-16 [Final Issue]

Life & Notes2010.01.16
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 10-01-16 [Final Issue]
At exactly 9 o’clock, after taking our seats, in order to let the waiter notice that there were people in the non-smoking area, I pressed the order button first. Not long after, a waiter poked his head in and looked around, then brought in a glass of water. But after that there was no further movement; not until 9:41 did classmate Bai arrive, and I had no choice but to call the waiter over to place the order, otherwise who knows how long it would have taken before he remembered me…… Classmate Bai sat there for a whole morning, leafing through the *Introduction to Phenomenology* I had brought, and also…
everyday life China culture Christianity
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2010年1月16日
The Naturalization of Mathematics — A Wordplay on the Mechanization of the World Picture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.01.15
The Naturalization of Mathematics — A Wordplay on the Mechanization of the World Picture
What is meant by “a mechanistic world-picture”? Dijksterhuis’s *The Mechanization of the World Picture* revolves around this question. He asks: “When we say this, are we thinking of the meaning of ‘tool’ or ‘machine’ implied by the Greek word μηχανή (that is, of viewing the world [whether or not it includes the human spirit] as a machine)? Or does it mean that natural events can be described by means of concepts and handled through the methods of mechanics, this branch of science (in which case the word is used in a very different sense from its original one, signifying the science of motion)?”[1] In the end, Dijksterhuis gives his answer:…
philosophy science Aristotle mathematics
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2010年1月15日
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 10-01-09 [Penultimate Issue?]

Life & Notes2010.01.09
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon, 10-01-09 [Penultimate Issue?]
Next week (January 16) may be the final session of the Xindao Salon. How we’ll do things next semester, we can talk about it after the New Year~ My Xindao membership card has been pretty much used up, but amazingly there are still seventeen or eighteen free drinks left. So next week, come a few people and help me drink them up……
everyday life blog conference review community
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2010年1月9日
Miscellaneous Notes from This Issue’s Xindao Salon 10-01-02

Life & Notes2010.01.02
Miscellaneous Notes from This Issue’s Xindao Salon 10-01-02
Happy New Year, everyone~ Today the salon is still open as usual, but no one else came. For the next two weeks the salon will still be running as normal, and toward the end of January I may be heading back to Shanghai. The New Island Salon may then draw to a close, and next semester it should move somewhere else. When I came this morning, I was told that the non-smoking area was not open because it was a holiday and there were few people; there was no service, no lights, and no heating. Still, I insisted on sitting down inside. Luckily there was power and internet, so reading…
everyday life blog
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2010年1月2日