Year: 2011

“Intentional History” and the Aim of Historiography

Culture & Public Commentary2011.12.28
“Intentional History” and the Aim of Historiography
After returning from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I attended the “Winter Solstice Conference,” I had the chance to meet teachers and students from Shanghai’s history-of-science circle, and I also took my senior and junior brothers around Shanghai for a bit. Although it took up a whole weekend that included the founding day of the PRC, it was still worthwhile. After I came back, Teacher Wu asked us to talk about our impressions. I said that, in my view, the biggest problem with the history of science in Shanghai is that it lacks philosophy. Of course, from a good perspective, this means that such history of science is relatively “pure”:…
philosophy history of science history philosophy of science
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2011年12月28日
On the Final Essay Question in the General History of Science Course: “The Key Machine of the Industrial Age Was Not the Steam Engine but the Clock”

AI & the Future of Technology2011.12.23
On the Final Essay Question in the General History of Science Course: “The Key Machine of the Industrial Age Was Not the Steam Engine but the Clock”
This time, since the usual workload was increased substantially, the final exam was relatively easier. Apart from the traditional term-definition questions—which have been raised to 14—there was only one essay question. Counted toward the total score, the essay question was worth the equivalent of 12 points, so one might roughly say it was the fourth short paper. 2. Essay question (30 points): citations must be proper (if you cite at all); plagiarism is forbidden. Why is it said that “the key machine of the industrial age was not the steam engine but the clock” (Mumford)? This final short paper also required proper citation, but after all, since this was an…
technology Introduction to Philosophy of Technology McLuhan Wu Guosheng
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2011年12月23日
Regarding the Third Assignment for Ke Tong: “On Bacon’s Science”

History of Science & Scholarship2011.12.19
Regarding the Third Assignment for Ke Tong: “On Bacon’s Science”
As final exams approach, the teaching assistants are all busy too… This time I was a bit lazy with the assignment and didn’t annotate and reply to each student one by one. In fact, last time I did annotate and reply individually, many people simply didn’t even look at my comments, and the citations were still nonstandard. That really disappointed me… Of course, if you would like to communicate with me, you can take the initiative to contact me. Given that this assignment was relatively open, the standards were also hard to set, and it was the final assignment, I suggest grading somewhat leniently, with 8 points as the basic…
philosophy science philosophy of science Scientific Revolution
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2011年12月19日
Love of Wisdom and Patriotism

Life & Notes2011.12.17
Love of Wisdom and Patriotism
Yesterday the two Wu teachers had a gathering, and Old Wu [Bei Wu laoshi] got quite drunk and launched into a grand speech. Unlike when he is drunk in other settings, he said many things that he would only say in front of his disciples. Teacher Wu mentioned that, during his lifetime, he would certainly PUSH us; gold always shines in the end, but don’t count on Teacher Wu living too long—we have to make a name for ourselves within fifteen years… (Although Teacher Wu said drunkenness means speaking logically, in fact there were still some problems at the level of logic.) In the end, Teacher Wu came to the…
philosophy China scholarship freedom
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2011年12月17日
Schneider, What’s the Matter with You? Or, on the Thickness of Media—An Interpretation of “The Phenomenology of Perception” 1.3.8

AI & the Future of Technology2011.12.13
Schneider, What’s the Matter with You? Or, on the Thickness of Media—An Interpretation of “The Phenomenology of Perception” 1.3.8
The Thickness of the Medium — Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s Schneider Case[1] What I am dealing with is section 8 of the third chapter of Part One of *Phenomenology of Perception*: “‘Symbolic Function’ and the Existential Structure of Disease.” From the title of the section alone, one can see that it occupies a very important position. In the preceding chapters, Merleau-Ponty introduced Schneider’s case and brought in two traditional explanatory approaches: mechanistic physiology tries to explain it in terms of damage to bodily functions, while intellectualist psychology tries to explain it at the level of consciousness. But Merleau-Ponty believes that neither can truly explain the possibility of pathology. So by this section,…
philosophy technology book reading media
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2011年12月13日
Cookbooks and the History of Science and Technology

Culture & Public Commentary2011.12.12
Cookbooks and the History of Science and Technology
Last week in Brother Bu Tianshi’s class, he mentioned how a certain quantitative tendency entered the general consciousness of modern people. Brother Bu Tianshi said that in history, some things simply “happened”; the spirit of the age shifted, and sometimes there was not much in the way of a reason. Indeed, one cannot find a strict causal-law explanation in history, but one can still find many “explanations.” For example, I tend to explain the quantitative tendency of public thinking by the rise of print media. This is because printing brought with it an unprecedented demand for repeatability and operability, and this repeatability was realized through text rather than oral…
technology culture history printing
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2011年12月12日
A Portal for the History of Science and Philosophy? A Library? — On the Future Fate of keshizhe.net

Site Matters2011.12.08
A Portal for the History of Science and Philosophy? A Library? — On the Future Fate of keshizhe.net
After wrapping up the Beijing History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy Student Forum, more than half a month had slipped by before I even realized it. The keshizhe.net I had worked so hard to put together died, with no suspense whatsoever. Although I had never had much confidence that it would ever become active in the first place, I still hadn’t expected it to die so quickly, so cleanly, and so decisively. Not only did almost no one post again after the meeting ended, but traffic also plunged rapidly, and in less than a week it was already lying on the bottom: The 5 or 6 visits per day at…
philosophy of science blog internet website
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2011年12月8日
On Communicating with Extraterrestrial Civilizations—A Snarky Commentary on Jiang Xiaoyuan’s Report

Culture & Public Commentary2011.12.04
On Communicating with Extraterrestrial Civilizations—A Snarky Commentary on Jiang Xiaoyuan’s Report
Forum on the History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy, Lecture 82: Jiang Xiaoyuan: Should We Talk to Strangers? — A Debate in the History of Science about the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilization This afternoon I went to listen to the Keke Forum. Quite a few people showed up this time; even the classroom was full. It seems that everyone still has high expectations for Teacher Jiang’s talk. Before this talk, when Teacher Wu mentioned it to us, he said that this time he especially wanted Teacher Jiang to say something “substantive.” In the past, whenever Teacher Jiang had been invited to speak, it was all rather “media-like,” or to put…
culture value modernity human nature
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2011年12月4日
Second Commentary on the Science and Technology Assignment (On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System)

Teaching & Courses2011.11.30
Second Commentary on the Science and Technology Assignment (On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System)
I’d been busy with meetings for a while; organizing these meetings takes so much mental energy that I still haven’t really recovered… But the long-overdue second assignment for Keton had to be graded. I’ve already gone through the assignments once and added comments one by one. Some assignments got very few comments, so I’ll use this space to talk about the more general issues. First, I have to stress once again the issue of annotation conventions. Last time I only directly pointed out the problem of annotation conventions in my replies to some students; for other students whose annotations were also nonstandard, I didn’t criticize them directly. Instead, I wrote…
history of science scholarship history course
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2011年11月30日
Exchange First, Scholarship Second—A Summary of the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science

Life & Notes2011.11.23
Exchange First, Scholarship Second—A Summary of the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science
The 2nd Beijing Graduate Student Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science was finally wrapped up last weekend~ After the forum, I caught up on sleep + spent two days tinkering with the blog as a change of pace, and only now have I begun to write the summary.I was the main person in charge of organizing this forum, and my chief work was contacting students from various schools, calling for paper submissions, and moderating the review process, and so on. At the beginning, everyone’s enthusiasm was not high; it was not until the last moment that submissions started flooding in, which in the final half-month almost drove…
everyday life scholarship media blog
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2011年11月23日