The department’s magazine, *Qingqiu Yuan*, invited me to write a few recommendations of good books in philosophy of science and technology, mainly to provide some guidance for students who have not yet settled on a direction. I am very honored. In addition, I hope that all students interested in philosophy of science and technology will get in touch with me. On my blog (yilinhut.com) you can find my various contact details.
Undergraduate philosophy majors are required to choose a supervisor and a direction in their freshman or sophomore year. At this stage, apart from introductory courses in Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Marxist philosophy, students have relatively little knowledge of other directions and other teachers. In particular, because the teachers in philosophy of science and technology offer very few courses for undergraduates, many people graduate without ever really understanding this direction; as a result, very few of our graduate students are from our own department, and we fail to fill our quota almost every year.
There are two common misunderstandings about the philosophy of science and technology direction in our department. First, people confuse our style with the logic major and assume that we are also inclined toward the “science” side. In fact, that is not the case. Of course, within philosophy of science and technology there can also be people with a typical science background and scientific research methods, but basically speaking, we do not usually calculate or deduce; our style is closer to philosophy or history, and in fact the demands we place on students’ scientific ability are not very high. Of course, if you come from a science background or are good at the mathematical sciences, you will naturally feel closer to philosophy of science and technology, but once you enter the field, you also need gradually to shed a purely scientific way of thinking. Second, people understand us as “anti-science.” Back in my day, I heard several logic teachers advise us in exactly this way: choose logic, not philosophy of science and technology, because those people are anti-technology and anti-modernity. They often said: if those anti-science people are still using mobile phones, driving cars, and turning on tap water, how can they be anti-science? In fact, there are indeed many romantics in the philosophy of science and technology world, but basically speaking we are not rebels, nor are we bent on retreating to premodern society. The basic character of philosophy is reflection, especially reflection on our own situation—whether those situations are escapable or fated, whether we are delighted to enjoy our situation or painfully resisting it, we must reflect on our own situation. Even if modern technology is impossible to refuse—or precisely because modern technology is an inescapable fate—we must reflect on it all the more, inquire into its origins and development, rather than blindly consuming it.
As everyone knows, the division into eight secondary disciplines within philosophy, including philosophy of science and technology, is entirely a historical product, the result of creating temples for people, and not something with much conceptual or logical necessity. When choosing a major, the main consideration is finding a place to stand and make a living, finding an academic environment; as for what exactly its subject matter is like, that is secondary. Most philosophical problems can be studied under the name of philosophy of science and technology. But it should be noted that the field of “philosophy of science and technology” is broader than philosophy as a whole. In fact, what we here call the “philosophy of science and technology” major covers two disciplinary points: one is “philosophy of science and technology” as a secondary discipline under philosophy, and the other is “history of science and technology” as a first-level science discipline. Under these two major names, it includes not only philosophical topics in the traditional sense, but also things like intellectual history, social history, sociology, communication studies, science and technology policy research, and so on. In fact, a large number of scholars in philosophy of science and technology are working on topics that deviate from philosophy.
In today’s Chinese academic world, “philosophy of science and technology” is a big pocket, even a “recycling station,” encompassing all kinds of marginal interdisciplinary research. This is the greatest strength and weakness of the field: excessive openness. Within this discipline, no ready-made paradigm has formed to tell you how to study and research step by step. One especially needs one’s own judgment and route; otherwise, one may lose direction.
The preface has already gone on too long. If you want to know about the academic environment and training methods of philosophy of science and technology, you can refer to my other articles or contact me directly. After all, this article is intended to introduce books. What I have said above means that the list I am about to give is entirely personal. You may find that the “philosophy of science and technology” spoken of by others is completely different from the image I am trying to present to you, and you may also enter philosophy of science and technology by following your own route.
1. M. Kline, *Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty* (The First Push series), translated by Li Hongkui, first edition by Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2003; second edition, 2007.
After much thought, I have made this famous popular science work my top recommendation. The First Push series is the leading frontier popular science series in China, but most of it is about frontier physics such as black holes and quantum theory, which can make one aesthetically fatigued; the occasional non-physics book is refreshing by contrast, such as *A Mathematician’s Apology*, *The Engines of Logic*, and this *Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty*. As for better books on physics, I recommend *God and the New Physics* and *Black Holes and Time Warps* in the First Push series, plus a remarkable book by a Chinese author, Cao Tianyuan’s *A History of Quantum Physics*. In high school I was precisely reading these popular science books that I became interested in philosophy, but now, if I am recommending something for philosophy majors, I would first recommend this popular science book on mathematics.
M. Kline was a mathematician, but even more one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics; his *Ancient and Modern Mathematical Thought* is a classic in the history of mathematics. This *Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty* can also be regarded as a work of the history of mathematics, but by comparison it is written in a far more accessible style and is suitable for the general public. At the same time, however, this book has a clear historical narrative and original analysis and commentary, so it would not be wrong to regard it as a philosophical work.
In the history of Western thought, mathematics and philosophy are profoundly connected. From the very beginning, the mathematical spirit and the philosophical spirit were unified: freedom, curiosity, and the pursuit of pure knowledge. The reason Plato’s Academy was “no one ignorant of geometry may enter” was by no means that geometry was treated as a life skill one had to master, but rather as something akin to an indispensable “moral education” course: only after studying geometry could one appreciate the purity of knowledge and the freedom of thought. Up until the twentieth century, the tension and interaction among mathematics, science, and philosophy ran throughout Western intellectual history. Mathematical thought can be said to be the hidden thread behind the development of all Western philosophy. From the ancient Greeks Pythagoras and Plato, to the early moderns Descartes and Leibniz, to the twentieth century Husserl, Russell, Frege, and even Wittgenstein. Behind every major philosophical transformation, there often lurk some important mathematical problems. I do not mean specific mathematical research topics and the proof of theorems, but rather the understanding of “mathematics” itself—what is mathematics? Where is its foundation established? Where are the objects it studies? What is its significance for science? …
*Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty* narrates precisely the fate of “mathematics” itself, and Kline uses “the loss of certainty” to characterize that fate. The whole of Western philosophy can be said to have developed around the purpose of “the pursuit of certainty,” and “mathematics” was from the very beginning regarded as the paradigm of certainty; Euclid was the object imitated by philosophers and scientists alike. But what if mathematics’ “certainty” suddenly “wavers” or even “disappears”? Where then is truth to be placed?
Kline explains the various foundational problems in the history of mathematics—for example, the legitimacy of negative numbers and complex numbers; for example, the development of calculus; and the birth of non-Euclidean geometry, debates over the foundations of mathematics, the axiomatic movement, mathematical paradoxes, and so on. These matters are not only crucial turning points in the history of mathematics, but also in the development of science and even philosophy.
Today, even elementary school students can learn “negative numbers” and “irrational numbers,” middle school students can understand “complex numbers,” and high school students can use “infinitesimals.” But why, in history, did these concepts once provoke such fierce debate among so many great scientists? Because the introduction of these concepts often requires changing people’s understanding of “mathematics” as a whole. Why did the ancient Greeks not allow fourth powers or higher? Why did Pascal denounce negative numbers as absurd? Why did Berkeley sneer at the concept of “infinitesimals”? Were they old stubborn men with rigid minds? In a certain sense, the skeptics and resisters in the history of science are often the more clear-headed people, while those who accept new concepts are often more blind, because the logic by which these concepts can be legitimately used has in fact not yet been properly explained. Several consecutive chapters in the book are even titled “Illegitimate Developments…,” and that is precisely a portrayal of the development of the history of scientific thought. Physics and astronomy are similar—for example, in the context of that time, abandoning Ptolemy and defecting to Copernicus was almost unreasonable. But the development of science cannot rely on rigor alone; the real history of scientific development is by no means a self-rolling logical system, but one full of intricate entanglements and possibilities. Thus, when we study the history of science, we are not focusing on the content of science; it is by no means enough merely to attach a label to each contemporary scientific theory stating its date and discoverer.
From antiquity to modernity, one important change in mathematics was the rise and fall of geometry and algebra. Up until Descartes, geometry was always regarded as the core of mathematics, while algebra was a subsidiary to geometry; that is why the Greeks did not accept fourth powers, because they had no geometric meaning. But in modern times, algebra became the center of mathematics. The connection between this turn and the history of philosophy is hidden, but extremely important. Today we regard mathematics as a tool of science; when we speak of the mathematization of the world, we often mean algebraization, and quantitative calculation is increasingly becoming the image of mathematics. These changes are not merely technical.
As for the period around the twentieth century, the far-reaching event was the debate over the foundations of mathematics. Both the Anglo-American analytic philosophy after Frege and Husserl’s phenomenological tradition originated in the question of the foundations of mathematics. Although later Continental philosophy moved away from mathematical questions, the debate over mathematical foundations nonetheless laid the groundwork for later currents of thought. Logicalism, formalism, and intuitionism reproduced the divergences between realism, nominalism, and conceptualism in medieval philosophy, but the development of the history of mathematics provided fresh stimulus to old philosophical problems.
One cannot say that to do philosophy one must necessarily specialize in the history of mathematics, but when investigating the core topics of philosophy such as metaphysics or epistemology, it is hard not to pay attention to mathematical issues. That is to say, whether or not it is for understanding this major of philosophy of science and technology, I recommend this book to all philosophy majors. Readers at a more advanced level who are especially interested in debates over the foundations of mathematics can look for the volume *Philosophy of Mathematics* published by the Commercial Press and edited by Benacerraf and Putnam, which includes classic polemical articles from the great masters of various schools.
2. Wu Guosheng, *Lectures on Philosophy of Technology*, Renmin University of China, 2009
What is called philosophy of science and technology, aside from the paths of history and sociology, also covers quite a lot of fields if one considers only its more “philosophical” category. The major branches can be divided into natural philosophy, philosophy of science, and philosophy of technology, along with some marginal subfields such as science and religion, environmental ethics, and so on. “X philosophy,” put simply, means “reflection on X.” In the present age, science and technology have become closely allied, and thus there is the category of “history of science and technology” and “philosophy of science and technology.” But historically and conceptually, science and technology are two entirely different things. Although the origin of technology is as ancient as humanity itself, philosophy of technology is the youngest field. Why, in the long history of Western thought, was the theme of technology systematically ignored, and only after Marx did philosophy’s focus begin to gather around technology?
On closer inspection, the Western philosophical tradition has not in fact always ignored technology; on the contrary, from the very beginning, “technology” was a hidden theme in Western metaphysics. Socrates compared philosophy to the technology of midwifery, Plato used craft—for example, flute playing—as an example to explain the concept of the philosopher-king, and Aristotle used contrast with artifacts to clarify the concept of “nature.” When people think and speak, our technological environment always plays some background role, whether overtly or covertly. However, ancient thinkers revered pure reason and regarded technology, especially the technology of making a living, as vulgar and lowly. Moreover, the technologies of daily life are so ordinary; the more intimate the technology, the more likely it is to remain outside our field of vision—for example, one’s own glasses and clothes, which attract our attention only when they malfunction.
Therefore, the reason philosophy of technology emerged in the twentieth century is, first, the self-conscious reflection on the metaphysical tradition in intellectual history, and second, that modern technology began to become conspicuous; people increasingly and deeply realized that they always live within some technological environment, and the technological environment on which we depend is becoming increasingly difficult to control.
“Philosophy of technology” is not merely a “philosophical category that takes technology as its subject,” but rather signifies a certain “philosophical character.” Just as the so-called “natural philosophy” of ancient Greece was not simply a philosophical category with nature as its object, but meant that the natural philosophers first “discovered nature”; in other words, they discovered a “field of immanence” that is “its own principle unto itself.” “Nature” means “inborn nature,” and “natural philosophy” is not specially inquiring into the nature of some “nature” object, but rather it is natural philosophy that opened the inquiry into “nature.” The so-called “philosophy of science” and “philosophy of language” of the twentieth century likewise had similar intentions: early “philosophy of science” aimed to “scientize” the entire field of philosophy, while philosophy of language for the first time placed linguistic analysis at the center of philosophy. Similarly, “philosophy of technology” is not a subject within philosophy, but a philosophical style that places “technology” at the center of inquiry.
Of course, the eternal questions of philosophy are nothing other than “self-reflection”—Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? And philosophers of technology notice that “technology” is the key word in these questions. My “identity” means what I “do”; I do not have a ready-made “what I am.” I always shape my own image and define my own position through “what I do” and “as what.” I also always relate to the world and to others “through what.” And these intermediary technologies are not purely neutral; we shape them, and they shape us in turn.
Every technological artifact bears certain specific structures of meaning. For example, a table is still a table, but a round table tends toward egalitarian relations, an octagonal banquet table may be imbued with concern for orientation and position, and a rectangular table is more likely to display distinctions between rank and guest, host and visitor. Every technological object is made within its corresponding cultural environment; conversely, introducing a new technology and adapting to it may also reshape the cultural environment. “Humans and technology co-constitute each other” — “whatever kind of people there are, there will be whatever kind of technology, and vice versa.”
Archaeology or history uses technology as the standard for periodizing humanity (Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age; agricultural age, industrial age), and this is not accidental. But early archaeology paid more attention to offensive technologies such as stone axes and stone awls, while relatively neglecting preservative technologies such as pottery jars, nets, and houses. Beyond this, philosophy of technology broadens the category of technology, bringing language, communication media, architecture, art, and bodily skills under the name of “technology” (craft).
All of the above, of course, I am saying while following what Professor Wu says. Professor Wu Guosheng is the director of our philosophy of science and technology teaching and research office (the Center for History, Philosophy, and Science Studies), and also my supervisor. My current work is basically all a matter of writing notes to his texts. Professor Wu has not published any systematic scholarly monograph in recent years; this “lecture record” was compiled from several lectures he gave in earlier years. It is popular and readable, but it also condenses his strategic thinking about “philosophy of technology” and points us in a research direction. Of course, you will find that our department also has other teachers of philosophy of science and technology, each with a very different style; Professor Wu’s path is a unique one and may not be some broad highway. But since it is me who has been asked to introduce these works, it is only natural that I put old Professor Wu in the front.
Professor Wu’s school calls itself “hemahism,” seeking to inherit the mantle of Heidegger and Marx. Through Heidegger it introduces the phenomenological-existentialist tradition into philosophy of technology, and through Marx it brings in “practicality” or “historical materialism.” Marx can be said to be the first “philosopher of technology,” although he rarely explicitly mentions the concept of “technology”; what he calls “materialism” and “the economic base determines the superstructure” emphasizes precisely the human technological environment. Textbook philosophy interprets Marx’s “matter” as “the primacy of matter” or “matter comes first,” which is a typical “metaphysical” model. To truly restore Marx’s epoch-making status in the history of philosophy, it may be better to regard him as a precursor of philosophy of technology. Moreover, compared with Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, Marx’s approach (and that of the Frankfurt School) pays more attention to the political dimension of technology; these two philosophical resources complement each other and constitute the philosophy of technology path pointed to by Professor Wu. I will not elaborate on the more specific details here.
3. Neil Postman, *Amusing Ourselves to Death · The Disappearance of Childhood*, first edition by Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009 (the two books bound together; separate booklets were published in 2004)
These are the first two parts of Postman’s trilogy on media criticism; the third, *Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology*, has also been translated into Chinese. After reading the third book, perhaps it becomes easier to understand why I have enshrined it as an introductory reading for philosophy of technology. But compared with that, the first two books are even more impactful and illuminating.
The critique of “television” constitutes one of the themes running throughout Postman’s work. Postman believed that “television” would lead humanity toward a Huxleyan “Brave New World,” rendering everything entertaining and superficial.
Bozman is one of the disciples of the media thinker McLuhan. The “media ecology” school, which Bozman, guided by McLuhan, institutionalized, was the main focus of my graduate studies. I tried to integrate the two great resources of McLuhan and Heidegger in order to interpret a kind of media phenomenology or media ontology. “Media” refers to a certain structure of “through…to achieve” and the artifacts that bear this intentional structure. One could say that “media” belongs to “technology” in the broad sense; one could also say that “technology” belongs to “media” in the broad sense. But replacing “technology” with “media” on the one hand emphasizes the meaning of “through” and the structure of “communication,” and on the other hand places narrowly defined media technologies such as printing, telegraphy, and television at the core of general technology; in the end it also allows one to directly introduce the resources of the media ecology school. Of course, I do not need to say too much here about my own line of thought. My recommendation of this book is not entirely based on my personal conceptual framework. In fact, Bozman counts as something of an oddball within the media ecology school; he is almost the only one who holds such a blunt and intense stance of resistance toward a particular medium—television. The force and depth of his thought also seem to fall short of McLuhan’s.
However, compared with the wildly imaginative McLuhan, Bozman’s texts are clearly more orderly, smoother, and more moving. Although the focus of his critique is television, his analysis is obviously not limited to flashy commentary on television content. In fact, he devoted even more pages to discussions of print culture. In *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, Bozman tells how printing made the formation of modern democracy possible, and then shows how modern democracy was corrupted by television; while in *The Disappearance of Childhood*, Bozman tells how the concept and social identity of “childhood” were constructed along with the rise of printing, and how this identity then disappeared in television culture.
We can classify this work as belonging to cultural history or technology history; more importantly, it displays a mode of critique of modernity—beginning from technology history. This perspective does not focus especially on steam engines, internal combustion engines, atomic bombs, and other glaringly prominent major technological topics, but instead pays more attention to the media of communication and life technologies on which people rely in daily life. Nor does this perspective care about the “content” of media; for example, it does not care what programs are broadcast on television—what proportion consists of entertainment programs, what proportion of educational and scientific programs, and so on—but instead pays more attention to the impact that the medium of “television” itself may bring to human culture. This is exactly what McLuhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message” emphasizes—if one merely looks at the information transmitted by media, one will miss an understanding of media’s true message. For example, if you only look at the “content” of a train, you will find that the coal brought in by train is no different from the coal brought by horse-drawn cart, and people traveling by train are no different from people traveling by horse-drawn cart; the conclusion would amount to nothing more than the fact that trains have much greater carrying capacity than horse-drawn carts. But in fact, the emergence of the train drove the transformation of the entire social structure and mode of production.
Although we say that our attitude should be reflection rather than resistance, young people cannot at the outset learn to “let things take their course” with equanimity; we may begin to resist and oppose our situation and our age with intensity. The “rebellious phase” marks the awakening of self-consciousness. Therefore, Bozman’s attitude of resistance without despair is perhaps the most suitable one for beginners. In any case, the theme of philosophy is reflection on one’s own situation, and generally speaking, we always first notice that our situation is “problematic” before we begin the path of questioning. It is hard for people who simply sit back and enjoy what they have without the slightest worry or doubt to take the road of philosophy.
4、陈嘉映：《哲学 科学 常识》，东方出版社2007年
The several books introduced above are all rather special—I mean, if you are not in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University, but are instead hoping to take the graduate entrance exam for philosophy of science and technology at some other school, then the books above probably won’t be of much use. Below I return to the mainstream and introduce two general introductory readings in “philosophy of science.”
The first is this introductory book written by Professor Chen Jiaying. Professor Chen is extremely well known, so I believe I need not introduce him much. This is one of his popular academic works; the blurb says, “A philosophy book as thrillingly readable as an adventure novel.” Of course, whether this claim is exaggerated mainly depends on your fondness for adventure novels. For someone like me, who does not like reading novels, this book seems even more readable. In any case, it is fluent and easy to read, very suitable as introductory reading. However, when I personally read this book, perhaps because I had already accumulated some knowledge in various respects beforehand, I did not feel much that was novel or moving.
Judging from the title alone, one can guess that the range covered by this book is very broad. The first part can be regarded as an introductory guide to “scientific history,” covering the origins of the Greek spirit of inquiry, the causes and consequences of the Copernican Revolution, and the rise of modern science or the mechanization of the world. The second part can be regarded as an introductory guide to “philosophy of science,” including the issues of experience and experiment, the relation between scientific concepts and everyday concepts, the mathematization of science, and propositions such as natural philosophy, realism, and positive science.
Like us, Professor Chen opposes blind, fanatical scientism, but he also opposes the nihilism of abandoning the pursuit of knowledge. In this age of science, aside from entrusting the task of pursuing knowledge to scientists, what else can philosophy do? Professor Chen believes that philosophy must recognize that its mission has never been to construct a universal theory, but rather to engage in “reflecting on experience and examining concepts.” I agree with this point. Of course, exactly how one carries out reflection on experience and examination of concepts may follow different paths: Professor Chen moves toward analytic philosophy, while Professor Wu prefers continental philosophy. But in any case, we no longer expect to construct an eternal and universally valid metaphysical system that stands above science; instead, we honestly strive to be “Minerva’s owl,” not to think about the situation of “human beings” as some abstract, eternal, unchanging idea, but to reflect on ourselves within our own historical situation.
Putting Professor Chen’s conclusion aside, what is more important is that this book uses clear and accessible language to present classic cases and themes in the history and philosophy of science,
5、查尔默斯：《科学究竟是什么》，鲁旭东 译，商务印书馆2007年
This is one of the best introductory textbooks in philosophy of science, and one of the required readings for the Peking University philosophy of science and technology graduate entrance exam. It covers the major doctrines and related issues in the philosophy of science within the analytic tradition, from positivism, falsificationism, and historicism all the way to postmodernism. It is highly readable and also academically reliable. But I do not want to say much more about this book, because if you have already decided to devote yourself to the discipline of philosophy of science and technology, this book is almost mandatory reading; whereas if you are still hovering outside the door, you do not necessarily have to begin with this book, after all, it seems a bit too solemn. Of course, you can also go straight to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book brought the close relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science into the open, and it had a huge impact both inside and outside the fields of history of science and philosophy of science.
6、伯特：《近代物理科学的形而上学基础》，徐向东 译，北京大学出版社2003年
This is one volume in the Peking University series on History of Science and Technology and Philosophy of Science and Technology; the series contains many classics in the history of scientific thought, including well-known works by Kuhn and Koyré. But if I were to recommend just one book for beginners to read, I would still choose Burtt’s. By comparison, Koyré’s books are somewhat harder to chew through, while Kuhn’s *The Copernican Revolution* seems a bit flat. The field of “history of scientific thought” is the one that most vividly demonstrates the close connection among science, history, and philosophy. When Burtt was writing, the paradigm of “history of scientific thought” had not yet been established; we might as well regard Burtt’s work as a kind of “history of philosophy.” In fact, what he intended to write was precisely the history of epistemology. Burtt expressed dissatisfaction with earlier philosophers, who, when narrating the development of modern epistemology, actually left Newton out. Burtt believed that the so-called epistemological turn in modern philosophy was closely related to the shift in humanity’s position accompanying the “Scientific Revolution” from Copernicus to Newton. To examine the origins and development of modern epistemology, one cannot leave those physicists aside. Another master pioneer in the history of scientific thought, Koyré, also held a similar attitude—they were not researching “history of science” as merely a subcategory under intellectual history. They maintained that science, philosophy, and theology were interwoven in the development of intellectual history; one cannot look at the history of science in isolation, nor can one look at the history of philosophy in isolation. So how, exactly, should history be written? Their several classic works provide us with models.
Of course, besides the several books introduced above, students who are interested can also choose some introductory routes according to their own concerns. For example, students who are especially interested in religious studies can choose the combination of Paul Davies’s God and the New Physics, Ian Barbour’s Religion in an Age of Science, and Brooke’s Science and Religion (popular science, philosophy of science, and history of science). Every person’s path to philosophy is unique; in any case, never forget your own concerns and interests. Of course, teachers and elders may provide you with important guidance and help, and I am also very willing to share my own experience with younger brothers and sisters in the philosophy department; you are welcome to come to my blog and exchange ideas at any time~
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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