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 reminders about this in the general feedback post. Unfortunately, I put them at the very end, so perhaps some students never even saw them. Of course, there were also many students who, even after seeing my reminder, made no improvement at all in the second assignment, or even did worse. In this assignment, I hardly saw anyone who had failed to annotate properly the first time and then learned how to annotate this time. Everyone seems to have let my words go in one ear and out the other, which made me extremely indignant. This time I’ve added comments in the text and replied to every student. If the third assignment still shows no improvement, if there is still not even the most basic standard of annotation—for example, direct quotations not being put in quotation marks, page numbers not being indicated, and so on—it will be treated as a public provocation of the teaching assistant, and the assignment will be marked directly as failing.
Here I repeat the reminder from the end of the last feedback post:
The conventions for annotation really needn’t be said at such length. As long as you are willing, you can just imitate and copy the model from the examples. The first few assignments found online are actually fairly standard in their annotation style (of course there are many kinds of standards; for undergraduates, just choosing a suitable format is enough). But there are still quite a few students whose annotations are not very standard. Some people like to use italics in the main text (which looks terrible in Chinese), and some do not use quotation marks. Direct quotations must be enclosed in quotation marks and the source indicated in a footnote or endnote; indirect quotations (that is, paraphrasing someone else’s view in your own words) should not use quotation marks, but should also be indicated in a footnote or endnote. Long quotations may be set off as separate paragraphs, indented or in a different font (in which case quotation marks may be omitted). When citing books, indicate the author, translator, publisher, year of publication, and page number; when citing online materials, indicate the URL and the date accessed. It is recommended that annotations be added automatically using Word’s “footnotes and endnotes” function, which makes formatting easier.
http://hpslib.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=1461
This assignment’s topic was “On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System.” Regarding this topic, I had already given a little explanation in the post where I graded the previous assignment:
This time the topic is entirely new; it has never been assigned before, so I myself am not especially confident about it. But I can still say a little about my understanding of the topic itself:
As for the so-called “On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System,” the first thing is the concept of the “Copernican system.” Some students asked: if the Copernican Revolution is a collective process over a long period rather than the work of Copernicus alone, then how can we speak of the Copernican system on its own? It should be noted that the Copernican Revolution and the Copernican system are two different concepts. Copernicus and those who came after him were not consciously carrying out a “revolution,” but even Copernicus himself already had the awareness that he was proposing a new astronomical system. Of course, how broad that system is—whether it is merely a mathematical system, or a system of thought containing metaphysics, cosmology, a worldview, values, and so on—is another question. But restricting ourselves to Copernicus individually and discussing the “Copernican system” he contributed is still meaningful.
Second, as for revolutionary and conservative aspects, on these two concepts students are all deeply influenced by more than ten years of indoctrination from Chinese political textbooks, and always tend to understand revolutionary as good, correct, and advanced, while understanding conservative as bad, wrong, and backward. I remember that when I first heard about the Western “right wing” in middle school, I was quite puzzled: how could there be something like a “Conservative Party” in the West, and it even seemed to have a fair amount of support? But in fact, “conservative” is not a pejorative term in itself, nor does it mean stubborn, passive, or set in one’s ways. The political program of a conservative party may even be more radical, and reform does not always mean movement toward progress. Many students interpreted this assignment topic according to the opposition between advanced and backwardness; some even took it upon themselves to change the topic into “On Advancedness and Conservatism.” That interpretation is basically not bad, but it does inevitably introduce some deviation. In many senses, “conservative” in the history of science is not a bad thing, because only conservatism makes scholarly accumulation possible; only after inheriting the legacy of earlier generations can one begin to speak of progress or innovation. Many medieval thinkers were not “conservative”; they were very good at wild speculation, but their imagination was only imagination at best, stirring up a round of argument but hardly able to be preserved as a fixed body of knowledge. The importance of Copernicus may perhaps lie not in overthrowing Ptolemy, but in providing a new alternative. After Copernicus, the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system were both disseminated, subjected to later comparison, criticism, and revision. The new Tychonic system and Keplerian system also did not instantly replace the previous systems, but instead allowed more possible systems to accumulate. Even someone as fiery as Kepler first wanted not to overthrow Copernicus, but to defend Copernicus. Science is science precisely because it is not merely the wild speculation of isolated minds, but forms a public, normative, and cumulative scholarly tradition. In this sense, Copernicus’s advancedness lies precisely in his conservatism.
http://hpslib.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=1617
From the grading of the assignments, I did not see any especially surprising pieces. No student made a distinction concerning the concepts of “revolutionary” and “conservative”; everyone seemed to think these concepts were self-evident and used them as such. In fact, most students equated revolutionary with correctness and conservative with defects and errors.
A typical example is that Copernicus lacked observational data, and heliocentrism had not been sufficiently confirmed; many students classified this feature under the category of “conservatism.” But if we think about it carefully, when evidence is insufficient, is putting forward a bold theory revolutionary or conservative? At least, the fact that the evidence is insufficient cannot simply be made to correspond to the concept of “conservatism,” can it? If one insists on calling it conservative, then what exactly is it conservative about?
The Copernican system is actually a theory of a stationary sun rather than a heliocentric theory, and more students mentioned this point, of course also as part of its conservatism. But why is a stationary-sun theory more conservative than a heliocentric theory? If we think this through carefully, it is not at all something self-evident.
We need to forget the concepts indoctrinated into us by China-specific political education and avoid associating revolutionary-conservative with correct-wrong. Although, from the tradition and consequences of the Scientific Revolution, we can say from a modern perspective that it was a road from error to truth, if we examine some of its individual stages in detail, history is never so black and white. This topic, in fact, is meant to let students further appreciate the complexity of historical development.
Literally speaking, conservatism means adhering to tradition, while revolution means overturning tradition. In other words, conservatism and revolution are both first and foremost relative to tradition, not relative to modernity. Therefore, to evaluate Copernicus’s conservatism or revolutionary character, the first step is not to judge whether it is right or wrong by modern standards, but to place it within the intellectual tradition in which he lived, and see where he followed the old order and where he overthrew or broke through it.
Since our first assignment was on Ptolemy, this assignment naturally continues by measuring Copernicus’s relation to traditional thought such as Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, and thereby revealing his revolutionary and conservative aspects.
Many students like to begin the first paragraph with an introduction, first assigning Copernicus a character type, as if making a cardboard mask. This is unnecessary. We are not writing an encyclopedia entry or telling a historical story; we are writing an essay, and every sentence should, as much as possible, say something substantial. Especially when word count is limited, using several hundred words to paste in some highly unreliable Baidu Encyclopedia material as window dressing is really an unnecessary move that leaves a poor impression.
Perhaps continuing the habit from the last assignment, many students first wanted to explain “the main contents of the Copernican system.” That is not exactly wrong. But what is worth noting is: what sort of source did you actually rely on when summarizing the basic contents of the Copernican system? Many people listed the main points without annotation; some directly quoted the *De revolutionibus orbium coelestium*, but in fact these listed items are obviously not Copernicus’s own summary—so whose summary are they? Many students obviously quoted a modern person who clearly cared only about Copernicus’s revolutionary aspect. In listing these basic contents, they had already selected only the parts that modern people regard as revolutionary, while ignoring the conservative parts. Thus this introduction to the “basic contents” can entirely be folded into the section on “revolutionary aspects.” Here we can also see why “citation” is extremely important: in academic work, we are always inheriting and critiquing the work of our predecessors, so the original ideas or labor-intensive content that comes from others must be annotated. Only things that are common knowledge do not need citation. But sometimes some things that seem like common knowledge are precisely what our research needs to examine and question, so they cannot be let pass lightly. In this assignment, the basic contents of the Copernican system are precisely the things that need our scrutiny and examination.
Compared with Ptolemy, the first innovation of the Copernican system was to endow the Earth with motion; the so-called threefold motion—rotation, revolution, and axial motion—is something everyone mentioned. But the key is to make clear in what sense the Earth’s motion is revolutionary, and in what respects it is conservative.
Some students very well pointed out that Copernicus’s breakthrough did not merely lie in reintroducing the ancient hypothesis of Earth’s motion, but in mathematizing that hypothesis and realizing it within a rigorous mathematical system. The main content of the Copernican system is not its first chapter, but the ingenious mathematical construction and computational sections.
As for the Earth’s threefold motion, many students mentioned it in a general way; a few explained that axial motion was introduced to account for the precession of the equinoxes. But Teacher Wu clearly mentioned in class that this third motion was actually introduced in order to offset the motion imparted by the “celestial spheres,” a motion in the opposite direction from revolution. Of course, this motion also serves to explain the precession of the equinoxes, but to understand its significance only as explaining the precession of the equinoxes is probably from a modern perspective—one that values only the “correct” “basic contents” and ignores the incorrect things as nonessential.
In many respects, revolutionary and conservative aspects are intertwined in just this way. Copernicus’s elimination of the “equant” is another example. I was very surprised that the vast majority of students scarcely mentioned the concept of the “equant,” or else mentioned it only in passing, as if none of you had done the first assignment at all. From a modern perspective, what concerns us is Copernicus’s heliocentric, Earth-moving theory, and we care about the “correct” things, while things like eliminating the equant are of no interest to modern people. But from Copernicus’s standpoint, the elimination of the equant is precisely one of the greatest achievements of his system. This breakthrough is both an innovation and at the same time an expression of Copernicus’s adherence to Greek teaching and to the tradition of “saving the phenomena.” This is obviously something worth mentioning in this assignment.
After Copernicus endowed the Earth with motion, on the one hand, he did not further provide a new physics to explain the various consequences that Earth’s motion would cause. When he tried to offer some justification for the natural-philosophical difficulties that Earth’s motion might create, he was still confined to concepts from the Aristotelian tradition. This is of course where his conservatism lies. On the other hand, the tension in such explanations was also tearing apart the harmonious relationship between traditional natural philosophy and astronomy, opening up new explanatory space, suggesting the possibility of relative motion, breaking the stark dichotomy between heaven and earth, and thereby opening the road for the entire later Scientific Revolution—this is where the revolutionary aspect lies.
In short, in Copernicus, revolutionary and conservative aspects are intertwined; the same “content” may simultaneously manifest revolutionary and conservative features from different sides. Therefore, this assignment did not require students to list the items of revolutionary and conservative aspects precisely and comprehensively. Rather, it placed greater emphasis on students’ historical vision and mode of argument in their discussion and examples.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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