Last weekend I went to Wuhan to give a lecture on behalf of Teacher Wu. My audience was two dozen or so graduate students, who are being trained as reserve talent for the Hubei Science and Technology Museum. The required course I was to teach consists of three parts: the history of Chinese science and technology, the history of world science and technology, and the philosophy of technology. The part on the history of world science and technology had originally been assigned to Teacher Wu, but since he was abroad, I was sent to teach it.
I lectured for a day and a half straight on Saturday and Sunday, twelve class hours in one go. Of course, the effect of such lecturing can hardly be all that good. A better way would be to hold seminars in class and discuss, while spending time outside class reading the materials. Whatever course one is teaching, a lack of reading and digestion is always a bad thing.
In addition, the students who attended this time also did not seem used to asking questions and discussing. Although by the end the atmosphere had become somewhat livelier, there still never emerged any good interaction. Of course, this was my first time lecturing, so I was still lacking in experience, and my grasp of pacing was not quite on target either.
I strung together some of the special topics in *A History of Science and Culture* with some ready-made materials from Teacher Wu’s course on “the general history of science,” and gave a talk built around that. Although some of the more difficult parts in the history of ideas may well have been hard for those students to digest, I still insisted on teaching them these things. It does not matter if the specific details are not understood; what matters is opening up a historical horizon, and realizing that studying history is not just about mastering some ready-made record of events, but also requires understanding and reflection. Even if I left them a bit dazed, that might not be a bad thing.
The lecture PPT mainly consists of several major topics, supplements, and a recommended reading list, all placed in a single PPT. The general contents include:
Introduction: What Is the Use of the History of Science?
Greek Classical Science (Freedom, Nature, the Academy)
From Plato to Ptolemy: Greek Astronomy
Additional Notes on Several Figures
The Middle Ages and Christian Science
Printing and the Scientific Revolution
Supplement to the Copernican Revolution
Newtonian Mechanics (The Mechanization of Force)
Supplement: From Alchemy to Chemistry; the Establishment of the Social Role of the Scientist
The recommended reading includes:
- Hu Yilin: 《A History of Science and Culture》
- Wu Guosheng: 《The Course of Science》
- McClellan III et al.: 《A General History of World Science and Technology》
- Lindberg: 《The Beginnings of Western Science》
- Chalmers: 《What Is This Thing Called Science?》
- Kuhn: 《The Structure of Scientific Revolutions》
- Chen Jiaying: 《Philosophy · Science · Common Sense》
- Lloyd: 《Early Greek Science》
- Collingwood: 《The Idea of Nature》
- Hamilton: 《The Greek Spirit》
- Kuhn: 《The Copernican Revolution》
- Hoskin: 《The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy》
- Wu Guosheng: 《The Greek Concept of Space》
- Grant: 《The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages》
- McGrath: 《An Introduction to Science and Religion》
- Osler: 《Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God, and Human Understanding from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Europe》
- Eisenstein: 《The Printing Press as an Agent of Change》
- Mumford: 《Technics and Civilization》
- Burt: 《The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science》
- Kuhn: 《The Essential Tension》
- White: 《Newton: The Last Sorcerer》
Finally, here is the PPT
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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