From now on, when I post to Weibo, subscribers won’t be bothered with notification emails anymore~ Some subscribers’ email addresses keep bouncing messages back to me. Besides spam accounts, there may also be some innocent ones that got caught in the crossfire. If you’ve subscribed but have never received an email, please check your spam folder~
阅读全文Spring has arrived, and so has my rhinitis~ To date, I’ve had three submissions rejected and one accepted (the one I least expected, yet somehow had long had a premonition about; I’ll keep you in suspense for now). For the very first piece, I unconditionally accept the outrageously, ridiculously expensive page fee, but if you ask me for it again after that, we’ll have to talk it over~
阅读全文Previously I mentioned that I wanted to write about “why study the West,” and that made me think of the phrase “Western essence, Chinese utility” (西体中用). A quick search online showed that Mr. Li Zehou had already brought it up. He explained “food, clothing, housing, and transportation” as the “essence,” and what he meant by Western essence, Chinese utility was “the ‘Western essence’ of modernization put to use on Chinese soil.” Some of Mr. Li Zehou’s ideas are excellent, but my line of thought is different from his. Mr. Huang Yinong also seems to have mentioned “Western essence, Chinese utility,” but in a more general way. What I mean by…
阅读全文This article arose from the explanation in the previous post. Of course, apart from taking issue with one particular junior classmate, my more important intention is to emphasize that interpretations of the Confucian classics are plural, and the Mao left can forget about monopolizing the right to interpret the Confucian classics. When I was a freshman, under Yang Zi’s influence, I read some chapters of the Mencius. Though I have little recollection of them now, I did come away with a rough impression: even though the Mencius is not as invigorating to read as the Analects, it still felt pretty good. The night before last I dug it out and…
阅读全文Some days ago, I had a rather spirited debate on Weibo with a left-leaning junior fellow. I’m not very fond of slapping labels like “right-wing” and “left-wing” on people, but this argument was indeed representative in a certain sense, so I need to note this junior fellow’s left-wing background. As for me, who sparked the argument, I was not aiming my dissatisfaction specifically at him; rather, I took the opportunity to express my long-standing opposition to the rhetoric of the so-called Mao left. I once stated my personal position in the essay “Liberty vs. Equality—I Am a Right-Wing Socialist,” but that was mainly constructive rather than refutational. Still, I’m willing…
阅读全文Originally, I had planned to put up this article after the proposal defense, but while writing it I realized that in fact it was nothing more than citing some things I had written before, so I shelved it. But today a troll came by my Theses on Media Ontology, which just happens to give me a good occasion to post this article as a response. In fact, this troll’s objection was similar to the question Professor Sun raised back then. Of course, Professor Sun always poses his questions haughtily but without losing decorum, whereas internet trolls are different. I very much welcome criticism and questioning, especially the sort Professor Sun…
阅读全文In today’s seminar, I presented Levinson’s essay. Though the essay was short, the discussion was quite extensive, and in the end we had only twenty minutes left for reading—unexpectedly enough. As for Levinson’s positive significance, I really did write too ambiguously in the paper, or rather, too falsely; I even felt embarrassed saying it myself…… But the one theoretical element in Levinson that truly deserves to be called positively meaningful is indeed something I mentioned in the paper, and also what I first brought up at the start of the lecture: his kind of unselfconscious “Hegelian” line of thought. I first mentioned Wu’s “walking on two legs”: one leg is…
阅读全文A few days ago, from the end of February into the beginning of March, I fired off 12 articles to 9 core journals in one go, including a few book reviews and some papers written during my undergraduate years. At first I submitted a few newer, more important papers, but I didn’t bother to revise the format properly. Later I gradually sent out some older papers; those I did properly reformat, though I didn’t make many textual revisions. In that sense, my sincerity in submitting was still not quite sufficient, after all, at heart I remain rather reluctant about the whole business of submitting articles. But if I want to…
阅读全文The “Natural Selection” of Technology — A Critique of Levinson’s Media Evolution Theory Hu Yilin© (Department of Philosophy, Peking University, Beijing 100871) Abstract: Levinson inherits the tradition of media ecology, but only superficially. He believes that traditional critics of technology merely focus on technology’s drawbacks and do not evaluate technology from an evolutionary perspective. Levinson thinks that the drawbacks inherent in technology in its infancy will be eliminated or remedied in the course of evolution. But Levinson’s evolutionism faces three problems: Who is doing the selecting? By what criterion is selection made? How are the results of selection evaluated? Levinson’s answers to these three questions are all “nature—human nature,”…
阅读全文The portion I read today is, in my view, not especially important; Heidegger lays out the framework of “the book” (including the unfinished second part). To me, this framework is open to question. What I admire most is the first half of *Being and Time*; but once “temporality” is unveiled and the whole thing is repeated on the basis of temporality, I can no longer keep up with Heidegger’s train of thought. Still, broadly speaking, my line of thought remains corresponding to Heidegger’s—only, starting from “time,” perhaps more revisions are needed. Last week I said that what Heidegger calls “that which is asked about” (问之所及), “that which is questioned” (问之所问),…
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