Author: 胡翌霖

Some Replies on the General History of Science BBS in the First Half of the Semester

Teaching & Courses2011.10.28
Some Replies on the General History of Science BBS in the First Half of the Semester
Before, I was busy cranking out papers and went several weeks without recording the students’ discussions. Today I’ve caught everything up in one go, and along the way I also pulled out some of my own replies; some of them may still be a bit interesting, though most of the views I’ve written about before too.. On Philolaus’s “Counter-Earth” People at the time believed that “ten” was the most perfect number, but with the Sun, Moon, gold, wood, water, fire, earth, and the Earth, that still only makes nine, so people guessed there must be another planet on the opposite side of the Earth, called the “counter-earth,” but has…
philosophy China history of science education
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2011年10月28日
Printing, Natural History, and the Birth of Modern Science

History of Science & Scholarship2011.10.24
Printing, Natural History, and the Birth of Modern Science
Introduction This article attempts to point out a certain connection among the three things named in the title—what is the relation between the invention of printing, the revival of natural history, and the birth of modern science? Is there perhaps some profound link among them, such that if we want to understand the essence of modern science and even “modernity,” we must begin by examining the influence of printing? Among these three matters, the date of printing’s appearance in Europe is the clearest: in the 1440s, Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, invented movable-type printing. Whether or not Chinese printing indirectly influenced Gutenberg’s invention, the fact that the era of print in…
history of science scholarship media knowledge
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2011年10月24日
Notes on the keshizhe.net submission area (and adding a “replies visible only to the original poster” feature)

Site Matters2011.10.19
Notes on the keshizhe.net submission area (and adding a “replies visible only to the original poster” feature)
Why design a way of posting submitted papers for peer review like this? My original intention was to strengthen communication within the forum, because the purpose of our forum is exchange first and scholarship second; its primary significance is to enhance communication among students in the history of science, technology, and philosophy in the Beijing area. And if our communication is limited to those dozen or so session presentations on the final day, that is quite limited. I hope that academic exchange can already begin during the review process. Whether or not a submission is ultimately accepted as a session presentation, the student who submits it can still receive comments…
scholarship website conference review forum
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2011年10月19日
Beijing Region Graduate Student Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science Continues to Solicit Submissions~~

Life & Notes2011.10.15
Beijing Region Graduate Student Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science Continues to Solicit Submissions~~
The earlier published Call for Papers for the 2nd Beijing Graduate Student Academic Forum on History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy has already been revised in some respects. The revised portions are as follows: The forum will be held all day on Saturday, November 19, 2011, at the Sunshine Hall of Peking University’s Yingjie Exchange Center. In view of the fact that the chief aim of our forum is to strengthen mutual understanding among students from different specialties and directions within the field of history of science, technology, and philosophy, the conference will not have parallel sessions, but themes will be set at different time slots. This forum will award…
everyday life Peking University forum
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2011年10月15日
On the First Assignment for History of Science and Technology: Basic Features of Hellenistic Science Seen Through Ptolemaic Astronomy

Teaching & Courses2011.10.13
On the First Assignment for History of Science and Technology: Basic Features of Hellenistic Science Seen Through Ptolemaic Astronomy
The first assignment has basically been graded; let me summarize it. First, about the scores. This semester each assignment is worth only 10 points, and I was thinking of grading in 0.5-point increments. The highest score, 9.5, should be kept to a very small number—about one per class on average, and it can even be left unused; the teaching assistants can compare the best papers and then decide. Excellent papers get 9; good ones, 8 or 8.5; passing ones, 7 or 7.5; rather poor ones, around 6; abysmal ones, below 5; and plagiarism or failure to submit, 0. As for late submissions—strictly speaking, this course does not even have the…
course Peking University Greece astronomy
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2011年10月13日
Is the University a Public Sphere? — Further Thoughts on Publicly Posting Grades and Publicly Critiquing Assignments

History of Science & Scholarship2011.10.10
Is the University a Public Sphere? — Further Thoughts on Publicly Posting Grades and Publicly Critiquing Assignments
It’s once again time for grading in the history of science survey course. This course has always had the tradition of publishing grades, and this time should be no exception. Of course, I seem to be getting softer and softer lately; the harsh roasting of bad assignments may more likely be shifted into private messages rather than being publicly posted under real names. But the excellent students still absolutely deserve public praise. Last year I explained: Why post the grades? Now that I’ve recently finished reading Arendt, it may be worth giving that earlier account a further interpretation. It is said that American universities place enormous emphasis on “privacy”; information…
scholarship freedom public sphere university
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2011年10月10日
Arendt Reading Notes

Culture & Public Commentary2011.09.28
Arendt Reading Notes
Finally finished reading Arendt’s The Human Condition, and feel immensely relieved… Let me make some notes.. Wang Yinli’s Chinese translation of The Human Condition is basically pretty good. Though I didn’t compare it line by line with the English original, on the whole I could make sense of it, and there probably won’t be any major misunderstandings. The problem, however, is that her translation is still rather awkward. In the translator’s afterword, she also writes that she follows the principle of “literal translation,” saying that “literal translation has already become a consensus in the translation of academic works,” and so she tries not to change the original word order. I…
book reading notes freedom Aristotle
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2011年9月28日
My New Mobile Device: HTC Flyer

Life & Notes2011.09.08
My New Mobile Device: HTC Flyer
The smartphone (HTC G7) I bought half a year ago got lost a few days ago, and the Xiaomi phone still hadn’t come out, so I had no choice but to find another way… and that’s how I ended up with this HTC Flyer. I hadn’t originally planned to buy a tablet so early. I was biding my time, waiting for the open-source release of Android 3.X, or for Amazon to make some new move with a tablet or reader, and I was also keeping an eye on Asus’s new models—Asus’s Eeepad sits somewhere between a tablet and a laptop. If my phone had still been around, I would have been…
everyday life knowledge script printing
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2011年9月8日
Revisiting “Natural History” (Natural Science) as a Historiographical Program

Culture & Public Commentary2011.08.26
Revisiting “Natural History” (Natural Science) as a Historiographical Program
I previously wrote “Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Thoughts on Liu Huajie’s Lecture,” where I briefly raised this idea. I noted that although what I call natural history as a historiographical program differs from Liu Huajie’s “historiographical program of natural history” only in translation (I argue that Natural History should be translated as “自然史” rather than the more usual “博物学”), my conception of this way of writing history is quite different from Liu’s. Recently I chatted again with my student Wang Liang about related topics, and then I saw a conversation record between Liu and Jiang Xiaoyuan, Liu Bing, and the others about “the good should be attributed to natural…
philosophy history of science history knowledge
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2011年8月26日
Was Heidegger a Technological Pessimist?

History of Science & Scholarship2011.08.19
Was Heidegger a Technological Pessimist?
This article is a rewriting based on the earlier Heidegger’s Thinking on Technology. In fact, very little was changed, but after changing the title it suddenly became much more to the point and more complete. What I presented at this year’s Yangma Island conference was this very article, so before posting the conference record, let me post this article first. Is Heidegger a Technological Pessimist? Hu Yilin, Department of Philosophy, Peking University Abstract: Heidegger’s philosophy of technology is often described as a typical kind of pessimism. Starting from the question of whether Heidegger is in fact a technological pessimist, this article selectively expounds Heidegger’s analysis of modern…
philosophy technology Heidegger Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2011年8月19日