分类：History of Science & Scholarship

Aristotle’s Tactile World

History of Science & Scholarship2009.06.17
Aristotle’s Tactile World
Before discussing propositions such as modern science’s “mechanization of the world picture”[1], one should note that the concept of the “world picture” is quite extraordinary. Before the world can possibly be mechanized as a picture, there is a prior step: the picturing of the world. The world does not become a picture for human beings from the very beginning; in fact, once the world has come, as a matter of course, to be a picture, whether that picture is mechanized or not, some vitally important change in human knowledge has already quietly taken place. As Heidegger put it: “The world picture does not change from a medieval world picture into…
philosophy of science Aristotle Heidegger paper
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2009年6月17日
Reading an Einstein Biography

History of Science & Scholarship2009.05.09
Reading an Einstein Biography
[U.S.] Walter Isaacson: Einstein: Life and the Universe, translated by Zhang Butian I had originally promised to write a review for Senior Brother Butian, but I have kept putting it off again and again. It seems I really just cannot squeeze one out; at least, not before the end of this term. So let me just write a few random lines here as an explanation… There are several reasons for this procrastination: First, this spring I unfortunately developed allergic rhinitis. Since I had never had allergies before, I never got the right treatment at the beginning, and it took me more than half a month of fussing around before I…
book reading notes history of science historiography
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2009年5月9日
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.28
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report
Postscript: The report’s effect should not count as bad, and it also received Teacher Ren’s highest praise. Still, I feel that many things were not explained clearly, because I myself was only able to read this article through after reading Science in Action. However, since the issues discussed in this article are not the same as those in Science in Action in terms of emphasis, when explaining this article it was very hard to weave in material from Science in Action and similar books. I tried to introduce some of it, but the result may not have been very good: on the one hand, a few words do not make…
book reading science notes history of science
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2009年4月28日
Reading Notes on “Science in Action” (Prepared for the classroom report on Latour: Drawing Things Together)

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.27
Reading Notes on “Science in Action” (Prepared for the classroom report on Latour: Drawing Things Together)
[French]Bruno Latour: Science in Action, translated by Liu Wenxuan and Zheng Kai, Dongfang Publishing House, 2005 Although for the original course in the sociology of science the only assignment was to report on Latour: Drawing things together, if I had not first gone through this book, it would have been truly impossible to imagine myself managing to read that article… um… now I’ve finally figured out what Latour wants to do~~ 113[68] Any set-up or organizational structure, no matter how large or small, what sort of thing it is, or how much it costs, so long as it can provide any kind of visible display in a scientific text, I…
book reading notes nature instrument
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2009年4月27日
Translating “natural history” as “natural history” is also not bad

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.23
Translating “natural history” as “natural history” is also not bad
PS: It was very, very long ago, when I was writing “Natural History and History,” that I first began to think that translating it as “natural history” might also be quite good. At the time, I had just listened to lectures on natural history by Professors Wu, Liu, and Su, and felt that Professor Wu’s rejection of “natural history” was somewhat too categorical. Back then I wrote to Professor Liu and Professor Su about some of my thoughts; it seems Professor Liu replied that he thought “natural history” was not out of the question after all. But at that point I still did not dare to write to Professor Wu…
science history Wu Guosheng historiographer
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2009年4月23日
On How to Write a Book Report

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.03
On How to Write a Book Report
Today someone asked me over QQ about the “format” of a reading report, and someone else on the department forum raised the same question too. I happened to say a few words about my personal view, so I’m reposting it here: —————————————————— When you quote something, cite the source. Don’t think too much about the rest. This is not writing in an ossified eight-part style; the form of the essay is flexible. Sort out your thinking in whatever way seems clearest and most straightforward to you, and it is best to have a clear thread. A reading report does not necessarily have to summarize every single point in the original…
scholarship writing reading
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2009年4月3日
New Island Dialogues, Zero: Cafés and Scholarship

History of Science & Scholarship2009.03.07
New Island Dialogues, Zero: Cafés and Scholarship
A Niu: Hello, everyone! Thank you for coming to open my event. Xiaoming: Hello, Senior Brother Niu! A Niu: Hmm… what should we talk about? … Let me start by asking about your purpose for coming—what exactly were your intentions or thoughts in coming here to look for me? Xiaoming: Ah, actually I still haven’t figured out what kind of event this is. I just heard that, in legend, Senior Brother Niu was here, so I specially came to pay my respects… A Niu: How polite. It would be better to say you came to visit. I feel a bit like an absurdly ugly wild buffalo in a zoo—nothing much…
philosophy scholarship Aristotle discussion
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2009年3月7日
How Do I Read?

History of Science & Scholarship2009.01.21
How Do I Read?
About reading and writing, I said earlier that these two activities alternate in a cycle and become my mode of thinking: thought begins in reading and comes to a pause in writing. But that is too general a way of putting it, so the essay “The writer, one who pours forth” described my style of writing, and the more recent “How I choke out a paper” added a discussion of the specific mode of writing called paper-writing. Now, if I add a note on my method of reading, the picture is even more complete. Still the old saying: my style is not worth boasting about, much less imitating. In particular,…
philosophy culture scholarship writing
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2009年1月21日
Four Readings of “Scholarship”

History of Science & Scholarship2009.01.18
Four Readings of “Scholarship”
The people who claim to be walking the path of “academia” often take very different routes. Although, in the final analysis, each person’s path is unique, still, in broad and rough terms, there are probably the following four ways of understanding the word “academia.” Of course, a given person may fall somewhere between several paths, but the general direction is probably these four. The first kind of “academia” I call “the power of the academy,” though that sounds somewhat unsavory. Yet this is indeed the path taken by most so-called “scholars.” What they seek is not their own growth, but labels such as titles, ranks, and authority; the only difference…
philosophy scholarship Peking University art
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2009年1月18日
What, Exactly, Is the Scientific Revolution?

History of Science & Scholarship2009.01.13
What, Exactly, Is the Scientific Revolution?
This semester has finally ended~~ The topic of this essay does not particularly satisfy me. What on earth is the Scientific Revolution? — A critique of Shapin’s “No Scientific Revolution” claim “The Scientific Revolution”—referring specifically to that stretch of history around the seventeenth century, “from Copernicus to Newton”—has been the greatest focus of history of science research since Koyré, and the literature commenting on this “Scientific Revolution” from different perspectives and lines of inquiry is so abundant as to be immeasurable. Yet in the opening of his famous book The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin drops a bombshell: “There was no Scientific Revolution, and this book is about that.”[1] So, how…
book reading science Scientific Revolution book review
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2009年1月13日