分类：History of Science & Scholarship

“A History of the Technology and Philosophical Study of Blockchain” Receives National Social Science Fund Grant

History of Science & Scholarship2020.10.05
“A History of the Technology and Philosophical Study of Blockchain” Receives National Social Science Fund Grant
Many crypto folks have often hoped I would write a bit more on related topics, and now that’s good: for the next couple of years I really am going to come back to writing about blockchain. The social science fund project I applied for was fortunate enough to be approved: “Research on the History of Technology and Philosophy of Technology of Blockchain.” This is a combination of my academic interests and the blockchain field. At first I had wanted to paste the main body of the application directly, but a colleague reminded me that when the social science fund project is finalized, they need to check for plagiarism, so one…
Web3 Bitcoin history of technology decentralization
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2020年10月5日
Rules for Authorship on Coauthored Papers

History of Science & Scholarship2020.08.11
Rules for Authorship on Coauthored Papers
Professor Wu’s published papers and books are almost always single-authored; he has never coauthored papers with students. Naturally, I followed suit, and under normal circumstances I also tend toward working independently, while encouraging students to pursue research on their own and not giving much thought to questions of joint authorship. Still, of course, I am not rigid to the point of stubbornness. For various reasons, I have recently begun trying to coauthor papers with students. But this is not something to be done casually or blindly: why coauthor at all, under what circumstances one may be listed as an author, who should be first author and who second author—these questions…
scholarship paper
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2020年8月11日
How to Write Good Reading Notes Assignments

History of Science & Scholarship2020.05.03
How to Write Good Reading Notes Assignments
My undergraduate general-education courses (History of Technology, Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, and so on) all like to assign “reading notes” as homework, which can substitute for a term paper (many undergraduates simply do not know how to write papers at all; if you force them to do so, plagiarism becomes all too likely, so it is better to be a bit more open-ended). But if reading notes are assigned as the major project, students should of course take them seriously; a slapdash job will naturally not earn a high grade. If you send me your reading notes in advance, you can get some feedback. But I have found that,…
philosophy book reading scholarship notes
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2020年5月3日
The “Atmosphere” of Online Teaching, or a New Paradigm

Culture & Public Commentary2020.04.18
The “Atmosphere” of Online Teaching, or a New Paradigm
Stage-by-Stage Reflections on Online Teaching The most unusual semester in years has already passed its halfway point in the blink of an eye. I have finished eight lectures of my course on the history of technology, and of course it has always been online. The reading group I host has naturally also shifted to an online mode; during winter break we had already launched a “cloud reading group,” meeting once before the semester began and then resuming once a week after classes started. The reading group is held through Zoom cloud video conferencing, while Tsinghua’s large lecture course (history of technology) is livestreamed simultaneously via Rain Classroom and Zoom cloud…
technology culture scholarship media
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2020年4月18日
Should We Defy Gaia? — A Review of The Medea Hypothesis

History of Science & Scholarship2020.04.16
Should We Defy Gaia? — A Review of The Medea Hypothesis
Published in Chinese Science Bulletin (2020-04-16, Book Review, p. 7). The title was mine, but now I’m tempted to change it again and call it: “Will Gaia Die?” The “Gaia hypothesis” was proposed by the British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s, and, together with the biologist Lynn Margulis, it exerted a huge influence both in science and in the environmental movement; it has remained a matter of controversy to this day. The inspiration for the Gaia hypothesis came from Lovelock’s participation in the 1965 Mars life-detection project. Lovelock held that the existence of life would be a planetary phenomenon: life would transform an entire planet’s environment, especially its…
book reading science history of science book review
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2020年4月16日
The Meaning of “Conflation”: How the Public Can Participate in Scientific Communication

Culture & Public Commentary2020.02.06
The Meaning of “Conflation”: How the Public Can Participate in Scientific Communication
The third essay written amid the epidemic. I’ll say it again: things are tense, so please be cautious about sharing this among friends. From science popularization to public understanding of science to science communication, people in philosophy of science and technology have been talking about this for at least twenty years. The most traditional “deficit model” has long been widely questioned, but to this day, science communication and its significance still have by no means truly taken root in people’s minds. Simply put, the “deficit model” says that scientists possess scientific knowledge while the public lacks scientific knowledge, so science popularization is nothing more than scientists, from a position of…
science philosophy of science commentary politics
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2020年2月6日
Why Has “From One to Infinity” Remained Popular for 70 Years?

History of Science & Scholarship2020.01.18
Why Has “From One to Infinity” Remained Popular for 70 Years?
Published in China Science Daily (2020-01-02, Section 7, Book Review) Its Decades-Long Bestseller Status Was No Accident From One to Infinity is the famous popular-science classic by the renowned physicist Gamow. Published in 1947 and revised and republished in 1961, it was translated into Chinese in 1978 by Mr. Bao Yongning, and has already been wildly popular at home and abroad for decades. Gamow died in 1968, more than 50 years ago now, so this classic work has become a “public-domain book.” As a result, many new translations suddenly appeared on the market. In addition to the repeatedly reprinted Bao Yongning translation from Science Press, I have already found at…
book reading science history of science book review
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2020年1月18日
My Qualification to Recruit PhD Students Was Revoked (with an Attached Record of Communication with Prospective Applicants)

History of Science & Scholarship2019.08.24
My Qualification to Recruit PhD Students Was Revoked (with an Attached Record of Communication with Prospective Applicants)
Today, just as doctoral applications were opening at Tsinghua University, I only learned of the bad news from a student’s reminder: Tsinghua University had suddenly changed its policy again and taken back the admissions rights of assistant professors and pre-tenure associate professors. In other words, at least for these next two years, I won’t be able to take students—unless I wait until I’ve slogged my way into a tenured position…… As for the policy change, I don’t want to comment too much. In fact, the overexpansion of doctoral admissions really is not a good thing, and there is reason to tighten it. But to announce the change only at this…
scholarship history of technology autobiography admissions
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2019年8月24日
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated

Culture & Public Commentary2019.07.02
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated
Published in China Science Daily (2019-06-28, p. 5, Culture) In 1959, the British writer C. P. Snow proposed the thesis of the “two cultures” in a lecture, sparking intense debate. Even sixty years later, the topic is still with us, and seems not to have gone out of date. But I want to put forward a seemingly out-of-place claim: the two-cultures debate is already passé, and there is not much point in still fretting over the issue Snow raised. First, let us return to the context of the time and see just what split between what two cultures Snow was actually talking about. Nowadays, when many people talk about…
culture science sociology intellectuals
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2019年7月2日
Personality Philosophy vs. Propositional Philosophy: On the Inevitability of the Decline of Continental Philosophy and the Immortality of Its Significance

History of Science & Scholarship2019.04.20
Personality Philosophy vs. Propositional Philosophy: On the Inevitability of the Decline of Continental Philosophy and the Immortality of Its Significance
I had mentioned this in passing on Weibo before, and because it was rather short, I didn’t plan to put it on the blog. Yesterday, at the small reading group, this question came up again, and after thinking it over I decided to post it after all, since it is ultimately a question about the basic orientation of philosophy. Byzantines Should Regard Themselves as Romans As a student of Wu, my philosophical position is of course inclined toward continental phenomenology, but in fact I am not very willing to call myself a phenomenologist or a continental philosopher. It is much like how, after the division of the Eastern and Western…
philosophy scholarship media philosophy of science
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2019年4月20日