分类：Life & Notes

Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-04-11

Life & Notes2009.04.11
Notes from Today’s Xindao Salon 09-04-11
The previous few times I was rather lazy; starting today I’ll try to jot down a few fragments after every salon, so friends who didn’t take part may be able to get a rough idea of what we talked about indirectly (of course I won’t record everything), and friends who did take part may be able to consolidate what they gained, or find a few more hints on related topics (things I didn’t mention on the spot will be marked in bold). First of all, friends who have no particular topic they especially want to hear or speak about are welcome to come as they please (if you’re worried the…
philosophy everyday life language Plato
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2009年4月11日
[A Quick Science Explainer][Repost] Allergic Rhinitis

Life & Notes2009.04.10
[A Quick Science Explainer][Repost] Allergic Rhinitis
http://baike.baidu.com/view/83.htm Allergic rhinitis is also called vasomotor rhinitis; it is an allergic disease of the nasal mucosa and can cause a variety of complications. There is also a type triggered by nonspecific irritation, with no specific allergen involved and not an immune reaction process, but whose clinical manifestations are similar to the above two types of allergic rhinitis; this is called vasomotor rhinitis, or neuroreflex rhinitis. The irritants may come from outside the body (physical or chemical factors), or from within the body (endocrine or psychological factors). For this reason, some people regard it as essentially allergic rhinitis; however, because there is no antigen-antibody reaction in the body, desensitization therapy,…
everyday life tradition children medicine
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2009年4月10日
Remembering Illness While Ill

Life & Notes2009.04.06
Remembering Illness While Ill
The previous stretch was all nostalgia; it seemed even my body had gotten nostalgic, too. A bout of the flu has risen and fallen with the fluctuations in temperature, dragging on for more than two weeks, and even today it still hasn’t fully cleared up…… Although I’ve had quite a few colds in recent years, they usually pass in three to five days, and I’ve never had that up-and-down relapse of getting better and worse again. That sort of condition was actually quite common when I was little. As a child I had very poor constitution; I caught colds all the time, took sick leave more than a few times,…
everyday life emotion traditional Chinese medicine childhood
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2009年4月6日
My philosophy lacks healing power

Life & Notes2009.04.02
My philosophy lacks healing power
What can either I or my philosophy say to those who are mired in hardship? Of course, although my philosophy leans toward “black magic,” it is not incapable of providing positive force. But to be precise, what philosophy can provide is a certain immunity or resistance, so that once I encounter a difficult situation, I will be more likely to face it with calm, composure, or humor. Yet I know very well that it is not an effective cure, let alone an all-purpose tonic that can cure every illness. It is like getting a vaccination: only when you are in good health, or when the disease has not yet broken…
philosophy autobiography love fate
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2009年4月2日
Speaking of Childhood’s First Dream

Life & Notes2009.03.31
Speaking of Childhood’s First Dream
Recollecting something that came to mind in passing when thinking back on childhood, it is worth adding as a postscript. This thing does not count as a deeply memorable “scene,” because my recollection of it now is actually indirect; it is only because I later remembered and spoke of it many times that I am certain it really happened. From primary school all the way to senior year of high school, if you asked me what I wanted to do in the future, my answer would probably have been: “scientist.” More specifically, in primary school and junior high I was mainly influenced by Olympiad mathematics, so I leaned toward being…
philosophy science autobiography mathematics
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2009年3月31日
Several Scenes from Childhood Memory: Cats, Rain, Streets, Beads, and Chess

Life & Notes2009.03.30
Several Scenes from Childhood Memory: Cats, Rain, Streets, Beads, and Chess
Looking back over my growing-up years, one can sketch out a “clear line,” roughly including abacus, olympiad math, Schrödinger’s cat, the philosophical grand unification, ecological philosophy, Kant, and so on. Each of these events marks some obvious turning point or development. But perhaps the more important events are not those whose influence was immediately visible, but those experiences that, though they seemed to have little effect at the time, nevertheless seemed to have imprinted themselves on my heart and have continued to exert certain secret influences on me ever since. The experience of the starry sky in the observatory at Shanghai Gezhi High School is of course one example, and…
philosophy autobiography childhood
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2009年3月30日
(Expired) Unless something comes up, every Saturday I’ll be in the window-side corner of the non-smoking area at Xindao

Life & Notes2009.03.29
(Expired) Unless something comes up, every Saturday I’ll be in the window-side corner of the non-smoking area at Xindao
Unless something unexpected happens, I’ll be at the corner by the window in the smoke-free section of Xindao every Saturday. If you’re coming, there’s no need to text me in advance or anything like that; when I’m in the café, I often can’t hear my phone ring. If some special situation arises and I need to suspend this, I’ll announce it in advance on my blog and on campus. For example, every year I have to go back to Shanghai twice or so. There will definitely be a notice before any suspension, so please rest assured. If there’s no explanation either on the blog or on campus, and you come…
everyday life blog
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2009年3月29日
On “Fate”

Life & Notes2009.03.25
On “Fate”
As I mentioned earlier, I feel as though I am being teased kindly by “fate,” and I may have used similar rhetoric in earlier essays as well. Well, this is similar to my saying things like “the ghost of Kant is poking me from behind” — it is simply a metaphorical way of expressing a “feeling,” and does not mean that I believe in “fate”; nor, of course, does it mean that I do not believe in fate. For an ill-defined concept, making an yes/no judgment about it is always pretty meaningless. First of all, I would like to declare that, with regard to the transcendental world of deities, I…
philosophy autobiography consciousness choice
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2009年3月25日
Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love

Life & Notes2009.03.19
Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love
I always say that my philosophy “starts from the classical,” specifically, more or less from Kant and those around him. But that is only an external explanation; as for what this “classical” actually contains, I have my own understanding. In my view, so-called “classical philosophy” represents a style and an attitude, one marked by an entire era. Roughly speaking, the history of Western philosophy can be divided into four eras: antiquity (ancient Greece), the Middle Ages, the classical period, and modernity.—Of course, my “classical” here is classical rather than ancient, the sense of “canonical.” A rougher division would be simply classical and modern; a finer one could add primordial times…
philosophy autobiography pursuit Greece
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2009年3月19日
Chen Jiaying: The Influence of Translations of Western Thought on Contemporary Chinese Reasoning

Life & Notes2009.03.18
Chen Jiaying: The Influence of Translations of Western Thought on Contemporary Chinese Reasoning
http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=523&fpage=1&toread=1 I suddenly remembered to post this. At the time I had only put up a link in “some text written on KKBBS during the period of seclusion,” and had not posted it in any more conspicuous way. In fact, that review is fairly important for explaining my philosophical ambitions—that is to say, how I view modern Chinese. I’m too lazy to write something new about that for the moment, so I’ll just put this old piece under the café column. Butian (Third Pole General Education Lecture) Chen Jiaying: The Influence of the Translation of Western Thought on Contemporary Chinese Reasoning Third Pole General Education Lecture (No. 83) “The way…
philosophy everyday life language translation
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2009年3月18日