分类：Phenomenology & Heidegger

Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time

Phenomenology & Heidegger2024.02.02
Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time
This article was published in Science and Technology Daily (2024-02-02, p. 3, Book Reviews), and retitled “Memory Is More Important Than Function; Richness Is More Important Than Efficiency” Bernard Stiegler was one of the most important philosophers of technology from the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first; in my view, one could even dispense with both “technology” and “one of.” His magnum opus is the three-volume Technics and Time, which has long been translated into Chinese, and Yilin Press has recently published a collected edition. The collected edition improves upon the old translation, especially by resolving inconsistent renderings of individual terms and by providing a unified index, making it…
philosophy technology book reading history of technology
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2024年2月2日
Rethinking Human Nature in the Age of Technology — A Review of Technics and Time 1

Phenomenology & Heidegger2020.04.03
Rethinking Human Nature in the Age of Technology — A Review of Technics and Time 1
This article was published in the April 2020 issue of Book City Bernard Stiegler is one of the most influential living philosophers in the field of philosophy of technology, and in recent years he has also had a considerable impact in China. He himself often comes to China to give lectures and teach courses. The lecture notes from a course he taught in the Department of Philosophy at Nanjing University in 2016 have recently been published in collected form (Nanjing Lectures: Reading Marx and Engels in the Anthropocene—From The German Ideology to Dialectics of Nature). And the Chinese translation of the work that made his name in his early years,…
technology book reading Heidegger history of technology
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2020年4月3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
AR Glasses and the “Brain in a Vat”

AI & the Future of Technology2018.10.26
AR Glasses and the “Brain in a Vat”
My doctoral student Yao Yu recently gave a presentation in the reading seminar, discussing a phenomenological reconstruction of Putnam’s “brain in a vat” thought experiment. He chose the topic himself, and I thought it could be done, but I was very dissatisfied with what he actually produced. I won’t repeat my criticisms here; I’ll just briefly note here my own understanding of the “brain in a vat.” First of all, the reason Putnam proposed the thought experiment of the “brain in a vat” was absolutely not to reintroduce some new version of “external-world skepticism.” In the skeptical sense, there is nothing novel about a brain in a vat. I think…
technology phenomenology VR analytic philosophy
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2018年10月26日
On the Backboard — A Phenomenology of Beat Saber

Phenomenology & Heidegger2018.09.28
On the Backboard — A Phenomenology of Beat Saber
Recently I’ve basically been grinding Beat Saber in VR, so I should count as having reached the expert level, right? Among the official songs, aside from standard mode where everything is A rank and Full Combo, I’ve recently started tackling no-arrow mode and one-handed mode, and in both modes I’ve also got 3 FC clears each~ Just the other day, in the introductory philosophy of technology class, we had just finished discussing Stiegler’s tertiary retention, and one of the links in that discussion was a phenomenological analysis of music. Applying that whole phenomenological analysis here is actually kind of interesting. When people first get into the game Beat Saber, many…
philosophy technology phenomenology Introduction to Philosophy of Technology
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2018年9月28日
On Phenomenology (I)

Phenomenology & Heidegger2016.12.24
On Phenomenology (I)
Recently I came across Master Xianglong’s article “What Is Phenomenology?”, and I thought it was terrific. This piece of his is especially suitable for readers who have some background knowledge of the history of Western philosophy but are unfamiliar with phenomenology. Teacher Zhang explains some basic concepts clearly, and between the lines he also conveys some of his own unique experience of phenomenology. It is truly a model of making the profound accessible. After reading Teacher Zhang’s article, I too could not help wanting to write about my own understanding of phenomenology. Of course, my article can hardly be compared with Teacher Zhang’s; my main purpose is to clarify my…
philosophy media phenomenology Wu Guosheng
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2016年12月24日
The Origins of Technology

AI & the Future of Technology2016.12.16
The Origins of Technology
This article began as an attempt to sketch out a thread for the soon-to-be-written *A General History of Technology*, while trying to apply the strategy of “intentional history.” After discussing it in a seminar, I found that there were still many gaps in the logic after the four causes. I had originally wanted to fill them in before posting, but now I feel it would be very hard to add anything, and I’m afraid the whole thing would need to be reorganized from scratch. So I’ll just post the unfinished essay for now. 0. Intentionality The origin of technology is a historical and archaeological question, but first of all…
technology phenomenology Kant intentionality
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2016年12月16日
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage

History of Science & Scholarship2016.12.01
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage
Introduction: From Philosophy of Technology to Philosophy of Garbage 1. The Historical Absence of a Philosophy of Garbage 2. How Is Garbage Possible? 3. Garbage Has Existed Since Ancient Times 4. The Modernity of Garbage I. The World of Ideas That Rejects Decay 1. The Age of the World Picture 2. The One-Sidedness of the World Picture 3. Plato’s World of Ideas 4. Aversion to Mortality II. Intellectual Purism That Rejects Ambiguity 1. Binary Opposition 2. Is and Ought 3. Identity and Garbage 4. Kant’s “Discarding Method” III. Foundationalism That Rejects Recycling 1. The Triple Synthesis 2. Memory and Its “Recycling” 3. Learning and Technology 4. The Cycle of History…
technology media Heidegger phenomenology
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2016年12月1日
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage

History of Science & Scholarship2016.12.01
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Garbage
Introduction: From Philosophy of Technology to Philosophy of Garbage 1. The Historical Absence of a Philosophy of Garbage 2. How Is Garbage Possible? 3. Garbage Has Existed Since Ancient Times 4. The Modernity of Garbage I. The World of Ideas That Rejects Decay 1. The Age of the World Picture 2. The One-Sidedness of the World Picture 3. Plato’s World of Ideas 4. Aversion to Mortality II. Intellectual Purism That Rejects Ambiguity 1. Binary Opposition 2. Is and Ought 3. Identity and Garbage 4. Kant’s “Discarding Method” III. Foundationalism That Rejects Recycling 1. The Triple Synthesis 2. Memory and Its “Recycling” 3. Learning and Technology 4. The Cycle of History…
technology media Heidegger phenomenology
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2016年12月1日
The knives are really starting to fly and cut people: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Technological Intentionality

AI & Scholarship2016.08.07
The knives are really starting to fly and cut people: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Technological Intentionality
This is a supplement to the previous post. I had originally wanted to make “technical intentionality” the core concept of this essay, but in the end I retreated before the difficulty and gave it up; still, because it had been brewing for so long, I feel I ought to say a few things about it. Seven years ago in Nanning, I attended my first phenomenology and philosophy of technology conference. There was one session that left a deep impression on me, and I wrote about it in my notes from that year as well: Professor Wu spoke about “the intentional structure in technology,” but Professor Jin disagreed with using the…
technology media phenomenology human nature
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2016年8月7日