Suixuan

标签：certainty

  • Reading: A Bridge to the Future

    Reading: A Bridge to the Future
    Culture & Public Commentary

    Reading: A Bridge to the Future

    Commissioned piece for China Science Daily China Science Daily (2025-03-23, p. 4, General) — I am posting the original draft here The theme of World Book Day 2025 is “Reading: A Bridge to the Future” (Reading: A Bridge to the Future). Come to think of it, this formulation seems a bit strange, because the future will always arrive; no matter what we do, time will always pass, and we will always move toward the future. Reading, by contrast, is always touching “the past,” and what becomes a book always originates in the past and settles there. Perhaps the point of the metaphor is the “bridge” — we will always enter…

    cultureAIPlatofuture
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  • “It Must Be Rectification of Names” — Politics, History, and Science

    Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese

    “It Must Be Rectification of Names” — Politics, History, and Science

    Recently, the issue of the extension of property rights on Chinese real estate has come to light, and many people have only then discovered that the so-called “automatic renewal” in the Property Law as they had understood it was merely a misunderstanding; “automatic,” it turns out, does not include the meaning of “free,” and moreover there is no fixed amount for how much one must pay to renew. Wenzhou said one would have to pay 30 percent of the housing price to renew, and then issued a clarification saying the matter was still under study. But the problem is: if the rules were already established long ago, why must the…

    cultureChinacommentarytradition
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  • Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty

    Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty
    Philosophy & Thought

    Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty

    Philosophy, or “love of wisdom,” is fundamentally an activity of love. I have always said that love is like philosophy, and philosophy is like love; related remarks can be found in the blog folder “谈情——说爱.” I also once wrote “Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love,” in which I crudely mapped various philosophical styles across ancient and modern times onto various attitudes toward love. This was not some offhand joke of mine, The resemblance between philosophy and love is by no means merely a literary analogy; rather, it means that these two activities share something in certain fundamental senses. A culture, or a thinker, who has a certain philosophy will also…

    philosophypursuitPlatolove
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  • The Search for “Possibility”

    Philosophy & Thought

    The Search for “Possibility”

    The following statement may be regarded as a certain “translation” of Heidegger, though of course it cannot conform to Heidegger’s original intention. Traditional Western philosophy, or rather the entire history of Western thought, has taken as its main thread the “search for certainty.” Around this craving for certainty have unfolded philosophy’s pursuit of “being,” science’s pursuit of universal laws, ethics’ pursuit of clear rules, religion’s pursuit of immortal bliss, and so on. All learning seeks certainty, seeks what is fixed and unchanging. Originally, the search for certainty and the search for possibility were not necessarily in conflict. However, the search for certainty eventually expanded beyond measure, so much so that…

    philosophyfreedomtraditionHeidegger
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