Suixuan

标签：historiography

A History of Technological Thought Between the Legs

AI & the Future of Technology2012.03.15
A History of Technological Thought Between the Legs
In today’s seminar, I presented Levinson’s essay. Though the essay was short, the discussion was quite extensive, and in the end we had only twenty minutes left for reading—unexpectedly enough. As for Levinson’s positive significance, I really did write too ambiguously in the paper, or rather, too falsely; I even felt embarrassed saying it myself…… But the one theoretical element in Levinson that truly deserves to be called positively meaningful is indeed something I mentioned in the paper, and also what I first brought up at the start of the lecture: his kind of unselfconscious “Hegelian” line of thought. I first mentioned Wu’s “walking on two legs”: one leg is…
technology media phenomenology historiography
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2012年3月15日
Printing, Natural History, and the Birth of Modern Science

History of Science & Scholarship2011.10.24
Printing, Natural History, and the Birth of Modern Science
Introduction This article attempts to point out a certain connection among the three things named in the title—what is the relation between the invention of printing, the revival of natural history, and the birth of modern science? Is there perhaps some profound link among them, such that if we want to understand the essence of modern science and even “modernity,” we must begin by examining the influence of printing? Among these three matters, the date of printing’s appearance in Europe is the clearest: in the 1440s, Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany, invented movable-type printing. Whether or not Chinese printing indirectly influenced Gutenberg’s invention, the fact that the era of print in…
history of science scholarship media knowledge
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2011年10月24日
Revisiting “Natural History” (Natural Science) as a Historiographical Program

Culture & Public Commentary2011.08.26
Revisiting “Natural History” (Natural Science) as a Historiographical Program
I previously wrote “Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Thoughts on Liu Huajie’s Lecture,” where I briefly raised this idea. I noted that although what I call natural history as a historiographical program differs from Liu Huajie’s “historiographical program of natural history” only in translation (I argue that Natural History should be translated as “自然史” rather than the more usual “博物学”), my conception of this way of writing history is quite different from Liu’s. Recently I chatted again with my student Wang Liang about related topics, and then I saw a conversation record between Liu and Jiang Xiaoyuan, Liu Bing, and the others about “the good should be attributed to natural…
philosophy history of science history knowledge
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2011年8月26日
Some Thoughts on the Elements of History of Science in the Primary School “Science” Curriculum

History of Science & Scholarship2011.01.23
Some Thoughts on the Elements of History of Science in the Primary School “Science” Curriculum
It is a great honor to have the opportunity to offer suggestions for the writing of primary school science textbooks. However, because my own level is limited and I have a habitual tendency to drag my feet, I may not be able to offer many constructive opinions; I can only jot down some very scattered thoughts. I will divide them into two parts: first, the overall significance of elements from the history of science; second, following the framework of the textbook, some ideas about how to interweave historical material into each grade. The original plan also had a third part, which would have selected some usable cases along the thread…
science history of science history education
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2011年1月23日
Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Reflections on Liu Huajie’s Lecture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.11.12
Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Reflections on Liu Huajie’s Lecture
Just after finishing a paper arguing that “natural history” should be translated as 自然史, today happened to be the day when Professor Liu came to speak on natural history and its methods of historiography, so I might as well continue and write a couple more thoughts. Like historiographical programs such as Whig history, intellectual history, and social history, “natural history,” as a program of historiography, is a pun. On the one hand, “scientific natural history” can be read as some kind of “scientific chronicle” or “scientific record.” The feature of natural history lies in its emphasis on classificatory description, but not on temporal narration, especially not on constructing causal chains…
science historiography Liu Huajie Whig history
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2010年11月12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 history of science notes historiography
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2009年5月9日