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标签：history of science

Call for Papers for the 2nd Beijing Graduate Academic Forum on the History of Science and Philosophy

Life & Notes2011.07.17
Call for Papers for the 2nd Beijing Graduate Academic Forum on the History of Science and Philosophy
Call for Papers for the 2nd Beijing Graduate Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology In order to promote scholarship, foster exchanges among young scholars in the field of dialectics of nature at universities across the Beijing area, and create more opportunities for understanding and communication between senior and junior scholars, the Institute for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the School of Humanities, Tsinghua University, together with the Center for Studies of Science and Society at Peking University and other institutions, jointly initiated and organized last year the Graduate Academic Forum of Beijing’s philosophy of science and technology circles. The inaugural forum was successfully held…
everyday life history of science scholarship philosophy of science
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2011年7月17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
The Blind Spots of Modern Medicine as Seen from “Double-Blind Experiments”

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.30
The Blind Spots of Modern Medicine as Seen from “Double-Blind Experiments”
Is medicine a science? The usual answer is yes, or at least that “medicine is not merely a science,” but in any case, one believes that medicine is first of all a science, or at least “scientific.” Like other modern sciences, the “scientificness” of medicine is embodied in its goals and methods: the goal of science is to reveal the (natural, reductionist) causes and laws of things; the method of science is quantitative and experimental. The scientificness of modern medicine is first grounded in biology and physiology. But even the most stubborn reductionists will admit that medicine is not physiology, and that besides studying physiological phenomena, the basic theme…
culture science history of science philosophy of science
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2010年12月30日
A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.20
A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture
Textbook-style history of science takes the achievements of modern science as its standard, and describes the course of science as a great chronology in which people one by one attained those achievements. But history of science in this sense is in a certain way not history at all; what it confronts is not the process by which science succeeded one another, but is always simply the task of praising modern science. Such history of science assigns to each component of modern science a discoverer and a date of discovery, and thus introduces modern science according to the order of discovery rather than the logical order. Yet this kind of narrative…
book reading history of science history book review
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2010年12月20日
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.19
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)
I suddenly realized that I still hadn’t posted this article…… This piece was originally supposed to appear in Dushu Bao, but by some strange twist of fate it somehow ended up being published in Zhongguo Tushu Shangbao, and I don’t know exactly how much was cut from it. To this day I still haven’t seen the newspaper or the fee…… I’m told that in the next couple of days I’ll be rewriting it and submitting a new version to senior brother Bu Tian…… If I’m going to revise it, I might as well revise it more thoroughly—why not try a different line of thought and rewrite it from scratch?…… It’s…
book reading history of science book review Whig history
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2010年12月19日
“Natural History” Should Be Translated as “Natural History”

History of Science & Scholarship2010.11.07
“Natural History” Should Be Translated as “Natural History”
Natural history is generally translated as “博物学” (bowuxue, “studies of things”). In the Western tradition, natural history stands in opposition to natural philosophy, representing a way of studying nature that emphasizes observation, recording, and classification rather than reasoning or experiment. In the Chinese tradition, by contrast, though we lack a tradition of natural philosophy, we do have a developed tradition of “博物学.” But did ancient China really have a so-called tradition of bowuxue corresponding to Western natural history? Is it really appropriate to translate natural history as bowuxue? I have always been skeptical. In this article, I will revisit this translation, trace the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western…
history of science history paper natural history
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2010年11月7日
Civilization History as History of Science—A Review of Sarton’s Ancient Science in the Golden Age of Greece

History of Science & Scholarship2010.10.24
Civilization History as History of Science—A Review of Sarton’s Ancient Science in the Golden Age of Greece
As the founder of the discipline of the history of science, George Sarton was the first generation of professional historians of science, and he is by no means unfamiliar to scholars in China. In 2007, Jiang Xiaoyuan and Liu Bing edited Sarton’s History of Science Series, bringing Sarton’s ideas on historiography into the Chinese context in a comprehensive way. One of the monumental representative works that reflects Sarton’s achievements in the history of science, Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, has also recently been introduced by Xiangxiang Press. Regarding Sarton’s value, the translator Lu Xudong says in the preface: “Anyone reading the history of science cannot but read…
book reading history of science Aristotle book review
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2010年10月24日
The Secrets of the Turing Machine

History of Science & Scholarship2010.09.20
The Secrets of the Turing Machine
The second lecture of “What Is Science” was delivered by Yao Qizhi on the life of Turing. Before the class, as a teaching assistant, my dealings with his female secretary already left me with a very bad impression; I hadn’t expected the lecture itself to be disappointing as well. After the lecture I had already written some thoughts, which I’ll paste below first: Frankly speaking, today Teacher Yao’s lecture was disappointing. The introduction to Turing was too watery, and it hardly introduced what Turing’s enormous contribution actually was. It only said that he designed the “Turing machine,” that the Turing machine is a universal computer, that is, the modern computer….
philosophy science history of science mathematics
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2010年9月20日
Postscript After Grading the 2010 General History of Science Exam

Teaching & Courses2010.06.21
Postscript After Grading the 2010 General History of Science Exam
This time I was in charge of grading all three essay questions, and since I also had to watch the World Cup, the grading went a bit slowly. But the two teaching assistants who graded the short-answer section together had already taken a week to get it to me, and they hadn’t arranged the order of the exam papers for me at all, nor had they prepared the electronic roster properly, so my speed was probably still pretty good. This time, because I had to assign grades for the graduating class first, I rushed through the papers of the class of ’06, and in the process fixed the grading scale….
history of science course Peking University Christianity
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2010年6月21日
Answers to the Essay Questions on the Final Exam for History of Science

Teaching & Courses2010.06.13
Answers to the Essay Questions on the Final Exam for History of Science
1. Discuss the differences between ancient Greek astronomy and ancient Chinese astronomy. This is the most objective of the three essay questions, so you can answer it by listing the main points. In simple terms, the differences are as follows: In terms of theoretical background, ancient Greek astronomy was integrated with cosmology and separated from astrology, whereas ancient Chinese astronomy was separated from cosmology and integrated with astrology; In terms of purpose, aside from their shared goals such as constructing calendars, ancient Greek astronomy aimed to “save the phenomena,” while ancient Chinese astronomy focused on calculating the Mandate of Heaven for the imperial court; In terms of content, Greek astronomy…
China history of science history course
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2010年6月13日