标签：history

Notes on “Being and Time” II: “Being and Media”?

Philosophy & Thought2012.03.01
Notes on “Being and Time” II: “Being and Media”?
The portion I read today is, in my view, not especially important; Heidegger lays out the framework of “the book” (including the unfinished second part). To me, this framework is open to question. What I admire most is the first half of *Being and Time*; but once “temporality” is unveiled and the whole thing is repeated on the basis of temporality, I can no longer keep up with Heidegger’s train of thought. Still, broadly speaking, my line of thought remains corresponding to Heidegger’s—only, starting from “time,” perhaps more revisions are needed. Last week I said that what Heidegger calls “that which is asked about” (问之所及), “that which is questioned” (问之所问),…
philosophy book reading technology notes
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2012年3月1日
“Intentional History” and the Aim of Historiography

Culture & Public Commentary2011.12.28
“Intentional History” and the Aim of Historiography
After returning from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I attended the “Winter Solstice Conference,” I had the chance to meet teachers and students from Shanghai’s history-of-science circle, and I also took my senior and junior brothers around Shanghai for a bit. Although it took up a whole weekend that included the founding day of the PRC, it was still worthwhile. After I came back, Teacher Wu asked us to talk about our impressions. I said that, in my view, the biggest problem with the history of science in Shanghai is that it lacks philosophy. Of course, from a good perspective, this means that such history of science is relatively “pure”:…
philosophy history of science philosophy of science history
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2011年12月28日
Cookbooks and the History of Science and Technology

Culture & Public Commentary2011.12.12
Cookbooks and the History of Science and Technology
Last week in Brother Bu Tianshi’s class, he mentioned how a certain quantitative tendency entered the general consciousness of modern people. Brother Bu Tianshi said that in history, some things simply “happened”; the spirit of the age shifted, and sometimes there was not much in the way of a reason. Indeed, one cannot find a strict causal-law explanation in history, but one can still find many “explanations.” For example, I tend to explain the quantitative tendency of public thinking by the rise of print media. This is because printing brought with it an unprecedented demand for repeatability and operability, and this repeatability was realized through text rather than oral…
culture technology history printing
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2011年12月12日
Second Commentary on the Science and Technology Assignment (On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System)

Teaching & Courses2011.11.30
Second Commentary on the Science and Technology Assignment (On the Revolutionary and Conservative Aspects of the Copernican System)
I’d been busy with meetings for a while; organizing these meetings takes so much mental energy that I still haven’t really recovered… But the long-overdue second assignment for Keton had to be graded. I’ve already gone through the assignments once and added comments one by one. Some assignments got very few comments, so I’ll use this space to talk about the more general issues. First, I have to stress once again the issue of annotation conventions. Last time I only directly pointed out the problem of annotation conventions in my replies to some students; for other students whose annotations were also nonstandard, I didn’t criticize them directly. Instead, I wrote…
history of science scholarship history course
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2011年11月30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
Recommended Introductory Readings in Philosophy of Technology

History of Science & Scholarship2011.07.26
Recommended Introductory Readings in Philosophy of Technology
The department’s magazine, *Qingqiu Yuan*, invited me to write a few recommendations of good books in philosophy of science and technology, mainly to provide some guidance for students who have not yet settled on a direction. I am very honored. In addition, I hope that all students interested in philosophy of science and technology will get in touch with me. On my blog (yilinhut.com) you can find my various contact details. Undergraduate philosophy majors are required to choose a supervisor and a direction in their freshman or sophomore year. At this stage, apart from introductory courses in Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Marxist philosophy, students have relatively little knowledge of…
book reading science notes history of science
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2011年7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
The Qufu Church and the Time and Space of Chinese Tradition

Culture & Public Commentary2011.01.13
The Qufu Church and the Time and Space of Chinese Tradition
Today (yesterday), I was dragged by Classmate Slim to take part in a salon event, where we discussed the question of Confucianism and Christianity, East and West, using the incident of building a church in Qufu as our thread. Although I’ve lately been rather lazy and reluctant to move, I still went, after all, academic salons are activities I’ve always highly esteemed, and since a classmate was organizing it and had actively come to invite me, there was no reason to demur. I had originally planned merely to go along and make up the numbers, but when I arrived I discovered that there were in fact fewer participants than expected,…
culture China history religion
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2011年1月13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
Reviving the Culture of the Court Historian——The Institution of the Court Historian as a Religious System

Culture & Public Commentary2010.11.09
Reviving the Culture of the Court Historian——The Institution of the Court Historian as a Religious System
Earlier I wrote a paper on “natural history,” but it was rather hasty, and there is still much work to be done. On the one hand, the inner connection between the rise of natural history and the rise of historiography in modern Western thought still awaits examination from the standpoint of intellectual history; on the other hand, the relationship between history and nature also deserves further philosophical reflection. Senior Brother Ke suggested that I read Foucault’s The Order of Things; he seemed to mean that the book would support the translation “natural science” [博物学], but when I flipped through it roughly, it was clearly supporting my line of thought. In…
China history faith religion
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2010年11月9日