Suixuan

标签：knowledge

  • Ways of Creating Concepts (Jottings)

    Philosophy & Thought

    Ways of Creating Concepts (Jottings)

    Passive creation (mass communication) and active creation (scholarly invention). There are two active modes of creation: the natural-history style of “defining by pointing to the thing” and defining concepts through concepts. The latter is a way of abbreviating some meaning that was originally associated with a long string of concepts like A, B, C, D, E, F, or even with an allusion, or even with an entire philosophical system, into a convenient concept. Why create new concepts? Very simple: because the old concepts are not enough. If an intuition is so unfamiliar that people cannot naturally and smoothly place it in its proper position within the net of concepts, then…

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  • What Is the Difference Between Philosophy and Natural History?

    What Is the Difference Between Philosophy and Natural History?
    Philosophy & Thought

    What Is the Difference Between Philosophy and Natural History?

    Today I was asked a question that, at first hearing, seemed baffling: “What is the difference between philosophy and natural history?” The questioner felt that philosophy deals with everything, and natural history also touches on everything, so the two seemed more or less the same… My answer was: philosophy is directed toward problems, whereas natural history faces things. Or, to put it another way, philosophy asks after the ultimate meaning of concepts—such as “What, ultimately, is science?” “What, ultimately, is essence?”—these are the ways philosophy poses its questions. A typical way natural history poses a question is: point at a tree and ask, “What is this?”—“A poplar.” That sort of…

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  • Choosing Peking University, Taking on Freedom

    Choosing Peking University, Taking on Freedom
    Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom

    Choosing Peking University, Taking on Freedom

    The original writing plan for “Yanyuan—The Four Schools” had stalled for a long time because I shut myself away and hid from the blog. Now that graduation is practically upon me, it’s time to restart this task. Just then the student union was organizing a “My Yanyuan Memories — A Commencement Essay Collection for Peking University’s Class of 2008 Excellent Graduates,” asking each department to nominate writers. Although I do not like taking part in essay contests, especially those initiated by official bodies, I was going to write something anyway. So I might as well take part. There was also a call for submissions from 《Communist Youth Garden》, and perhaps…

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  • Why Suixuan Is Not Afraid of Plagiarism

    Why Suixuan Is Not Afraid of Plagiarism
    Life & Notes

    Why Suixuan Is Not Afraid of Plagiarism

    Not long after Suixuan first started running, a friend reminded me to be a little careful: academic articles posted there would always inevitably face the risk of plagiarism and theft. More recently, an older fellow student also suggested that I might as well submit more pieces to newspapers, which would both earn a bit of author’s fee and, to some extent, protect copyright. But for me, whether writing for newspapers or submitting papers to magazines, first, it is not commensurate with my present qualifications and level; second, it more or less sacrifices freedom; third, it is unnecessary, because I am neither short of money nor afraid of plagiarism and theft….

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  • Philosophy of Media: An Introduction

    Philosophy & Thought

    Philosophy of Media: An Introduction

    Wu Laoshi once mentioned that in the future Xiaogu might perhaps be able to do some specialized research in the philosophy of technology of media; of course, that is something to think about later. Indeed, for me, concern with media is by no means a spur-of-the-moment interest, but a very fundamental, connecting perspective. Wu Laoshi once distinguished between two kinds of “philosophy of technology” (or, more generally, “XX-philosophy”): one is as a departmental philosophy, that is, taking XX as the object of philosophical reflection; the other is as a philosophical character, that is, taking XX as the foundation, direction, or point of departure of the whole of philosophy (in this…

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  • A Tentative Discussion of Schopenhauer’s Spirit of Rationalism

    History of Science & Scholarship

    A Tentative Discussion of Schopenhauer’s Spirit of Rationalism

    The epigraph to the first part of *The World as Will and Representation* quotes Rousseau: “Step out of childhood, my friend, awaken!” What did Schopenhauer want to express by this line? We might as well compare it with a fable he wrote late in life: “A mother, with the hope of educating and cultivating her children’s minds, lets them read Aesop’s fables; but they soon send the book back, and the eldest, precocious child says: this is not the sort of book we read; it is too childish, too silly; you cannot make us believe that foxes and wolves can talk, and we shall read nothing of the kind again!…

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  • Keke Forum Lecture 41: Two Kinds of Local Knowledge (November 2)

    History of Science & Scholarship

    Keke Forum Lecture 41: Two Kinds of Local Knowledge (November 2)

    The task of activating KKBBS begins… Last week I tried testing the waters by posting a report, only to discover that there isn’t just a shortage of water there—it’s a complete desert! Where on earth am I supposed to begin………… Let’s be a little honest first and finish the basic task of reporting on each instance of the KeKe Forum~ But this post of mine doesn’t seem to be a news report; rather, it’s a discussion. I think news copy is pretty dull anyway, and besides, I’m not good at writing it. So I might as well keep hurling bricks and see whether I can stir up even a tiny…

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  • A Book-Buying Maniac’s Self-Justification

    Life & Notes

    A Book-Buying Maniac’s Self-Justification

    Quoting Lao Yang, my characteristic is “as addicted to books as to life, buying books by the mountain”; the books I have piled up already number beyond counting, and it seems that, like our universe, they are actually still expanding at an accelerating rate…… Many teachers and senior students had long since tried to persuade me that there was no need to buy so many books, because in the end these books would all be useless. They told me that once one has entered the proper track of scholarship, the more important readings are original foreign-language works; Chinese books are, on the one hand, unlikely to be of the highest…

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  • About the Papers I Have Written

    Life & Notes

    About the Papers I Have Written

    Before I went to Shanxi, I once ran into LY in a bookstore. He mentioned the problems with the papers I write: they involve too much, their contents are too mixed, the theme is not clear enough, the logic is not coherent enough, and the key issue is that they are not sufficiently “standard” — that is, I have not really mastered the conventions of the academic paper. He also said that my year-paper was almost rejected in the reviewers’ discussion, and only because LY spoke up for me did it end up receiving an excellent grade. In fact, I am aware of these problems myself. The general style of…

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  • Negative Ontology

    History of Science & Scholarship

    Negative Ontology

    Negative Ontology ——A Critical Appraisal of Kant’s Ontological Thought Abstract: This essay aims to interpret Kant’s ontological thought in Critique of Pure Reason and Introduction to a Future Metaphysics. Kant’s ontology differs radically from the tradition; it is what may be called a “negative ontology,” that is, an ontology whose aim is not to expand knowledge, but to set limits to it. The thing-in-itself is precisely Kant’s ontic ground; Kant emphasizes that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, yet must be thinkable and acknowledged. The positing of the thing-in-itself, on the one hand, restricts the arrogance of dogmatism; on the other hand, it also restrains the lawlessness of skeptics. In the realm…

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