标签：Kuhn

Compendium of Recommended Readings for a General History of Science

History of Science & Technology2015.06.19
Compendium of Recommended Readings for a General History of Science
A selection of recommended books at hand above ↑ (the missing ones are all those I’ve no idea where I stuffed them, so I haven’t found them for the moment…) General history category, overall recommendations: Wu Guosheng: 《The Course of Science》——I’ve put my advisor’s book in the first place. Among books by domestic authors on the same subject, this one is still the best, but after all it was first published quite early, and now it does have quite a few shortcomings. McClellan, 《A General History of Science and Technology in the World》——A rather standard general history of science, at least much better than Dampier’s, with the highlight being the…
history of science course Kuhn Copernicus
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2015年6月19日
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 9: The Copernican Revolution

History of Science & Technology2015.04.30
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 9: The Copernican Revolution
Last time we talked about printing as the technological environment of the Scientific Revolution. Starting from this lesson, we will formally enter the period of the Scientific Revolution. Last time we mentioned that, when talking about the Scientific Revolution, we must at least distinguish three lines of development: first, astronomy; second, physics. These two lines converge in Newton, and can together be called the tradition of the mathematical sciences; this also constitutes the so-called “main line” of the Scientific Revolution in the usual sense. The third is alchemy and magic. This line stretches back farther than Copernicus and Newton; although its emblematic result is the rise of chemistry, its significance…
history of science philosophy of science course Scientific Revolution
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2015年4月30日
Copernicus and Nakamoto — A Paradigm Shift in the Technological Revolution

Web3 & Bitcoin2015.01.28
Copernicus and Nakamoto — A Paradigm Shift in the Technological Revolution
This article was submitted last year to Babit, and may have been included in a new book published by Babit. But so far I still haven’t seen it published. Recently, while writing an article, I happened to come across some related content, and remembered that this piece still hadn’t been made public, so I might as well publish it first~ In the earlier Southern Metropolis Daily Bitcoin interview questionnaire, when I reposted it on Babit and Bitren, I added the title “Bitcoin as a Paradigm Revolution.” After all, having a title makes it seem as though it will spread better. But in fact, as a paradigm revolution, it was only…
media philosophy of science Web3 Aristotle
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2015年1月28日
A Summary of the Reading Group on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

History of Science & Scholarship2014.12.10
A Summary of the Reading Group on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
This semester, at the initiative of a few undergraduate students, with me leading the reading, we organized a reading group on Kuhn’s *Structure*. By last week, we finally finished *Structure* (skipping the postscript), and starting this week the reading group has begun *Being and Time*. This time around, leading *Structure* was quite a coincidence: just when Professor Wu went abroad, the undergraduate students in our department’s history and philosophy of science project were left without anyone to supervise them. These two students were especially eager to learn and spontaneously wanted to start a reading group, asking Professor Wu to find a teaching assistant to lead it. Professor Wu knew that…
philosophy book reading history of science notes
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2014年12月10日
The Rationality of Whig History and the Possibility of an Anti-Whig Approach

Culture & Public Commentary2013.09.18
The Rationality of Whig History and the Possibility of an Anti-Whig Approach
In the first week of the Wendao seminar at Wu, junior brother Liu Renxiang, a promising new talent, took the initiative to give a talk on “The Poverty of Anti-Whiggish Historiography.” There were many discussions in class at the time, and I even went up to the podium to draw a diagram, but afterward I kept busy writing my travel notes on Mount Lu and preparing my own seminar report, so I never got around to writing anything down. Still, this topic is quite important, so I’m taking a little time now to add some thoughts. Just from the title of Liu Renxiang’s article, you can tell that the junior…
science history of science philosophy of science history
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2013年9月18日
The Revolutionary History of Media

AI & the Future of Technology2013.09.16
The Revolutionary History of Media
Pre-seminar note: The paper isn’t finished yet, but I’ll say a few things first anyway. I’ve run into some difficulties with this paper, which have stalled its progress. In fact, this section is quite an important part of my doctoral dissertation plan. Here I am trying to establish a connection between the history of technology and the history of science, linking philosophy of technology → history of technology → history of science → philosophy of science into a single chain. But the ambition of the framework is rather large, and so I ended up letting the conclusion come first, while the material has not kept up. Relying mainly on Walter…
technology history of science media phenomenology
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2013年9月16日
Travel Notes on the Lushan Conference

History of Science & Scholarship2013.09.11
Travel Notes on the Lushan Conference
Departing on August 28 and returning to Beijing on September 4, this conference trip, counting from beginning to end, lasted a full week; it was the longest conference I have ever attended, practically a vacation. Ever since I went to Nanning in 2009 to attend the Third Conference on Phenomenology and Philosophy of Technology, I have now attended five consecutive conferences. Aside from Nanning, where I only wrote a little “Miscellaneous Notes,” I went on to write full conference gripe-sessions about Hailar, Yangma Island, and Guangzhou, and I am now in the awkward position of having ridden the tiger and being unable to get off; this time, too, I ought…
Heidegger phenomenology Kuhn Wittgenstein
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2013年9月11日
Solving Problems and Institutional Reform

Culture & Public Commentary2012.07.28
Solving Problems and Institutional Reform
The previous article mentioned that a despotic system constantly needs imminent crises to overcome, with hatred and struggle as its basic posture. Of course, a democratic system too must keep solving immediate problems; “solving problems” is the normal state of governance. However, the basic paradigms for solving problems differ under different systems. This is not merely a matter of keeping pace with the times or adapting measures to local conditions—for example, Chinese people solving China’s special problems, Americans solving America’s problems, and so on. The difference in paradigms is not limited to that kind of distinction; it also includes differences in standards of judgment, such as what counts as a…
philosophy China culture history of science
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2012年7月28日
Regarding the Third Assignment for Ke Tong: “On Bacon’s Science”

History of Science & Scholarship2011.12.19
Regarding the Third Assignment for Ke Tong: “On Bacon’s Science”
As final exams approach, the teaching assistants are all busy too… This time I was a bit lazy with the assignment and didn’t annotate and reply to each student one by one. In fact, last time I did annotate and reply individually, many people simply didn’t even look at my comments, and the citations were still nonstandard. That really disappointed me… Of course, if you would like to communicate with me, you can take the initiative to contact me. Given that this assignment was relatively open, the standards were also hard to set, and it was the final assignment, I suggest grading somewhat leniently, with 8 points as the basic…
philosophy science philosophy of science Scientific Revolution
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2011年12月19日
What, Exactly, Is the Scientific Revolution?

History of Science & Scholarship2009.01.13
What, Exactly, Is the Scientific Revolution?
This semester has finally ended~~ The topic of this essay does not particularly satisfy me. What on earth is the Scientific Revolution? — A critique of Shapin’s “No Scientific Revolution” claim “The Scientific Revolution”—referring specifically to that stretch of history around the seventeenth century, “from Copernicus to Newton”—has been the greatest focus of history of science research since Koyré, and the literature commenting on this “Scientific Revolution” from different perspectives and lines of inquiry is so abundant as to be immeasurable. Yet in the opening of his famous book The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin drops a bombshell: “There was no Scientific Revolution, and this book is about that.”[1] So, how…
book reading science book review Scientific Revolution
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2009年1月13日