标签：media

Schneider, What’s the Matter with You? Or, on the Thickness of Media—An Interpretation of “The Phenomenology of Perception” 1.3.8

AI & the Future of Technology2011.12.13
Schneider, What’s the Matter with You? Or, on the Thickness of Media—An Interpretation of “The Phenomenology of Perception” 1.3.8
The Thickness of the Medium — Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s Schneider Case[1] What I am dealing with is section 8 of the third chapter of Part One of *Phenomenology of Perception*: “‘Symbolic Function’ and the Existential Structure of Disease.” From the title of the section alone, one can see that it occupies a very important position. In the preceding chapters, Merleau-Ponty introduced Schneider’s case and brought in two traditional explanatory approaches: mechanistic physiology tries to explain it in terms of damage to bodily functions, while intellectualist psychology tries to explain it at the level of consciousness. But Merleau-Ponty believes that neither can truly explain the possibility of pathology. So by this section,…
philosophy book reading technology notes
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2011年12月13日
Exchange First, Scholarship Second—A Summary of the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science

Life & Notes2011.11.23
Exchange First, Scholarship Second—A Summary of the Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science
The 2nd Beijing Graduate Student Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science was finally wrapped up last weekend~ After the forum, I caught up on sleep + spent two days tinkering with the blog as a change of pace, and only now have I begun to write the summary.I was the main person in charge of organizing this forum, and my chief work was contacting students from various schools, calling for paper submissions, and moderating the review process, and so on. At the beginning, everyone’s enthusiasm was not high; it was not until the last moment that submissions started flooding in, which in the final half-month almost drove…
everyday life scholarship media blog
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2011年11月23日
Mathematics, Education, and Machines

AI & the Future of Technology2011.11.02
Mathematics, Education, and Machines
Today in discussion section, I listened to Brother Donglin’s report, and it felt wonderfully intriguing; some of my earlier scattered thoughts have become much clearer. What Brother Donglin discussed was the concept of “diagramming” in ancient Greek geometry. He pointed out that the geometrical constructions of the ancient Greeks cannot be understood as “construction” in the Kantian sense: the meaning of diagramming is not to provide some kind of “ontological proof.” Diagramming is undertaken for pedagogical and instructional purposes; the original meaning of “proof” is also a kind of showing, a process by which the teacher displays something to the student. “Geometrical diagramming, geometrical knowledge, and phronesis (practical knowledge, that…
philosophy technology science media
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2011年11月2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
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
Why Create Such a Forum?

Site Matters2011.07.18
Why Create Such a Forum?
This newly launched “Forum for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology” is part of the “Beijing Graduate Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology,” which will be held this coming November. This graduate forum was founded last year; Tsinghua took charge of it last year, and this year it is our turn. So the heavy responsibility of overall coordination has landed on my shoulders. As a shut-in, I have never been good at organizing affairs, nor am I good at socializing. Of course, under Professor Wu, people who are particularly good at organizing social activities have always been rather scarce, so I could only…
scholarship media internet website
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2011年7月18日
On Heidegger’s Thought on Technology

AI & the Future of Technology2011.06.29
On Heidegger’s Thought on Technology
The previous article was another piece written by hastily asking for reinforcements. On the one hand, that was indeed because I have not been diligent enough lately; on the other hand, I was also busy planning the proposal for my doctoral dissertation, eager to design the overall line of thought, and as a result I could not settle down to concentrate first on some specific issue. The earlier “experience report” was like this too, and so is this set of reading notes on Heidegger’s later thought. Although they are all written rather superficially and in a somewhat scattered way, they really do have to do with a certain strategy for…
technology media Heidegger environment
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2011年6月29日
Heidegger’s Thought on Technology

AI & the Future of Technology2011.06.27
Heidegger’s Thought on Technology
As everyone knows, “technology” is a core concept in Heidegger’s later thought. Heidegger’s meditation on technology exerted a major influence on both the critique of modernity and the unfolding of postmodern currents, and it pointed the way for the “philosophy of technology” that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century; Heidegger has even been retrospectively canonized as a model “philosopher of technology.” Yet this emblematic image of Heidegger is often painted as that of a reactionary resister, pessimistic or romantic: it is said that he denied “the exaltation of human subjectivity”[1], ignored the “promoting role”[2] of modern technology, and was a “romantic” afflicted with “nostalgia”[3]. These judgments are…
philosophy technology media Aristotle
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2011年6月27日
Utensils and Ritual Vessels

AI & the Future of Technology2011.05.25
Utensils and Ritual Vessels
A few days ago I attended a lecture by Li Meng. To be honest, the lecture was rather like scratching an itch through one’s boot, or rather, he merely pointed out where the itch was, and then it was entirely up to us to do the scratching ourselves. The lecture’s inspiration is wholly concentrated in its title; for those of us doing phenomenology of technology, there’s no need to attend the lecture at all—just recite this title a few times over. “Utensils and Ritual Vessels—A Chinese Appraisal of Metaphysics” First of all, we know that Western philosophers of technology, with Heidegger as their leader, carried out a kind of “appraisal”…
China technology media Aristotle
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2011年5月25日
The Distinctiveness of China’s Written Culture and Print Culture

AI & the Future of Technology2011.05.14
The Distinctiveness of China’s Written Culture and Print Culture
I often cite McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others on the progression from oral culture to written culture to print culture (see Media, Senses, Space-Time — A Preliminary Exploration of McLuhan’s Media Ontology), but they are basically talking within the context of Western languages. The development of writing there is basically a process of “pure oral speech — ideographic writing — consonantal alphabetic writing — vocalized alphabetic writing (from Greek onward) — alphabetic writing printed with movable type.” Certain Eastern scripts can also be fitted into this genealogy and understood in that way: for example, Arabic and Sanskrit are consonantal alphabetic scripts, and thus preserve context more strongly. However, Chinese writing…
culture China technology media
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2011年5月14日