标签：Middle Ages

Course Summary for A General History of Technology (Fall 2020)

Teaching & Courses2021.02.19
Course Summary for A General History of Technology (Fall 2020)
This is the fourth round of the course. This round was a little different from the previous three: the total number of class hours was about the same, but the original 16-week format of 2 class hours per week was changed to an 11-week format of 3 class hours per week. This scheduling was due to a small mistake I made when I first registered the course, but afterward I also decided to go with the flow and see what benefits this arrangement might have. There were indeed some benefits. First, the course ended off-peak, concluding a month earlier than most courses, which relatively speaking may have eased some of…
course history of technology General History of Technology machinery
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2021年2月19日
The Growth History of the Scientific Spirit and the Unity of Personality

History of Science & Scholarship2020.12.19
The Growth History of the Scientific Spirit and the Unity of Personality
Today I was invited to take part in a forum on the spirit of science. Although my theme talk was only five minutes long, I had also prepared some new formulations, which I will lay out here in a fuller way. “The spirit of science” seems to include many dimensions: seeking truth from facts, pursuing truth, solidarity and cooperation, and so on. How should we understand this multiplicity of what is called the “spirit of science”? There are two reasons for this multiplicity. On the one hand, many people are too casual, stuffing every “good” quality into the spirit of science; but on the other hand, this multiplicity does have…
science history of science freedom Scientific Revolution
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2020年12月19日
At what “time” do we need to “check the time”?

AI & the Future of Technology2018.04.30
At what “time” do we need to “check the time”?
This short essay is made up of some fragments from the fifth lecture of my course “A General History of Technology.” The full handout has not yet been整理出来, but today there happens to be a filming session that will deal with the relevant topic, so I’m extracting these parts first and jotting down a few lines at will. What is a clock? It is a kind of, or rather a class of, technical artifact. As a technical object, it of course has a specific function; so what is a clock for? The answer seems very simple: a clock is for “looking at time.” But on closer thought, this act of…
technology Industrial Revolution General History of Technology time
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2018年4月30日
Undergraduate General Education Course: “A General History of Technology”

Teaching & Courses2018.02.24
Undergraduate General Education Course: “A General History of Technology”
This semester (Spring 2018), I will be offering an undergraduate elective at Tsinghua: *General History of Technology*. Basic Course Information Course number: 00691572 Time: Every Tuesday, period 4 (15:20–16:55) Note: Classes start on February 27 Location: Building 4, Room 4202 Assessment: Reading notes / short paper + open-book final exam Note: I hope every student can write a relatively complete paper (more than 6,000 Chinese characters), but past experience shows that many students still lack adequate academic training, and the papers handed in are often a miserable patchwork. So this time I am considering allowing reading notes, with a more flexible format, to substitute for the paper; but students who…
China technology history of science course
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2018年2月24日
Comments on the 2nd Tsinghua Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science

History of Science & Scholarship2017.12.15
Comments on the 2nd Tsinghua Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science
The 2nd Tsinghua Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology was held on December 10, 2017. This year’s forum was somewhat smaller in scale than the first one, but it marked the point at which the forum entered a regular pattern; even if it were held just once a year as a summary report meeting mainly for the disciples of the Wu school, that would already be quite good. After the meeting, Teacher Wu asked me to write a review, but I spent the first day preparing classes, the second day teaching classes, and the third day came down with a cold; I am still in a…
history of science philosophy of science Wu Guosheng Greece
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2017年12月15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
Lectures on the General History of Science 8: Printing and the Scientific Revolution

History of Science & Technology2015.04.23
Lectures on the General History of Science 8: Printing and the Scientific Revolution
Last class I talked about medieval science. We discussed the emergence of the “university,” and the conceptual preconditions that Christian theology may have provided for modern science. But I have not yet given a concrete introduction to the theoretical creativity of medieval scholastic philosophers. I had originally considered giving a comprehensive account of the specific contents of medieval science in this class as well, but after weighing it up, I decided not to devote a single lecture to it. The main contributions of medieval science were concentrated in natural philosophy and in the clarification of certain concepts; they are relatively speculative in character, and if treated in a separate class…
course Aristotle Scientific Revolution natural history
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2015年4月23日
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 7: The Middle Ages and Christian Science

History of Science & Technology2015.04.17
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 7: The Middle Ages and Christian Science
After finishing with the Arabs and China, let us return to the West and talk about medieval science. As for the Middle Ages, I was wondering whether I should spend two classes on them, because traditionally this period has been rather neglected; people probably know very little about it, yet in fact it is extremely important. To discuss why modern science did not arise in the Arab world or in China, on the one hand we have to talk about what was lacking in Arab and Chinese civilization, and on the other hand we must also make clear what medieval Europe actually had. In this lecture we will mainly talk…
history of science scholarship education course
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2015年4月17日
Notes and Illustration Sources for “A Brief History of Scientific Culture”

Life & Notes2014.07.11
Notes and Illustration Sources for “A Brief History of Scientific Culture”
My first “monograph” has finally been published. This book is mainly a compilation of some articles already on the blog, with a bit of revision and stitching-together added to make a small book. Preparation for it began in September 2012, and by the end of that year the manuscript was basically finished. With Wu Laoshi’s help, it was published by Peking University Press as a public-literacy reader. Originally, I had hoped it would give me one more line on my record when I graduated and went job hunting for my doctorate, but after the slow publishing process, it finally came off the press at such an awkward time. By then…
science history of science Aristotle Bitcoin
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2014年7月11日
Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love

Life & Notes2009.03.19
Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love
I always say that my philosophy “starts from the classical,” specifically, more or less from Kant and those around him. But that is only an external explanation; as for what this “classical” actually contains, I have my own understanding. In my view, so-called “classical philosophy” represents a style and an attitude, one marked by an entire era. Roughly speaking, the history of Western philosophy can be divided into four eras: antiquity (ancient Greece), the Middle Ages, the classical period, and modernity.—Of course, my “classical” here is classical rather than ancient, the sense of “canonical.” A rougher division would be simply classical and modern; a finer one could add primordial times…
philosophy autobiography pursuit Greece
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2009年3月19日