标签：nature

Art: The Margin of Technology

AI & the Future of Technology2013.10.19
Art: The Margin of Technology
**Art: The Margin of Technology** **Explanation:** This was a philosophy of technology talk I was invited to give to the young artists at the West Five Arts Center. The original title was “Toys and Art: The Margin of Technology,” but in the actual talk I still mainly talked about technology and art; toys were only mentioned in passing. So now I’ve changed the title a bit. What I call “margin” could also be called “defect.” To speak of art as technology’s defect sounds somewhat offensive, so “margin” sounds more positive. A defect always means something that can be supplemented; hitting a wall always means there is room to turn back….
philosophy technology Heidegger Aristotle
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2013年10月19日
A Natural History of Media—McLuhan’s Method

History of Science & Scholarship2013.08.10
A Natural History of Media—McLuhan’s Method
1. Introduction: Literary Style or Research Method? Marshall McLuhan (1911–1982) was the most influential and at the same time the most controversial media thinker of the twentieth century. As a pioneer or founding figure of the media ecology school, his reputation rose and fell dramatically: he was once elevated to the altar, and then quickly neglected and forgotten. With the dawn of the network age, he came once again to be widely known in academic circles and indeed throughout the cultural world as a “prophet-sage,” yet some still regard him as a mountebank who merely uses gibberish to hoodwink the public. These two images are not really contradictory. So-called prophets…
media Heidegger paper McLuhan
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2013年8月10日
Photography and Science

History of Science & Scholarship2013.03.23
Photography and Science
This is a simple metaphor that I have used before, though I never wrote it up as a special topic. Today, when I was eating with Teacher Zhang and the others, I brought it up again, and I think this metaphor is still fairly illuminating, so I’ll talk about it here in some detail. The metaphor is mainly meant to express our attitude toward science and how to understand the relation between science and the “world”: science is like photography, offering an image of the world. We point at a photograph and identify it, saying, “This is Zhang San.” Is this Zhang San? Yes, this is indeed Zhang San, not…
technology science media phenomenology
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2013年3月23日
The Two Falls of the Concept of “Nature” and Nature as “Anti-Normative” in Its Original Sense

History of Science & Scholarship2012.12.21
The Two Falls of the Concept of “Nature” and Nature as “Anti-Normative” in Its Original Sense
Today Professor Wu gave a talk, “The Discovery of Nature,” at the Friday philosophy forum of the Institute of Foreign Philosophy. Although the topic was something Professor Wu has always thought about, and I am already fairly familiar with it, it is quite rare to hear him speak at the Institute of Foreign Philosophy; especially with Liu Zhe, Wu Zengding, and Wu Fei all taking part in the questions, it was extremely interesting to listen to. Professor Wu mentioned that “the discovery of nature” actually contains two “falls” of the concept of nature: first, nature as “nature, origin”; second, the emergence of “the natural world” as a special domain of…
philosophy technology science media
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2012年12月21日
A Supplement to “Media History as Transcendental Philosophy”: The Relation Between Ontology and Epistemology; Nature Is Naturally the Boundary of Technology

AI & the Future of Technology2012.11.20
A Supplement to “Media History as Transcendental Philosophy”: The Relation Between Ontology and Epistemology; Nature Is Naturally the Boundary of Technology
Today’s discussion seminar covered that earlier article, and the result seemed pretty good. Of course, Wu’s comments and those of the students pointed out that while my article reads smoothly overall, a close look reveals many gaps in the logic, especially the final section, which seems overly hurried. This is certainly something that can be improved in part—particularly, the last section ought to have been written in more detail. At the time I probably felt that I was almost done, breathed a sigh of relief, and then slackened off, lacking patience in handling the most crucial part of this section. But in a certain sense logical gaps are impossible to…
philosophy technology media Aristotle
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2012年11月20日
Christian Creationism and the Rise of Modern Science

History of Science & Scholarship2012.06.14
Christian Creationism and the Rise of Modern Science
Abstract: The Christian doctrine of creation is the metaphysical foundation of modern science, and an important thread for sorting out the historical relationship between science and religion. Foster’s essay “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science” represents a typical line of thought: it emphasizes the connection between God’s free will and the empirical tendency of modern science, though its argumentative details are open to question. The key is to clarify the general points of the Christian doctrine of creation and the ways these points correspond to the characteristic features of modern science. The doctrine of creation, at the very least, includes four aspects: 1. There…
science philosophy of science history Scientific Revolution
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2012年6月14日
The Flush Toilet: City, Civilization, Modernity

AI & the Future of Technology2012.05.26
The Flush Toilet: City, Civilization, Modernity
Yesterday, Professor Jiang Jinsong came to Chengze Garden to give a talk titled “Observations and Reflections on the Flush Toilet,” and Professor Tian Song offered comments. Professor Jiang did not say very much, and Professor Tian’s comments were also rather hurried, but the discussion was still very lively. Indeed, the flush toilet can be counted as one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization. It is not only a device that makes “going to the bathroom” more convenient, but also a hub that helped assemble the whole modern urban way of life and the entire urban system. Professor Wu commented that Professor Jiang’s presentation should be divided into the issue…
technology value modernity human nature
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2012年5月26日
Nature as Raw Meat or Bacon

History of Science & Scholarship2012.05.24
Nature as Raw Meat or Bacon
Today in discussion class, Liu Ping’s paper, which he will be presenting next week, came up. He wants to write on “wilderness and flesh,” attempting an environmental-philosophical reading of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. It sounds very interesting. This important concept in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy is usually translated as “flesh,” but Liu Ping said this translation is not good, because it misses a great deal of meaning. But don’t be like Liu Zhe: since we are using Chinese to do phenomenological thinking, rather than working as mere scholars of texts—and foreign scholars of texts at that—to do philological research, of course we should still ultimately translate these concepts. Even if some meaning…
science phenomenology environment nature
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2012年5月24日
Recommended Chinese-Language Bibliography on Environmental Philosophy

History of Science & Scholarship2012.04.20
Recommended Chinese-Language Bibliography on Environmental Philosophy
In discussion class, Liu Ping asked me to recommend books related to environmental ethics or eco-socialist thought, so I整理了一下 and am posting it here. In 2005, when I was a freshman, a number of courses in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy happened to be offered at the same time. I took three or five of them in one go, and then put effort into the papers as a whole too (when I submitted them I explained the situation of “multiple submissions”). The end result was that I skimmed through dozens of books on environmental philosophy then available on the market, and along with other reference works, more than a hundred…
China book reading book review environment
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2012年4月20日
The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came Into Being

History of Science & Scholarship2012.04.08
The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came Into Being
[荷]H·弗洛里斯·科恩：《The Re-Creation of the World: How Modern Science Came into Being》，translated by Zhang Butian, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2012 This is a slim booklet written for ordinary readers, and may be regarded as a popularized version of the author’s other weighty scholarly work, *How Modern Science Was Born: Four Civilizations, One Breakthrough in the Seventeenth Century*. The Needham Question has long been a topic of particular concern to Chinese historians of science and even to the general public. The Hong Kong scholar Chen Fangzheng recently published *Inheritance and Rebellion: Why Did Modern Science Appear in the West?* Teacher Zhou Cheng translated a book also called *Why Did Modern…
China book reading history of science notes
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2012年4月8日