标签：notes

How to Write Good Reading Notes Assignments

History of Science & Scholarship2020.05.03
How to Write Good Reading Notes Assignments
My undergraduate general-education courses (History of Technology, Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, and so on) all like to assign “reading notes” as homework, which can substitute for a term paper (many undergraduates simply do not know how to write papers at all; if you force them to do so, plagiarism becomes all too likely, so it is better to be a bit more open-ended). But if reading notes are assigned as the major project, students should of course take them seriously; a slapdash job will naturally not earn a high grade. If you send me your reading notes in advance, you can get some feedback. But I have found that,…
philosophy book reading scholarship notes
阅读全文

2020年5月3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
阅读全文

2014年12月10日
The History of Work

AI & the Future of Technology2013.01.16
The History of Work
Richard Donkin: The History of Work, translated by Xie Zhongwei, Electronic Industry Press, 2011. Generally speaking, a title like “The History of XX” is always interesting, especially when that “XX” looks all the more dull and ordinary; its history is often all the more interesting. For history tells us that anything we have long taken for granted and found unremarkable has its own origins and development; by tracing history we can let our imagination unfold: is it necessary? Is it inevitable? In what other forms might it still take place? Recently, I happened upon this The History of Work, and felt it was quite good. Along with Technical Elements, Electronic…
technology book reading notes history of technology
阅读全文

2013年1月16日
Recommended Introductory Reading on Phenomenology: “Studies in Lived Experience”

Philosophy & Thought2012.05.27
Recommended Introductory Reading on Phenomenology: “Studies in Lived Experience”
[+] Max van Manen: “Lived Experience Research: Pedagogy in the Perspective of the Human Sciences,” trans. Song Guangwen et al., ed. Li Shuying, Educational Science Press, 2003 Lately I have been paying attention to the phenomenology of education, and I came across this book. But rather than a work on pedagogy, this book is really more like an introduction to (applied) phenomenology; the whole book is trying to describe a human-scientific mode of inquiry—phenomenology. The author, Van Manen, is a Canadian scholar and one of the founders of “phenomenological pedagogy.” He edits the journal *Phenomenology + Pedagogy*. But he is originally from the Netherlands, and his native language is Dutch;…
book reading notes phenomenology education
阅读全文

2012年5月27日
On Choosing an English Translation of “The Critique of Pure Reason”

Philosophy & Thought2012.05.20
On Choosing an English Translation of “The Critique of Pure Reason”
On the Choice of Translations of the Critique of Pure Reason (with two reports reposted at the same time) As for the version of the Critique of Pure Reason that the spontaneous reading group from Wu Men is using, I personally recommend the Li Qiuling translation. Last year, a revised annotated edition came out, and it should be the best among the Chinese translations. Of course, another option is the Deng Xiaomang translation, and there seem to be many arguments about which is better, the Li translation or the Deng translation. Both versions proclaim fidelity to the original text, but Li’s fidelity lies mainly in diction, whereas Deng’s lies mainly…
book reading notes Kant translation
阅读全文

2012年5月20日
Satisfaction and Choice—Reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

AI & the Future of Technology2012.04.24
Satisfaction and Choice—Reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants
I recently read this book: Kevin Kelly: 《What Technology Wants》, and what especially caught my attention throughout the book was the discussion of the Amish. The original title plainly says Technology, yet the Chinese translation from CITIC Press has actually turned most of the instances of Technology into “科技” (“science and technology”)—utterly baffling. As a product of this “brand” called CITIC Press, notes, indexes, and so on are of course uniformly absent; the fact that an “Acknowledgments” section was preserved is already extraordinarily rare. In itself, this book, though not especially profound academically, is still a very good popular introduction to philosophy of technology, somewhere between the academic and the…
technology book reading freedom media
阅读全文

2012年4月24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
阅读全文

2012年4月8日
Notes on “Being and Time” II: “Being and Media”?

Philosophy & Thought2012.03.01
Notes on “Being and Time” II: “Being and Media”?
The portion I read today is, in my view, not especially important; Heidegger lays out the framework of “the book” (including the unfinished second part). To me, this framework is open to question. What I admire most is the first half of *Being and Time*; but once “temporality” is unveiled and the whole thing is repeated on the basis of temporality, I can no longer keep up with Heidegger’s train of thought. Still, broadly speaking, my line of thought remains corresponding to Heidegger’s—only, starting from “time,” perhaps more revisions are needed. Last week I said that what Heidegger calls “that which is asked about” (问之所及), “that which is questioned” (问之所问),…
philosophy technology book reading media
阅读全文

2012年3月1日
Notes on Being and Time, Part I: The Questioning Path That Illuminates the Light

Philosophy & Thought2012.02.24
Notes on Being and Time, Part I: The Questioning Path That Illuminates the Light
Last year, when our reading group read *Being and Time*, I had already thought of writing reading notes as we went along. But at the time I talked quite a lot while reading, so I more or less used up my urge to express myself on the spot; when I got home, I was too lazy to write it all out again, and in the end I never managed to do it. This semester, as we read *Being and Time* again in the Wumen discussion seminar, maybe I can take the opportunity to make up those notes. The introductory part of *Being and Time* is very important, but also not…
book reading media notes Heidegger
阅读全文

2012年2月24日
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 technology book reading media
阅读全文

2011年12月13日