标签：practice

The Left and Right, Chinese Style

Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom2012.05.15
The Left and Right, Chinese Style
Recently I’ve been mentioning the left and the right quite often, but always rather cautiously, always wanting to add a couple of lines: I don’t like taking sides, I only use labels because I have no choice, and so on. To keep on like that is not really a solution, so I might as well write an article and talk through my understanding of the so-called left and right. My first acquaintance with the concepts of left and right probably came in middle school political class, where the teacher explained that the left was progressive and reformist, while the right was backward and conservative. We children, brainwashed by China’s rote-learning…
China freedom autobiography tradition
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2012年5月15日
Western Learning as Substance, Chinese Learning as Application

Culture & Public Commentary2012.03.28
Western Learning as Substance, Chinese Learning as Application
Previously I mentioned that I wanted to write about “why study the West,” and that made me think of the phrase “Western essence, Chinese utility” (西体中用). A quick search online showed that Mr. Li Zehou had already brought it up. He explained “food, clothing, housing, and transportation” as the “essence,” and what he meant by Western essence, Chinese utility was “the ‘Western essence’ of modernization put to use on Chinese soil.” Some of Mr. Li Zehou’s ideas are excellent, but my line of thought is different from his. Mr. Huang Yinong also seems to have mentioned “Western essence, Chinese utility,” but in a more general way. What I mean by…
culture China scholarship education
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2012年3月28日
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website

AI & the Future of Technology2012.01.05
From Technical Code to Virtue Ethics: Table or Div? — Starting from the Ministry of Railways Ticketing Website
The Ministry of Railways has finally rolled out an online ticketing system, and that alone is worth encouraging. Of course, it is debatable whether moving the advance-sale period for online tickets up by two days is a good idea; for migrant workers and other vulnerable groups who lack access to the internet, this is not very fair. I have already booked train tickets on this website three times (the first two times were round trips to the Winter Solstice conference), and each time I ran into one problem or another. Even when the Winter Solstice conference was still very much in the off-season for train tickets, I still encountered network…
China technology media commentary
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2012年1月5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
The Practice-of-Medicine Model as the Modern Significance of Traditional Chinese Medicine — Reflections on Zhang Daqing’s Lecture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.10
The Practice-of-Medicine Model as the Modern Significance of Traditional Chinese Medicine — Reflections on Zhang Daqing’s Lecture
Today Teacher Zhang Daqing talked about the modernization process of Chinese medicine; yesterday’s class on “What Is Science?” happened to also be taught by Teacher Zhang, on the transformation of medical paradigms past and present; and tonight’s discussion class was about the modernizing problem of Chinese medicine. Taken together, let me talk a bit about my thoughts. What Teacher Zhang referred to as the modernization process of Chinese medicine was not the modernization of Chinese medicine itself, but rather the process by which Western modern medicine was introduced. The concept of “modernizing Chinese medicine” is different from “Westernizing” or “scientizing” it. Modernization first of all means a kind of boundary-drawing:…
philosophy science modernity traditional Chinese medicine
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2010年12月10日
Communication and Chess

History of Science & Scholarship2009.09.12
Communication and Chess
At times, people put to me a question in different ways: in communication, how do I view or handle the status relation between the two sides of a dialogue? For instance, in speaking with teachers and elders, must one inevitably look up to them, or, correspondingly, when speaking with juniors, does one unconsciously have to look down from a position of superiority? This is especially so lately with some younger students who communicate with me: they cannot help but face such a contradiction. They expect some kind of equal dialogue and do not wish always to be in a weak position, yet to try to counter my own forcefulness in…
scholarship discussion equality experts
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2009年9月12日
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report

History of Science & Scholarship2009.04.28
Latour: Drawing Things Together Class Report
Postscript: The report’s effect should not count as bad, and it also received Teacher Ren’s highest praise. Still, I feel that many things were not explained clearly, because I myself was only able to read this article through after reading Science in Action. However, since the issues discussed in this article are not the same as those in Science in Action in terms of emphasis, when explaining this article it was very hard to weave in material from Science in Action and similar books. I tried to introduce some of it, but the result may not have been very good: on the one hand, a few words do not make…
book reading science notes history of science
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2009年4月28日
Marx’s Theory of the Human from the Perspective of Philosophy of Technology (Lecture Notes for a Class Report in Marxist Philosophy)

AI & the Future of Technology2008.10.16
Marx’s Theory of the Human from the Perspective of Philosophy of Technology (Lecture Notes for a Class Report in Marxist Philosophy)
Since so many of the selected students are all speaking around Marx’s humanism, I think that as for the overall line of Marx’s anthropology, as well as the sorting out of some basic concepts such as alienation, everyone will probably do better than I can. In particular, the students of Marxist philosophy and Western philosophy should be well practiced in this. And whether in terms of overall grasp or close reading of specific texts, I am an outsider; although I do have some of my own thoughts and takeaways, if other students can speak better here, then I need not make a fool of myself. I am not being modest….
technology freedom human nature Marx
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2008年10月16日
A One-Month Running Account of Stock Trading

Life & Notes2007.08.24
A One-Month Running Account of Stock Trading
Before I knew it, I had been dabbling in stocks for more than a month, and a summer vacation that ought to have been the busiest of all is now clearly on the verge of being wasted away in vain (of course, not because of stock trading). And as my life rhythm returns to normal, and my stock-trading ideas grow increasingly mature, I will no longer spend more time researching stocks. So I’ll just casually jot down here my reflections from this past month of stock trading: Stock trading counts as yet another “social practice” I’ve done this summer. Originally, the point of my parents’ letting me trade stocks was…
everyday life economy capitalism practice
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2007年8月24日
Supplementary Questions from the Marx Lecture in the Philosophy of Technology Class

AI & the Future of Technology2007.03.16
Supplementary Questions from the Marx Lecture in the Philosophy of Technology Class
Supplement to the classroom questions: My confusion arose because I had first listened to Professor Wu’s lecture at Tsinghua and read the transcript of Professor Wu’s remarks on “Technology as the difference of being,” and only then looked at Marx, where everything felt extremely, extremely familiar—so familiar that it seemed Marx and Professor Wu were basically saying the same thing! First let me talk about my reading of some of Marx’s views on “human essence” in the 1844 manuscripts: Marx says: “The externalization of labor appears … first, that labor is external to the worker, that it does not belong to his essence; that therefore he does not affirm…
technology freedom Wu Guosheng Marx
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2007年3月16日