Suixuan

标签：science and religion

  • A Discussion of Aliens as a Modern Superstition

    History of Science & Scholarship

    A Discussion of Aliens as a Modern Superstition

    Recently, some netizens have been leaving comments on the blog discussing the issue of aliens (there were some earlier discussions under Jiang Xiaoyuan’s lecture commentary). Since his comment was placed under the introduction page Who Is Gu Bo?, it felt a bit out of place (in general, casual comments and questions may as well be posted under the message board), so I decided to open a new post and transplant the comments over directly~   Although I have already discussed this here and there in bits and pieces, I have always wanted to write a dedicated essay on the issue of aliens; it could be an essay on “science and…

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  • The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution

    History of Science & Scholarship

    The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution

    The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution occurred and unfolded almost simultaneously—people discovered this obvious fact long ago and tried to guess at the inner connection between the two. Beginning with Francis Bacon, many tended to treat praise of science as part of an argument for the superiority of Protestantism. This raises a question: although there is clearly some connection between the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, how exactly did that connection arise? And to what extent was it related to the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism? This essay will make some very preliminary inquiries into this question. The most conservative conclusion is this: Protestantism was more conducive to scientific…

    scienceScientific RevolutionChristianityCopernicus
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  • Why I Chose Philosophy of Science

    Life & Notes

    Why I Chose Philosophy of Science

    This was also a topic discussed with ZW last night.  Q: Why is philosophy of science, unlike philosophy of history, political philosophy, and so on, able to become an independent second-level discipline? A: The philosophy of science became an independent second-level discipline for both historical and contemporary reasons. The historical reason is that philosophy of science was originally what was called “dialectics of nature”; in that era, it was an attempt to provide methodological “guidance” for science, and this is an institutional arrangement left over from history. The contemporary reason is this: ours is precisely the age of so-called “science and technology”; almost all the problems this age faces—questions of…

    history of sciencephilosophy of scienceautobiographypluralism
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