Suixuan

标签：Scientific Revolution

Travel Notes from the Shenyang–Benxi Conference (Shenyang Section)

History of Science & Scholarship2015.10.08
Travel Notes from the Shenyang–Benxi Conference (Shenyang Section)
The annual conference on phenomenology and philosophy of technology has once again come to a successful close. This year it was hosted by Northeastern University and held in Shenyang and Benxi from September 24 to 28. In my travel notes from the Lushan conference in 2013, I wrote: Since going to Nanning in 2009 to attend the Third Conference on Phenomenology and Philosophy of Technology, I have now participated in five consecutive conferences. Apart from Nanning, where I only wrote a little “miscellaneous notes,” I wrote full-on conference takedowns for Hailar, Yangma Island, and Guangzhou. It has already become a case of riding a tiger and finding it hard to…
technology media phenomenology Scientific Revolution
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2015年10月8日
Lectures on the General History of Science 15: A Special Topic in the History of Mathematics (The Mathematical Revolution)

History of Science & Technology2015.06.12
Lectures on the General History of Science 15: A Special Topic in the History of Mathematics (The Mathematical Revolution)
Today is the penultimate class, so let me first talk a little about the course assignments. For this course, the requirements are a midterm reading report (optional) + a final paper. I have currently received four midterm reading reports, and I should already have replied to all of them by email. If you sent one but did not receive my reply, please send it again, or try another email address. Under normal circumstances, I should send a confirmation reply within two or three days, and I may also discuss some specific issues in the assignment with you by email. The point of assigning the reading report is to encourage everyone…
history of science course Scientific Revolution mathematics
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2015年6月12日
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 14: Science and the Industrial Revolution [Starting Next Week, We’ll Move to a Different Classroom]

History of Science & Technology2015.06.05
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 14: Science and the Industrial Revolution [Starting Next Week, We’ll Move to a Different Classroom]
First, a quick notice: we still have two classes after this. The classroom will be changed for these two sessions; it seems that the entire Jiao Eight building has been requisitioned by the school. Next week and the week after next, we will move to Jiao Nine201for class. Last time we mentioned that in the eighteenth century, the development of theoretical science, experimental science, and industrial technology was still relatively independent; theoretical science did not directly drive the Industrial Revolution, and even theory and experiment were out of sync. Last time, one student raised an objection and showed me a clip from *The Rise of Great Powers* and…
history of science course Scientific Revolution Industrial Revolution
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2015年6月5日
Lectures on the General History of Science 11: Alchemy and the Scientific Revolution [Next Week’s Class Discussion]

History of Science & Technology2015.05.14
Lectures on the General History of Science 11: Alchemy and the Scientific Revolution [Next Week’s Class Discussion]
Last class, we finished the mechanical revolution all the way up to Newton. The problems in physics provoked by Copernicus’s astronomical revolution were ultimately solved by Newtonian mechanics, but Newtonian mechanics itself implied a certain conceptual transformation amounting to sleight of hand: the distinction between nature and artifice, the distinction between inwardness and outwardness, and the boundary between physics and mechanics were all finally broken through, and the introduction of the concept of “force” ultimately substituted itself for people’s search for “cause.” We said that Newtonian mechanics is accidental in name; of course we could equally have had something like Empedology or Zhang San Dology, and F=ma could be replaced…
history of science course Scientific Revolution nature
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2015年5月14日
Lectures on the General History of Science 10: The Mechanics Revolution [Class Discussion the Week After Next]

History of Science & Technology2015.05.07
Lectures on the General History of Science 10: The Mechanics Revolution [Class Discussion the Week After Next]
Today the Department of Astronomy has an important lecture, and the astronomy students all took leave together, so that attendance in class fell to a new low; in the second period, only 3 people were left…… Although I do not require attendance every time, such a dismal turnout is still rather depressing. It seems I need to think of some way around it. There was a similar phenomenon when I used to take Professor Wu’s class: once the semester had entered its latter half and reached the stage of the Scientific Revolution, attendance actually dropped by quite a lot. Perhaps after half a semester of classes everyone was simply exhausted,…
course Aristotle Scientific Revolution Copernicus
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2015年5月7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 6: Special Topics in the History of Chinese Science

History of Science & Technology2015.04.09
Lecture Notes on the General History of Science 6: Special Topics in the History of Chinese Science
This time we are treating the history of Chinese science as a special topic. This subject does not lie within the lineage of Western science, so it is relatively difficult to discuss: there is a great deal of material on the history of Chinese science, but it is itself very scattered, and it is hard to summarize or to筛选 out what counts as core content. So this class may also be relatively free-ranging; what I mainly select are some points that can be set in contrast with the formation of Western science. We know that ancient China achieved a great many scientific accomplishments. Our primary and secondary education, as well…
China history of science course Scientific Revolution
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2015年4月9日
Copernicus and Nakamoto — A Paradigm Shift in the Technological Revolution

Web3 & Bitcoin2015.01.28
Copernicus and Nakamoto — A Paradigm Shift in the Technological Revolution
This article was submitted last year to Babit, and may have been included in a new book published by Babit. But so far I still haven’t seen it published. Recently, while writing an article, I happened to come across some related content, and remembered that this piece still hadn’t been made public, so I might as well publish it first~ In the earlier Southern Metropolis Daily Bitcoin interview questionnaire, when I reposted it on Babit and Bitren, I added the title “Bitcoin as a Paradigm Revolution.” After all, having a title makes it seem as though it will spread better. But in fact, as a paradigm revolution, it was only…
media philosophy of science Web3 Aristotle
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2015年1月28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
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2014年12月10日