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标签：Whig history

A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.20
A Paragon of the History of Scientific Thought — Dijksterhuis’s The Mechanization of the World Picture
Textbook-style history of science takes the achievements of modern science as its standard, and describes the course of science as a great chronology in which people one by one attained those achievements. But history of science in this sense is in a certain way not history at all; what it confronts is not the process by which science succeeded one another, but is always simply the task of praising modern science. Such history of science assigns to each component of modern science a discoverer and a date of discovery, and thus introduces modern science according to the order of discovery rather than the logical order. Yet this kind of narrative…
book reading history of science history book review
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2010年12月20日
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)

History of Science & Scholarship2010.12.19
Tracing the Origins of the “Mechanical View of Nature”—The Most Classic Whiggish Internal History of Science (A Review of *The Mechanization of the World Picture*)
I suddenly realized that I still hadn’t posted this article…… This piece was originally supposed to appear in Dushu Bao, but by some strange twist of fate it somehow ended up being published in Zhongguo Tushu Shangbao, and I don’t know exactly how much was cut from it. To this day I still haven’t seen the newspaper or the fee…… I’m told that in the next couple of days I’ll be rewriting it and submitting a new version to senior brother Bu Tian…… If I’m going to revise it, I might as well revise it more thoroughly—why not try a different line of thought and rewrite it from scratch?…… It’s…
book reading history of science book review Whig history
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2010年12月19日
Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Reflections on Liu Huajie’s Lecture

History of Science & Scholarship2010.11.12
Natural History as a Historiographical Program—Reflections on Liu Huajie’s Lecture
Just after finishing a paper arguing that “natural history” should be translated as 自然史, today happened to be the day when Professor Liu came to speak on natural history and its methods of historiography, so I might as well continue and write a couple more thoughts. Like historiographical programs such as Whig history, intellectual history, and social history, “natural history,” as a program of historiography, is a pun. On the one hand, “scientific natural history” can be read as some kind of “scientific chronicle” or “scientific record.” The feature of natural history lies in its emphasis on classificatory description, but not on temporal narration, especially not on constructing causal chains…
science Liu Huajie historiography Whig history
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2010年11月12日
How I Came to Approach Philosophy of Science (A Whig History)

Life & Notes2008.09.27
How I Came to Approach Philosophy of Science (A Whig History)
I didn’t write it well… not recommended reading.. Life is full of possibilities. In the course of my growing up, had it not been for those chance encounters and coincidences, I’m afraid I would not have set out on the road I’m on now—perhaps I would have gone into economics, or become a scientist; most likely, perhaps, I would have become some kind of amateur science nerd or armchair philosopher. But in the end I still ended up here: the philosophy of technology at Peking University. It was accidental, and yet somehow it also feels as though it came naturally, the most natural outcome of all. Looking back over my…
autobiography Peking University mathematics modernity
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2008年9月27日
[Repost] What Is Whig History? (“Whig History” and “Contemporary History,” Whig History of Mathematics and Whig History of Philosophy, and So On)

Culture & Public Commentary2008.01.20
[Repost] What Is Whig History? (“Whig History” and “Contemporary History,” Whig History of Mathematics and Whig History of Philosophy, and So On)
http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=297 Gu Che What Is “Whig History”? This forum is updated the slowest of all, so let me ask a “layman’s question”~ In a previous post (see: http://hps.phil.pku.edu.cn/bbs/read.php?tid=284), Brother Yuzhile said that the discussion had “changed in nature,” shifting from professional questions to layman’s questions. Since he put it that way, I was no longer comfortable pursuing the matter in that post. But the very basic layman’s question involved there struck me as something really worth pressing further! Brother Yu said: “History is necessarily Whig history. Don’t say that you know the original history, or a philosopher’s original thought, unless you are God.” Good heavens! What does that mean? I’ve…
philosophy history mathematics Whig history
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2008年1月20日
A Casual Repost from Teacher Liu’s Blog on Agriculture, Industrial Civilization, and “Progress”

History of Science & Scholarship2006.09.08
A Casual Repost from Teacher Liu’s Blog on Agriculture, Industrial Civilization, and “Progress”
http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/485ea8790100051y Failed Planting 2006-09-10 17:40:00 This year I had two failed planting attempts, one with corn and one with chayote. The seeds of both plants came from Yunnan. The corn grew well at first, but it was too luxuriant, and the plants grew too tall—some even reached 3.4 meters! There were also some stalks without ears, and some were even covered with black mold. The reason may have been inappropriate seed selection. The seeds came from Simao, Yunnan. There, they were not tall either, and not overly luxuriant, but once brought north they changed. My father says that usually seeds from the south, when planted in the north, become too…
culture science Liu Huajie progress
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2006年9月8日