分类： Excerpt

Excerpt

子供が見た世界の体育授業

最近在看《天声人语集萃》，以免把日语阅读能力和背过的单词语法都丢了。

「天声人语」是『朝日新聞』头版的固定栏目，已经有百年历史，据说文字水准很高。外研社出的《天声人语集萃》系列是对这些文章的选编，有注音、单词讲解、例句和全文翻译。感觉很适合用零碎时间翻看。

今天看到的这篇讲孩子们眼中的国外体育课，作者希望以此改善日本的传统、单一的体育教学。比如波斯湾的岛国巴林（Bahrain）体育课会教穿着衣服游泳，瑞士会教怎样长时间游泳，感觉这样的课程更加实用。

……

日本でも、もっと実用的なことを教えたらどうか、という感想が多い。バーレーンでの着衣のままの水泳練習。スイスでも着衣水泳のほか、長時間水泳や人命救助を習った。米国での救助訓練では、ズボンを浮袋に利用することも覚えた。米国には、女性の護身の勉強もある。

社会ダンスを学ばせるのは、ドイツ、カナダの中学だ。楽しかった。カナダから帰った女子生徒は、なぜダンスを教えるのだろうか、と考える。社会での付き合いの仕方に即している、そして自然な男女交際をおしえようとしたのだ。

様々な体験を『子供が見た世界の体育授業』という本にまとめた国際基督教大学高校の和田雅史教諭は，画一的、保守的な日本の体育授業に参考になる、と言っている。

1992年1月27日

Excerpt

War is illegal.

Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case. Might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. If one country felt it had been wronged by another, it could declare war, conquer some territory as compensation, and expect the annexation to be recognized by the rest of the world. The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. That cannot happen today: the world’s nations have committed themselves to not waging war except in self-defense or with the approval of the United Nations Security Council. States are immortal, borders are grandfathered in, and any country that indulges in a war of conquest can expect opprobrium, not acquiescence, from the rest.

The legal scholars Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that it’s the outlawry of war that deserves much of the credit for the Long Peace. The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, the conquest taboo has occasionally been enforced with a military response, such as when an international coalition reversed Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990–91. More often the prohibition has functioned as a norm—“War is something that civilized nations just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

Excerpt

natural food?

“Natural food.” Whenever I hear those words crooned, my inner crank cranks up. “Natural!” I would rail if I gave it voice. “No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!”

Stewart Brand. 2009. Whole Earth Discipline

 

Excerpt, Philosophy

《正义之心》与《当代启蒙》

最近读的这两本书刚好有一些微妙的思想碰撞（Pinker 的那本才刚开始读）。

Haidt 这位道德心理学家，在当年听耶鲁大学心理学导论公开课时就已经知道了，对他的研究也很感兴趣，但他这本 The Righteous Mind（《正义之心》）我一直拖到最近才看完。应该说最打动我的还是那些原来就已经知道的东西，比如 moral dumbfounding 相关的实验和解释，但 Haidt 对 WEIRD (Western, educated, and from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries) 世界之外的道德观的同情与认可还是没有说服我。本来按他自己所说，他只是在做描述性的工作，但有意无意之中，其实讲了很多「应该」。并且他似乎还认为「应该」是不能被理性、数学和逻辑讨论的。

这本书让我想到那句「存在即合理」，不是说黑格尔的原意，而是说很多人的一种观念：一件事既然长期、广泛地存在，那必然有它的道理，有为什么得以长存的原因，我们应该尝试去理解它，而不是盲目批判。然而大到等级社会、种族歧视、压迫、战争，小到男尊女卑、三从四德、守贞、闹婚，世界上有很多事，都长期、广泛地存在，背后也的确有原因，但这些原因只不过是改善中的障碍，而不是抵制批判的辩护词。读 Pinker 的 Enlightenment Now，这种感觉就更加强烈。

[I]n psychology our goal is descriptive. We want to discover how the moral mind actually works, not how it ought to work, and that can’t be done by reasoning, math, or logic.

Jonathan Haidt. 2012. The Righteous Mind

We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

[T]he economist Friedrich Hayek observed, “If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations” (inadvertently proving his point with the expression men’s minds). “What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction.” This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.

Steven Pinker. 2018. Enlightenment Now

Excerpt, Philosophy

1930 年代的中国绑匪

Derek Parfit 出生在 1942 年的成都，当时他父母都在中国做医生、教医学，不过 Derek 出生一年后，他们就离开了中国。所以这位英国哲学家与中国有很微妙的关系。

刚看到 Parfit 在 On What Matters Vol. 1 里讨论康德伦理学中的 merely as a means 问题时，写到他母亲在 1930 年代的中国的遭遇：

In a case that is less clear, when my mother travelled on a Chinese river in the 1930s, her boat was held up by bandits, whose moral principles permitted them to take, from ordinary people, only half their property. These bandits let my mother choose whether they would take her engagement ring or her wedding ring. If these people treated my mother as a means, they did not treat her merely as a means. Were they close to doing that? I am inclined to answer No. But this may be a borderline case, in which this question has no definite answer.

顺带一说，我认为中文里「20 世纪 30 年代」这种说法就像把 2018 年说成「21 世纪第 18 年」一样累赘而愚蠢，然而大陆的正式出版物中似乎还不允许「1930 年代」这种说法。

Excerpt, Philosophy

Derek Parfit 说康德

今天在看 Derek Parfit On What Matters 第一卷的 Preface。Parfit 说西季威克和康德是影响他最深的两位哲学家。然后说了几页西季威克之后开始讲自己读康德的感受，摘录几段大家感受一下：

Unlike our first reading of Sidgwick’s Methods, our first reading of Kant’s Groundwork is, in some ways, the best. There are some striking and inspiring claims, and we are not worried by what we can’t understand. But when we re-read the Groundwork, many of us become discouraged, and give up. We decide that Kant, though he may be a great philosopher, is not for us.

The first problem is Kant’s style. It is Kant who made really bad writing philosophically acceptable. We can no longer point to some atrocious sentence by someone else, and say ‘How can it be worth reading anyone who writes like that?’ The answer could always be ‘What about Kant?’

Kant did not have a single, coherent theory.

Kant makes many conflicting claims, and such claims cannot all be true.

As Kemp Smith points out, Kant often ‘flatly contradicts himself’ and ‘there is hardly a technical term which is not employed by him in a variety of different and conflicting senses. He is the least exact of the great thinkers.’ (To avoid provoking Hegelians, we should perhaps say ‘one of the least exact’.)

When I first re-read Kant, what I found most irritating was not Kant’s obscurities and inconsistencies, but a particular kind of overblown, false rhetoric.

…since I knew that Kant believed in a Categorical Imperative, I was surprised by Kant’s second sentence. I asked a Kantian, ‘Does this mean that, if I don’t give myself Kant’s Imperative as a law, I am not subject to it?’ ‘No,’ I was told, ‘you have to give yourself a law, and there’s only one law.’ This reply was maddening, like the propaganda of the so-called ‘People’s Democracies’ of the old Soviet bloc, in which voting was compulsory and there was only one candidate. And when I said ‘But I haven’t given myself Kant’s Imperative as a law’, I was told ‘Yes you have’. This reply was even worse. My irritation at such claims may have left some traces in this book.

当然，最后 Parfit 还是说 that irritation has gone.

 

Excerpt

What it means really to understand an equation?

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

It will take you some time to understand what should happen in different circumstances. You will have to solve the equations. Each time you solve the equations, you will learn something about the character of the solutions. To keep these solutions in mind, it will be useful also to study their meaning in terms of field lines and of other concepts. This is the way you will really “understand” the equations. That is the difference between mathematics and physics. Mathematicians, or people who have very mathematical minds, are often led astray when “studying” physics because they lose sight of the physics. They say: “Look, these differential equations—the Maxwell equations—are all there is to electrodynamics; it is admitted by the physicists that there is nothing which is not contained in the equations. The equations are complicated, but after all they are only mathematical equations and if I understand them mathematically inside out, I will understand the physics inside out.” Only it doesn’t work that way. Mathematicians who study physics with that point of view—and there have been many of them—usually make little contribution to physics and, in fact, little to mathematics. They fail because the actual physical situations in the real world are so complicated that it is necessary to have a much broader understanding of the equations.

What it means really to understand an equation—that is, in more than a strictly mathematical sense—was described by Dirac. He said: “I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.” So if we have a way of knowing what should happen in given circumstances without actually solving the equations, then we “understand” the equations, as applied to these circumstances. A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist.

http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_02.html

Excerpt

家族・自立

いつかは親のかわりに扶養してくれる男性、身の回りを世話してくれる女性と結婚しなければならず、とうてい自立しているとは言えない。

——菅原真理子『新・家族の時代』(1987)

N1 考试选用过的这篇阅读短文里，作者先是说日本年轻人不像美国年轻人那么自立，总是在经济和生活上依靠上一代，过着奢侈的生活。最后又说了这句话——（这些年轻人就算是今后结婚成家），女性总是要嫁给一个代替父母养活自己的男性，男性总是要和一个照顾自己生活起居的女性结婚，说到底仍然谈不上自立。

–

前两天一直觉得手机右上角的图标少了点什么怪怪的，但又想不起到底是什么，直到刚刚才知道，周六监考之前把所有闹钟都关掉了……

Excerpt

Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in.

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in. Now, Newton used the second and third of Kepler’s laws to deduce his law of gravitation. What did he predict? First, his analysis of the moon’s motion was a prediction because it connected the falling of objects on the earth’s surface with that of the moon. Second, the question is, is the orbit an ellipse? We shall see in a later chapter how it is possible to calculate the motion exactly, and indeed one can prove that it should be an ellipse, so no extra fact is needed to explain Kepler’s first law. Thus Newton made his first powerful prediction.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_07.html

Excerpt

The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew …

《费曼物理学讲义》书摘

How does the chemist find what the arrangement is? He mixes bottles full of stuff together, and if it turns red, it tells him that it consists of one hydrogen and two carbons tied on here; if it turns blue, on the other hand, that is not the way it is at all. This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done—organic chemistry. To discover the arrangement of the atoms in these enormously complicated arrays the chemist looks at what happens when he mixes two different substances together. The physicist could never quite believe that the chemist knew what he was talking about when he described the arrangement of the atoms. For about twenty years it has been possible, in some cases, to look at such molecules (not quite as complicated as this one, but some which contain parts of it) by a physical method, and it has been possible to locate every atom, not by looking at colors, but by measuring where they are. And lo and behold!, the chemists are almost always correct.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html