Under the epidemic situation, travel presses the "pause button", but reading at home and meditating will not stop.
Under the guidance of the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, the Shanghai Municipal Federation of Social Societies, Century Publishing Group and Wen Wei Po Specially planned the theme activity of "The Power of Reading , Always Together", which was launched on April 1, inviting Shanghai scholars and writers to make "1 + N" recommendations for readers - you can recommend an excellent book, you can also recommend a song, a movie, or even a good article, share reading and viewing experience, and highlight the strength of reading, the confidence and hope of spring travel with one heart. The event will run until World Book Day on 23 April.
Today, Professor Yu Zhenhua of the Department of Philosophy of East China Normal University, Fan Guorui, Dean of the Institute of Educational Governance of the Faculty of Education, Wen Jun, Dean of the School of Social Development, and Liu Liangjian, Head of the Department of Philosophy, respectively recommended "The Quest for Certainty", "A Brief History of the Future of Education: Learning in the Subversive Era", "The Age of Mobility: Living in an Age full of Uncertainty", "Ethics of Our Times", writer Lu Nei recommended the novel "Science Fiction Spirit" and the rock album "The Moon of Huagai".
Yu Zhenhua's recommended words:
In the spring of 1929, Dewey was invited to give a Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh, on the basis of which he wrote The Quest for Certainty, which was published in the same year.
When I opened the book, I saw: "Man lives in a dangerous world and has to seek safety." "In today's world of COVID-19 epidemics, frequent extreme weather and turbulent international situation, reading this sentence is inevitable to have mixed feelings. Dewey's words are in line with the current human condition.
The motivation to seek security developed in classical philosophy the ideological theme of "the search for certainty". People seek certainty and avoid uncertainty because the former gives people safety and the latter poses danger. Classical philosophy distinguishes between the real world and the phenomenal world, the former being eternal and unchanging, and the latter always in the midst of migration. The world of invariance is uncertain, and only the ultimate reality, which is eternal and unchanging, is absolutely certain.
Dewey disagreed with the static certainty of classical philosophy, and he elaborated a dynamic concept of determinateness on the basis of experimental inquiry. "Inquiry is the transformation of uncertain situations into definite, unified situations in a guided or controlled manner." Specifically, inquiry is the transformation of ambiguous, dubious, contradictory, and dissonant situations into clear, methodical, stable, and harmonious situations. An inquiry transforms an uncertain situation into a definite one, and its completion can only be relative, because new uncertain situations will arise and new inquiries will begin.
The book "The Quest for Certainty" is subtitled "A Study of the Relationship Between Knowledge and Action." Human action is closely related to knowledge and value, and Dewey based on experimental inquiry answered the questions of "how knowledge is possible" and "how is value possible". He questioned the contemplative tradition since ancient Greece, and his work was an example of a practical turn in philosophy. In 1998, Habermas wrote a book review for the German edition of The Quest for Certainty, which he spoke highly of as a work on a par with Wittgenstein's Theory of Logical Philosophy and Heidegger's Existence and Time.
Fan Guorui's recommendation:
Smart technology is changing our lives with unprecedented impact, accelerating the social changes facing humanity. Deterministic knowledge learning and standardized education based on the intellectual needs of the industrial age make it increasingly difficult for everyone, especially minors, to adapt to this rapidly changing "discontinuous" world (Yuval Harari, A Brief History today). Ian Jux and Ryan L. Schaff co-authored "A Brief History of the Future of Education: Learning in the Disruptive Era", through the prediction of the development of human society in the next few decades, analyzes the challenges facing education today, analyzes the changes brought by disruptive innovation to economic and social development, and the talent demand of the new global economy, and summarizes the learning methods and characteristics of the "digital generation" learners who have grown up in the context of the Internet.
Looking to the future, the authors predict for readers the main characteristics of education and learning styles in 2038. In the author's view, modern learners need to have eight core abilities such as introspection ability, interpersonal skills, problem solving ability, collaboration ability, information analysis ability, information communication ability, creative ability, and global awareness, and educators need to accept the reality of social change, change their concepts, and try new methods with children in the educational process to help them shape these core abilities and thinking habits necessary to adapt to the future society.
The enlightenment of this book for education leaders and organizers and teachers is that in the face of future social changes and their new requirements for human development, we should take the initiative to change our own role (the author describes eleven new roles of educators), immediately initiate and continuously promote changes that adapt to future learning, stimulate and guide learning interest, and release the potential and freedom of future learners to create and learn; for each of us as learners, the inspiration of this book is that Face up to the comprehensive and profound impact of social changes characterized by intelligent skills on human survival and development, comprehensively examine the unconscious and self-contained thinking mode, change their own thinking mode and learning style, and actively explore and acquire basic tools and skills such as programming, communication skills and multimedia skills that are really needed in future social life.
Of course, the author's elaboration mainly revolves around the impact of intelligent technology on learners to learn and master the knowledge of certainty, for the process of education and human development, we are not only concerned with the learning and mastery of knowledge, but also the establishment and development of people's emotions, attitudes, values, beliefs; the development of intelligent technology itself must be constrained by the system based on moral ethics, similarly, the educational application of intelligent technology is also constrained by the system of educational ethics, and must be enriched and developed as the premise. Rather, as Marx criticized the factory machine for turning man into an "appendage of the machine", some aspects of human development should not be strengthened and suppressed by unethical technical means, which is what the reader needs to pay attention to when reading this book.
Wenjun Recommended Words:
With the advancement of globalization, informatization and individualization, "mobility" has not only become the core of our daily lives, but also a basic feature of contemporary society. Among contemporary Western sociologists, Sigismund Baumann may be one of the theorists who pay the most attention to the phenomenon of "mobility", and a series of works such as "The Modernity of Mobility", "The Life of Mobility", and "The Age of Mobility" embody his concern for "mobility" theory and social phenomena, and to a certain extent, promote the mobility turn of sociological theoretical research, becoming a new perspective for observing and understanding today's social changes and social development.
In the sociological horizon, "mobility" has two different meanings: as a phenomenon of social displacement, the mobility involves the change of the structural position of people in the regional space and social space, mainly including residential mobility (long-distance mobility and short-distance mobility) and class mobility (upward class mobility and downward stratification mobility); as a metaphorical mobility, it points to the problem of deeper social structure generation, which is a relational practice, which metaphorically describes the living conditions of modern human beings. By examining the fluid state of subjects, we can grasp the social risk discourse and uncertainty practice that pervade an era.
As Bauman points out, "Every land on the planet, with a few exceptions, is adapting to an urgent, compulsive, and unstoppable change called modernization." The flow and lightness of modernity has led to the development of society into a never-ending change, which has brought profound changes to all aspects of human beings. The book depicts the various experiences of the world's transition from "solid" to "liquid", and roughly sorts out the various symptoms of human beings in the uncertainty and fear of day after day. "Solid-state" societies have replaced God's divine arrangements with powerful order-design efforts and structural forces, and even created too much certainty of viability, which has led to complications such as totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and freedom suffocation. When humanity enters the stage of "liquid" society, in view of the historical lessons of "solid" society, fluid modernity strives to dismantle rules, devalue norms, remove regulations, and delegate all rights to markets and individuals, with the result that all sacred, solid, and existing things disappear and the whole world is occupied by liquid, accidental, uncertain, and insecure factors. Thus, in this context of "fluidity", one must rethink the concepts and cognitive frameworks used to narrate individual experiences and their common history, thus making modern rational logic the norm of action that runs through the world.
This book on the age of "fluidity" has changed the way we think about today's world, delving not only into the variety of postmodern life, but also with the uncertainties that have a profound impact on contemporary life. Just like the global COVID-19 test we are facing today, the new crown virus has caused disastrous consequences for the development of the entire human society by virtue of its high degree of concealment and mobility, and has had a huge impact on the lives of almost everyone. In a sense, each of us is fighting the "virus" in fact, we are fighting ourselves. These viruses travel between the vast worlds, shuttle through the crowds, lurk in the body, because of their high degree of mobility, so that each of us is not only a "warrior" fighting the virus, may also be a "fortress" to protect the virus, and may even be an "accomplice" to help the virus spread. It can be seen that the riskiness, cosmopolitan and social nature of the practice in the mobile era are of great significance for us to deeply understand the uncertain characteristics of today's society and enhance the sense of security in social life. In this regard, I think this book is not only helpful for understanding and thinking about the epidemic prevention and control that is currently underway, but also a guide for our action to deal with the uncertainties of the "mobile era".
Liu Liangjian's recommended words:
Simon Blackburn's Ethics of Our Time is one of the "Oxford General Reader's Books", a small book for everyone. The English title of the book is "Ethics: A Very Short Introduction", the literal translation is "A Brief Introduction of Ethics", and the Chinese translator has taken some effort to translate the title as "Ethics of Our Time". This is certainly not a "faithful" translation, but it highlights the peculiarities of this short introduction to ethics: to cling to our times and to value our ethical feelings in the midst of them.
Since modern times, with the differentiation of disciplines, philosophy, including ethics, has to a considerable extent transformed from the original "knowledge of wisdom" to a kind of professional knowledge that enjoys itself within the framework of the discipline. The abuse is, as the modern Chinese philosopher Jin Yuelin put it, "being pushed into the glare of systematic speculation by some means of thinking, or pushed into the depths of a carefully carved labyrinth." This metamorphosis of philosophy may be a progress, but at least in the sense that it is not a regrettable degradation, namely that the activity of philosophical research and the life of the philosopher itself can be alienated and separated from each other. Still in the words of Jin Yuelin, "The Gladian characters are gone." Therefore, we sometimes see that some ethicists and moral philosophers who talk about ethics in their academic papers can not talk about morality at all in actual life; some logicians talk about logic in logic classes, and in actual life they can not talk about logic at all; similarly, Confucian researchers may not have the confucian style at all.
Another drawback of the specialization of philosophy is the "inner volume" of philosophy. By "inner volumes", I mean that philosophical studies speak only of "philosophy" and do not care about knowledge other than the profession of philosophy, let alone action, practice, and the world of life outside of knowledge. Ethics, for example, is originally closely related to life, but after the specialization of philosophy, ethicists can talk only about the "internal" theory of ethics and not about the world of life. In this sense, The Ethics of Our Time is of great corrective significance. The book begins by confronting the ethical problems of our time that "really bother people," namely, the relativistic, skeptical, and nihilistic tendencies toward morality in a secularized, pluralistic cultural context, and whether moral demands are false and hypocritical in substance.
It reminds us that in addition to the tangible and visible natural environment, there is also a moral environment that seems invisible but is actually of great effect. "The moral or ethical environment is an atmosphere of consciousness about how we should live, and it determines our thoughts—what is acceptable, what is not, what is desirable, what is despised." "Ethics and morality will shape our attitudes towards major issues such as birth and death, which in turn will determine our outlook and values for life later on; it will also condense our understanding of humanity and happiness and reveal what a good human life means." It also describes desire, freedom, and the right to the opportunities and powers we need in our daily lives. In pondering these personal questions, Blackburn leads us to question the foundations of ethics, discussing Kant's rationality and Confucius's advocacy of benevolence. The foundation of ethics is the meta-ethical problem, and in this little book we can have some vague feelings about Blackburn's basic claim, quasi-realism.
Lu Nei's recommended words: unique narrative pace, good themes
Over the past decade, Bolaño's work has been translated and published, from the prestigious Wilderness Detective and 2666 to this early work.
The early works of the great writer do not mean that they are low, but they may be slightly bleak in the sequence of the writer's works. "The Spirit of Science Fiction", like all of Bolaño's novels, has a unique narrative pace and a good theme. In short, Bolaño's novels are one less book to read.
Recommended album "Canopy Moon"
Television is a rock band from the United States, the entire album has a total of 8 works, the first classic, intriguing, especially the nearly 10 minutes long album of the same name song "Canopy Moon" in the loud and eerie double guitar combination, amazing.
Image source: Publisher
Editor: Xu Yang
Editor-in-Charge: Xuanjing
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.