Advanced Readings in Science and Humanities (Second Edition)

Author: Ren Dingcheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-08-01
Features: Feynman once said, "If nature is the key, then the humanities and social sciences are the instruction manual for using the key." We can say that the key and the instruction manual each have their own uses, although they are interdependent, they cannot replace each other. For many years, people have hoped to achieve the ideal of unifying science and the humanities. However, in reality, we can only view science through the humanities and the humanities through science. Tilling the fields of scientific culture and humanistic culture, as well as their intersection, yields different fruits. What we expect is not the unification of scientific and humanistic cultures, but rather the promotion of communication between the two cultures, diverse understandings, and different forms of integration. The editors of this book have taught general education courses for postgraduate students at Peking University for many years. These courses have played an important role in cultivating students' comprehensive scientific and humanistic literacy and have been widely welcomed by students. To allow more readers to experience the charm of this course, Peking University Press invited the editors to compile relevant reading materials into a book, hoping that a broader readership can appreciate the basic features of this course. The content of this book covers many cutting-edge and hot issues in contemporary scientific culture. It is not only suitable for postgraduate and undergraduate students to study both in and out of the classroom but also for general readers interested in the theme of science and the humanities. The basic positioning of this book is the understanding of science itself. This positioning is based on the editors' understanding of the intellectual mission of the general education course on the Dialectics of Nature offered in universities in China for majors in science, engineering, agriculture, forestry, and medicine. In the editors' view, this course should help students improve their comprehensive scientific literacy and enable them to reflect on science itself while conducting scientific research. Therefore, one of the principles for selecting and compiling this book is to hope that through some vivid materials and ideas, readers can become closer to scientific life and the social life related to science, thereby enhancing their interest in reading comprehensive scientific works, rather than introducing specific scientific knowledge and technical knowledge, which is the task of various professional textbooks; nor is it to systematically introduce the achievements in people's understanding of the nature, methods, and ideas of science, the social operation of science, the relationship between science, technology, and society, and the history of the production and development of science and technology, as these are the tasks of textbooks in philosophy of science, science sociology, and the history of science.