对话录

May we not agree, in fact, at the start that both religion and science are seriously practised techniques for attaining something that people want.

It is the part of the scientist—of the intelligent and honest man of letters and of the intelligent and honest clergyman as well—to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.

Ce n'est pas la technique qui nous asservit mais le sacré transféré à la technique, qui nous empêche d'avoir une fonction critique et de la faire servir au développement humain.

Lorsque nous voyons la science d'un Galilée triompher du Péripatétisme buté d'un Cremonini, nous croyons, mal informés de l'histoire de la pensée humaine, que nous assistons à la victoire de la jeune Science moderne sur la Philosophie médiévale, obstinée dans son psittacisme ; en vérité, nous contemplons le triomphe, longuement préparé, de la science qui est née à Paris au XIVe siècle sur les doctrines d'Aristote et d'Averroès, remises en honneur par la Renaissance italienne.

the Galilean and Cartesian revolution—which remains, nevertheless, a revolution—had been prepared by a strenuous effort of thought.

scientific revolutions are here taken to be those non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one.

Demoting the "Scientific Revolution" to the mere nomer of "early modern science" obscures the power of the dominant narratives of colonialism and imperialism that have helped to shape Western culture ... at the expense of nature, women, minorities, and indigenous peoples.

The Galilean revolution can be boiled down to the discovery of that language, to the discovery of the fact that mathematics is the grammar of science.

it meant not only, is the astronomical realm fundamentally geometrical, which almost any one would grant, but is the universe as a whole, including our earth, fundamentally mathematical in its structure?

… daß dieses Universum von Bestimmtheiten an sich, in dem exakte Wissenschaft das Universum des Seienden erfaßt, nichts ist als ein Kleid von Ideen, geworfen über die Welt unmittelbarer Anschauung und Erfahrung, über die Lebenswelt …

The history of science is the only history which can illustrate the progress of mankind. In fact, progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science.

The heart of the problem of a general education is the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition.

The main thing is to understand that in a world dominated by scientific methods and inventions the history of science should be the keystone of higher education.

Of course, it is a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology. But for normal-scientific work, for puzzle-solving within the tradition that the textbooks define, the scientist is almost perfectly equipped.

Because science students "know the right answers," it is particularly difficult to make them analyze an older science in its own terms.

In particular, more emphasis on the history of science has been recommended and in this recommendation I have heartily joined.

And in order to come into this world, education must not be content just to re-produce the past, but must, on the contrary, individuate it – in the sense developed by Simondon in L’individuation psychique et collective – that is, interpret it.

This criteriological apparatus – whose organs of transmission and interiorization are universities, which themselves emerge from philosophy, and which constitute the history of truth – is currently undergoing massive change, if not complete disintegration and destruction.

For an agricultural economy, astronomical knowledge as regulator of the calendar was of prime importance. He who could give a calendar to the people would become their leader.

Correspondingly, astronomy and calendrical science were always ‘orthodox’, Confucian, sciences, unlike alchemy, for example, which was typically ‘Taoist’ and ‘heterodox’.

Here astronomy played a check on the ruler, and astronomers were regarded as interpreters of celestial signs

In China, astronomy originated in the need of agriculture and astrology, and due to the influence of Chinese social conditions and traditional culture, developed in a way quite different from that of Greek astronomy.

Not only does it need techniques, but techniques need it.

Its development stemmed directly from the strategic needs of the country and the army, created key technologies, and adhered to the road of independent innovation with Chinese characteristics.

Nevertheless, instead of sending troops, the Chinese authorities chose to send scientific personnel. The Chinese politicians would claim, nominally, that the meteorological station served the international community, but what was really important was which state was in control.

A citizen, a businessman, a public servant, a lawyer, a teacher, or a writer, may be called upon at some time to evaluate the work of scientists and to consider the ways in which such work can be organized and financed.

L'homme politique ne peut pas choisir entre ce qui serait plus et ce qui serait moins efficace ; le choix est fait indépendamment de lui.

The machine itself makes no demands and holds out no promises: it is the human spirit that makes demands and keeps promises.

It was long claimed that technique was neutral. Today this is no longer a useful distinction.

In that sense, all technologies in use are non-neutral. They change the basic situation, however subtly, however minimally

from late Neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.

Dieser Fluß ist nicht der Fluß der objektiven Zeit, die ich mit Uhr und Chronoskop bestimme, nicht der Weltzeit, die ich in Relation zur Erde und Sonne fixiere.

il y a un seul Temps réel, et les autres sont fictifs. Qu'est-ce en effet qu'un Temps réel, sinon un Temps vécu ou qui pourrait l'être ?

The clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science.

this industrial technical system is changing in an ever-faster way, constantly producing situations of disadjustment between the technical system and the social systems.

The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age.

the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.

Contrary to the usual ideas, mechanical clockwork began not in early Renaissance Europe but in Thang China, in spite of the highly agrarian character of East Asian civilization.

Quand je suis des yeux, sur le cadran d'une horloge, le mouvement de l'aiguille qui correspond aux oscillations du pendule, je ne mesure pas de la durée, comme on paraît le croire ; je me borne à compter des simultanéités, ce qui est bien différent.

Wir bezeichneten die primäre Erinnerung oder Retention als einen Kometenschweif, der sich an die jeweilige Wahrnehmung anschließt. Durchaus davon zu scheiden ist die sekundäre Erinnerung, die Wiedererinnerung.

Le passé se survit sous deux formes distinctes : 1° dans des mécanismes moteurs ; 2° dans des souvenirs indépendants.

Tertiary retention is the inscription of a past that this Dasein has not lived, which has accumulated before it, and has accumulated as world

Though the great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created, it is also—until it becomes too cluttered and disorganized—the best agent for discrimination and comparative evaluation …

the digital, which, like every new form of tertiary retention, constitutes a new age of the pharmakon. It is inevitable that this pharmakon will have toxic effects if new therapies, new therapeutics, are not prescribed.

the replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space—a differentiated set of innerworldly places—by that of Euclidean geometry—an essentially infinite and homogenous extension

My body is wherever there is something to be done.

space is one of the primordial expressions of our being-in-the-world

Nature, society, and the human body are composed of interchangeable atomized parts that can be repaired or replaced from outside. ... and interventionist medicine exchanges a fresh heart for a worn-out, diseased one.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, and that in doing so they may be both effective and dangerous.

How to acquire this transformative capacity is essentially our concern today, not the debate over whether a machine can think, which is just an expression of existential crisis and transcendental illusion.

Render unto man the things which are man's and unto the computer the things which are the computer's.

Nature will be understood as consisting of processes, and the existence of any special kind of thing in nature will be understood as meaning that processes of a special kind are going on there.

Il y a des changements, mais il n'y a pas de choses qui changent : le changement n'a pas besoin d'un support. Il y a des mouvements, mais il n'y a pas nécessairement des objets invariables qui se meuvent : le mouvement n'implique pas un mobile.

… the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms.

Im Übergang der Brücke treten die Ufer erst als Ufer hervor.

La chair n’est pas matière, n’est pas esprit, n’est pas substance.

Greek natural science was based on the principle that the world of nature is saturated or permeated by mind.

Everyone understood the nature of a machine ... It was an easy step to the proposition: as a clockmaker or millwright is to a clock or mill, so is God to Nature.

The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution.

Comme dans l'hypothèse mécanistique, on suppose encore ici que tout est donné. Le finalisme ainsi entendu n'est qu'un mécanisme à rebours.

no one can understand natural science unless he understands history: and that no one can answer the question what nature is unless he knows what history is.

It happens, moreover, that these great Chinese clocks constitute an unsuspected missing link between the early water-clocks and later mechanical clocks found in the West. They are powered by a water-wheel but governed by an escapement device

Even just a small rate of increase every year would result in an exponential increase and end up in collapse. It would require infinite resources and energy, and would definitely output infinite waste.

The technocrats have a strange blindness to the complex reality of the world and to the lessons of common sense (e.g., that no system can grow indefinitely in a closed and finite universe, a truth that they treat sarcastically).

Technical progression is of the same nature as the process of numbering; there is no good ground for halting the progression, because after each number we can always add 1. In technical evolution also, it seems that limits no longer exist.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

I am most concerned about the effects of global climate change on the future of the earth… I would like to see the Age of the Anthropocene become the Age of Sustainability through the use of renewable energy, the recycling of resources, and the economic and political equality of all humans.

Humans have to learn how to make a life, a happy life on the one and only Earth and under the one and only sun

One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining would soon require that.

The mine, to begin with, is the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man … Day has been abolished and the rhythm of nature broken: continuous day-and-night production first came into existence here.

The mine is nothing less in fact than the concrete model of the conceptual world which was built up by the physicists of the seventeenth century.

Ein Landstrich wird dagegen in die Förderung von Kohle und Erzen herausgefordert. Das Erdreich entbirgt sich jetzt als Kohlenrevier, der Boden als Erzlagerstätte.

For mining is a robber industry … The mine is the worst possible local base for a permanent civilization: for when the seams are exhausted, the individual mine must be closed down, leaving behind its debris and its deserted sheds and houses.

Qui était-il, ce vagabond génial ? Un savant profond qui aurait, dans sa lutte contre la physique aristotélicienne et la médecine classique, posé les bases … Un médecin érudit génial, ou un charlatan ignorant, vendeur d’orviétan superstitieux, astrologue …

The "laboratory" as a self-contained space for conducting practical investigations in the natural sciences and chemistry derived from the alchemist's workhouse.

neither the alchemy, nor Cardano, nor Giambatista Porta—nor even Gilbert—is looking for numerical results. This because they think the world as an ensemble of qualities much more than as an ensemble of magnitudes.

The phlogiston theory was a broad conceptual scheme into which could be fitted most of the chemical phenomena of the mid-eighteenth century.

Lavoisier, we said, saw oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air and where others had seen nothing at all.

It was not experience, but experiment that had nourished its growth and decided the struggle: the empiricism of the modern science is not experiential; it is experimental.

Viewed as a whole, Galileo’s method then can be analysed into three steps, intuition or resolution, demonstration, and experiment

Thus necesse determines esse. Good physics is made a priori. Theory precedes fact.

he must find means of compelling nature to answer, devising tortures under which she can no longer hold her tongue. Here, in a single brief epigram, Bacon laid down once for all the true theory of experimental science.

His approach to experimentation is one in which nature is constrained by the "violence of impediments" and is made new by "art and the hand of man."

Une expérience de Physique est l'observation précise d'un groupe de phénomènes, accompagnée de l'interprétation de ces phénomènes ; cette interprétation substitue aux données concrètes réellement recueillies par l'observation des représentations abstraites et symboliques qui leur correspondent en vertu des théories que l'observateur admet.