2009年北京大学科学技术哲学专业“科学思想史”方向和“技术哲学”方向博士研究生入学考试试题公布如下，供考生备考时参考。欢迎有志青年报考我的博士。

科学思想史

共4题，每题25分

第一题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

  Modern cosmology, like its predecessors, is based on an analogy. What is new about it is that the analogy is a new one. As Greek natural science was based on the analogy between the macrocosm nature and the microcosm man, as man is revealed to himself in his own self-consciousness; as Renaissance natural science was based on the analogy between nature as God’s handiwork and the machines that are the handiwork of man; so the modern view of nature, which first begins to find expression_r towards the end of the eighteenth century and ever since then has been gathering weight and establishing itself more securely down to the present day, is based on the analogy between the processes of the natural world as studied by natural scientists and vicissitudes(兴衰) of human affairs as studied by historians.

第二题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

Now if place is what primarily contains each body, it would be a limit, so that the place would be the form or shape of each body by which the magnitude or the matter of the magnitude is defined: for this is the limit of each body. If, then, we look at the question in this way the place of a thing is its form. 

But, if we regard the place as the extension of the magnitude, it is the matter. For this is different from the magnitude: it is what is contained and defined by the form, as by a bounding plane. Matter or the indeterminate is of this nature; when the boundary and attributes of a sphere are taken away, nothing but the matter is left.

第三题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

  Most of the apparent incongruities in the De Revolutionibus reflect the personality of its author, and Copernicus’ personality seems entirely appropriate to his seminal role in the development of astronomy. Copernicus was a dedicated specialist. He belonged to the revived Hellenistic tradition of mathematical astronomy which emphasized the mathematical problem of the planets at the expense of cosmology. For his Hellenistic predecessors the physical incongruity of an epicycle had not been as important drawback of the Ptolemaic system, and Copernicus displayed a similar indifference to cosmological detail when he failed to note the incongruities of a moving earth in an otherwise traditional universe. For him, mathematical and celestial detail came first; he wore blinders that kept his gaze focused upon the mathematical harmonies of the heavens. To anyone who did no share his specialty Copernicus’ view of the universe was narrow and his sense of values distorted.

第四题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

  Newton thus, because of his powerful religious heritage and with a keen sense for all the facts of order and adaptation in the world, supports with all the vigour of his authoritative pen the view currently accepted by all parties of the ultimately religious genesis of the universe. God originally created masses and set them in motion; likewise the space and time in which they move, as we saw, he constitutes by his presence and continued existence. He is responsible for that intelligent order and regular harmony in the structure of things that makes them the object of exact knowledge and of reverent contemplation.

技术哲学

共4题，每题25分

第一题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

It is, therefore, a fundamental error to believe that man is an animal endowed with a talent for technology; in other words, that an animal might be transformed into a man by magically grafting on the technical gift. The opposite is the case: because man has to accomplish a task fundamentally different from that of the animal, an extranatural task, he cannot spend his energies in satisfying his elemental needs, but must limit their use in this realm so as to be able to employ them freely in the odd pursuit of realizing his being in the world.

第二题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. For such gathering-together, which challenges man to reveal by way of ordering, already holds sway in physics. But in it that gathering does not yet come expressly to the fore. Modern physics is the herald of enframing, a herald whose origin is still unknown. The essence of modern technology has for a long time been concealed, even where power machinery has been invented, where electrical technology is in full swing, and where atomic technology is well underway.

第三题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

At the beginning of its history philosophy separates tekhne from episteme, a distinction that had not yet been made in Homeric times. The separation is determined by a political context, one in which the philosopher accuses the Sophist of instrumentalizing the logos as rhetoric and logography, that is, as both an instrument of power and a renunciation of knowledge. It is in the inheritance of this conflict----in which the philosophical episteme is pitched against the sophistic tekhne, whereby all technical knowledge is dued----that the essence of technical entities in general is conceived:

Every natural being…has within itself a beginning of movement and rest, whether the “movement” is a locomotion, growth or decline, or a qualitative change…[whereas] not one product of art has the source of its own production within itself.

No form of “self-causality” animates technical beings. Owing to this ontology, the analysis of technics is made in terms of ends and means, which implies necessarily that no dynamic proper belongs to technical beings.

第四题　先阅读如下的英文文本，然后译成中文，再用中文对这段文字做进一步阐释和评论

The technical code of capitalism can now be defined as a general rule for correlating sociogram and technogram. The assumption that, as nonowners, workers are indifferent to the welfare of the firm is the most important social factor that infiltrates itself into the definition of technical reason through this code. The assembly line is an excellent example of a technology influenced by this assumption: a strategy of technologically enforced labor discipline forms the glue that holds together the elements from which it is composed. This asymmetrical effect on power is characteristic of a strategically encoded technology.