User:Zhongshusheng/sandbox

Pyrrho-Influence
Historical Pyrrhonism emerged during the early modern peiord and played a significant role in shaping modern historiography. Historical Pyrrhonism questioned the possibility of any absolute knowledge from the past and transformed later historian's selection of and standard for reliable sources.

Evaluating Wikipedia Page of De rerum natura

 * 1) Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?  Contents of the page is tightly relevant to the article topic.
 * 2) Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position? The articles is pretty neutral.
 * 3) Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?  The section talking about later reponses to the text, both complimentary and critical ones might not be complete.
 * 4) Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article? The links examined work well.
 * 5) Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?  Bias mostly appear in the response section from the comments of other authors, and the source of the biase was appropriately addressed to identify as the only the opinion of the one who commented.
 * 6) Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?  Did not find any.
 * 7) Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic? The talk page focused on several issues related to the images in the page, the topics talked about in De rerum natura that were ignored by the wikiprdia page and the controversy in the usage of some of the quotations in terms of their functions and roles.
 * 8) How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?  The article has been rated start-class by several WikiProjects including Philosphy, Greece and Rome, Poetry, History of Science, Latin with all high-importance.
 * 9) How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class? It is much more neutral, comprehensive, and inclusive of all kinds of opinions.

Philosophical skepticism
"This page is rated mid-importance and start-class in WikiProject Philosphy. Philosphical skepticism is the major discussion topic of our class, but this wikipedia page was to some extent ill-written as complained in the talk page and omitted many relevant information about skeptic things after the ancient Greek era. I would like to improve some of the already-existing components of the article and also add more information on the topic that was discussed in the class. I believe The History of Skepticism by Richard Popkin, the Spector of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matysin would be used as my major sources to develop this article."

Pyrrhonism
"This page is rated mid-importance and start-class in WikiProject Philosphy. There are not that many introduction on the wikipedia page about the content and the later influence about this branch of phiosophical skepticism, so I plan to provide more information about the influence Pyrrhonism imposed on later philosophers.""Useful Sources:"
 * 1) Walter Sinnott-Armstrong; Pyrrhonian skepticism
 * 2) Pyrrho of Elis on http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/
 * 3) Diego E. Machuca; Pyrrhonism in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy
 * 4) Richard H. Popkin; The high road to Pyrrhonism
 * 5) Diego E. Machuca; New essays on ancient pyrrhonism
 * 6) Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism

De rerum natura
"This page is currently rated as High Importance and Start Class in WikiProject Philosphy. From the talk page and my observatin, this wikipedia page lacks a more comprehensive analysis of the contents of the book. Therefore, I would like to add more information about some of the philosophical ideas of Lucretius displayed in De rerum natura and its relationship with epicureanism.""Useful Sources:"
 * 1) D.J. Butterfield; The early textual history of Lucretius' De rerum natura
 * 2) Monica R. Gale; Lucretius
 * 3) Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism
 * 4) The Cambridge companion to Lucretius
 * 5) Philip De May; Lucretius : poet and Epicurean
 * 6) Daryn Lehoux, A.D. Morrison, and Alison Sharrock; Lucretius : poetry, philosophy, science

General Information of the Draft
In this draft I plan to add the history of skepticism during and after the Renaissance that the Wikipedia page currently significantly lacks. The skepticism in the 17th and 18th century was majorly covered by the book of Popkin. I plan to use his book as the major sources to create an article that examine the philosphical skepticism in the age by important authors which might include Montaigne, Descartes, Bayle, Hobbes and Spinoza. I also want to edit the history of skepticism in ancient Chinese Philosphy as a auxillary edit, since the section right now is pretty fractional and lacks back-up sources and citations.

Zhuang Zhou (～369-286 BC)
Zhuang Zhou (庄子，"Master Zhuang") was a famous ancient Chinese Taoism philospher during the Hundred Schools of Thought period. Zhuang Zhou demonstrated his skeptical thinking through several anecdotes in the preeminent work Zhuangzi that was attributed to him: Through these anecdotes in Zhuangzi, Zhuang Zhou indicated his belief in the limitation of language and human communication and the inaccessibility of universal truth which established himself as an skeptic. But Zhuang Zhou was by no means a radical skeptic, since he only applied skeptical methods partially in some of his arguments to demonstrate his Daoism beliefs while adopting these Daoism beliefs in a dogmatic fashion.
 * "The Debate on the Joy of Fish" (知鱼之乐) : In this anecdote, Zhuang Zhou argued with his fellow philosopher Hui Shi on if they knew the fish in the pond was happy or not, and Zhuang Zhou said the famous sentence that "You are not I. How do you know that I do not know that the fish are happy?" ( Autumn Floods 秋水篇, Zhuangzi)
 * "The Butterfly of the Dream"(周公梦蝶) : The paradox of "Butterfly Dream" described Zhuang Zhou's confusion after dreaming himself to be a butterfly: "But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou." (Discussion on Making All Things Equal 齐物篇, Zhuangzi)

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
During his long stay in Paris, Thomas Hobbes was actively involved in the cricle of major skeptics like Gassendi and Mersenne who focus on the study of skepticism and epistemology. Unlike his fellow skeptic friends, Hobbes never treated skepticism as a main topic for discussion in his works. Nonetheless, Hobbes was still labeled as a religious skeptic by his contemporaries for raising doubts about Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and his political and psychological explanation of the religions. Although Hobbes himself did not go further to challenge other religious principles, his suspicion for the Mosaic authorship did siginificant damage to the religious traditions and paved the way for later religious skeptics like Spinoza and Isaac La Peyrère to further question some of the fundamental beliefs of the Judeo-Christian religious system. Hobbes' answer to skepticism and epsitmology was innvatively political: he believed that moral knowledge and religious knowledge were in their nature relative, and there was no absolute standard of truth governing them. As a result, it was out of political reasons that certain truth standards about religions and ethics were devised and established in order to form functioning government and stable society.

Baruch Spinoza and Religious Skepticism (1632-1677)
Baruch Spinoza was among the first European philosophers who were religious skeptics. He was quite familiar with the philosophy of Descartes and unprecedentedly extended the application of the Cartesian method to the religious context by analyzing religious texts with it. Spinoza sought to dispute the knowledge-claims of the Judeo-Charitian-Islamic religious system by examining its two foundations: the Scripture and the Miracles. He claimed that all Cartesian knowledge, or the rational knowledge should be accessible to the entire population. Therefore, the Scriptures, aside from those by Jesus, should not be considered the secret knowledge attained from God but just the imagination of the prophets. The Scriptures, as a result of this claim, could not serve as a base for knowledge and were reduced to simple ancient historical texts. Moreover, Spinoza also rejected the possibility for the Miracles by simply asserting that people only considered them miraculous due to their lack of understanding of the nature. By rejecting the validity of the Scriptures and the Miracles, Spinoza demolished the foundation for religious knowledge-claim and established his understanding of the Cartesian knowledge as the sole authority of knowledge-claims. Despite being deeply-skeptical of the religions, Spinoza was in fact exceedingly anti-skeptical towards reason and rationality. He steadfastly confirmed the legitimacy of reason by associating it with the acknowledgement of God, and thereby skepticism with the rational approach to knowledge was not due to problems with the rational knowledge but from the fundamental lack of understanding of God. Spinoza's religious skepticism and anti-skepticism with reason thus helped him transform epistemology by separating the theological knowledge-claims and the rational knowledge-claims.

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)
Pierre Bayle was a French philosopher in the late 17th century that was described by Richard Popkin to be a "supersceptic" who carried out the sceptic tradition to the extreme. Bayle was born in a Calvnist family in Carla-Bayle, and during the early stage of his life, he converted into Catholicism before returning to Calvinism. This conversion between religions caused him to leave France for the more religiously tolerant Holland where he stayed and worked for the rest of his life.

Bayle believed that truth cannot be obtained through reason and that all human endeavor to acquire absolute knowledge would inevitably lead to failure. Bayle's main approach was highly sceptical and destructive: he sought to examine and analyze all existing theories in all fields of human knowledge in order to show the faults in their reasoning and thus the absurdity of the theories themselves. In his magnum opus, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary), Bayle painstakingly identified the logical flaws in several works throughout the history in order to emphasize the absolute futility of rationality. Bayle's complete nullification of reason led him to conclude that faith is the final and only way to truth.

Bayle's real intention behind his extremly destructive works remained controversial. Some described him to be a Fideist, while others speculated him to be a secret Atheist. However, no matter what his original intention was, Bayle did cast significant influence on the upcoming Age of Enlightenment with his destruction of some of the most essential theological ideas and his justification of religious tolerance Atheism in his works.

Reflective Essay
Wikipedia has been a really important source of knowledge in my daily life, and at the begininig of this quarter, I felt like this project would be really promising. When I first encountered the Wikipedia portal and familiarized myself with the editing procedures of Wikipedia, I was amazed at how simple it was to contribute to a Wikipedia page. After weeks of editing on Wikipedia, I was able to realize and understand the more complicated aspects of editing and learned a lot that would help me better contribute to the Wikipedia community even after the end of the course.

Critiquing Your Article
I gained a deeper understanding of the structure of Wikipedia pages when critiquing my article Philosophical Skepticism. I also realized the importance of the talk page and used it intensively to learn about the ideas of previous editors and explore how the article evolved. I approached critiquing the article I selected for this assignment mainly from three aspects:
 * 1) Sources: I first tried to decide the quality of the article based on the quality of the cited article. Is the article well-cited with sources, and are these sources both reliable and relevant?
 * 2) Content: Then I tried to determine the quality of the content. Is the content neutral and balanced? Is the content relevant to the subject? Is the content written clearly and correctly?
 * 3) Organization: Last I tried to evaluate the organization of the content to see if there was a lack of anything significant about the subject and if the general structure was messy and needing of reorganizing?

For my article Philosophical skepticism, I realized that the entire section about the history of skepticism in the western tradition after antiquity was missing. Since this was the center of discussion for our course and I had access to many qualified and useful sources discussing it, I tried to add as much content to this section as possible within my capability. I also edited the part about ancient Chinese tradition of skepticism due to my advantage as a native speaker in Chinese and my interest in ancient Chinese philosophy.

Summarizing your contributions
My contribution to the Philosophical skepticism article includes: I believe my edits to the article, together with Sissi’s edits, added a large amount of new and important contents to the section about the history of skepticism. We introduced the history of skepticism after antiquity to the article that was previously uncovered. I believe that our reorganization of the article also helped make the article clearer and more navigable, and it would help future editor with editing this article more easily.
 * 1) Shorten the lead section and changed it to a general introduction to the philosophical idea of skepticism.
 * 2) Reorganize the entire page. I created a new heading called “philosophy” to include all the more minor headings. I also reorganized the entire parts on history of skepticism to make it more navigable. I separated non-western and western traditions of skepticism and made the sub-articles follow the mapping of (east/west-era/region-philosopher).
 * 3) Me and another student editor, Sissi, mainly worked on the section about the history of skepticism in the western tradition after antiquity. I worked on the history of skepticism after the 17th century and wrote the description of some of the major skepticism figures during this period including Bayle, Spinoza and Hobbes. I also rewrote the entire section about ancient Chinese skepticism to present the skeptical ideas of Zhuang Zhou and Wang Chong better.

Peer Review and Feedback
We were free to assign ourselves to peer review other classmates’ articles. I reviewed the edits made by Talia on the page for Pyrrho. She did a great job reorganizing and adding contents to the article, and she also fixed the citation of the article as well. I gave her some suggestions on expanding the influence section of Pyrrho page and on reorganizing the article on Pyrrhonism. Both Nathan and Julia gave us valuable peer reviews on the page of Philosophical Skepticism. Both of them offered us insights about how to better arrange and organize the contents of the article, and they also pointed out the direction for us to further improve the citation of the article. I also received two feedbacks on the page: one about citation and one about general arrangement and I have fixed the problems mentioned accordingly.

Wikipedia Generally
I learned about some principles of Wikipedia editing that was fundamentally different from those of academic papers and personal essays. Wikipedia has a stricter standard for the selection of sources and opinions: personal opinions should be strictly prohibited, and primary sources and unreliable sources should also be excluded. It is also important to present things on Wikipedia neutrally in order to balance all sides of an argument. Therefore I think a Wikipedia assignment was different from other regular paper assignments in terms of both the research procedure, the writing requirement and the team-work aspects. Wikipedia had the potential to be a great collection of all knowledges where the knowledges were the eptiome of works by the best scholars in the discipline. Therefore, Wikipedia, when written and edited appropriately, would be a great source for the public to understand the most up-to-date studies of a certain subject in the discipline. I believe that Wikipedia would keep improving and eventually realize this potential with its scientific method for editing and improvement and its amazing community of "honey-bees" behind these pages.
 * Research: Wikipedia does not approve primary sources contents and favors secondary and reliable sources from field experts. Therefore my focus of research switched from analyzing orginial texts to reading and collecting qualified secondary sources.
 * Writing: Wikipeida article is hard for me to write since I cannot present any personal opinions and needed to balance all arguments well to stay neutral.
 * Team-work: Teamwork was also extremely important when editing Wikipidea pages. Every page was a massive project that could not possibly be finished by one individual. Therefore, it was important for me to build on and improve the contribution of the previous editors, divide up the work and communicate with my fellow student editors, and repond accordingly to the feedback and the peer reviews.