In this paper, a lightweight and modular design of a quadruped robot with two-degree-of-freedom parallel legs is presented. To reduce the weight and enhance the transmission accuracy, the horizontal layout of the driving end is adopted for designing the legs of the quadruped robot. The rotation angle of each actuator for the quadruped robot is analyzed by the inverse kinematics algorithm. Moreover, the trajectory of the foot-end, including support and swing phases, is planned to reduce the impact between the foot-end (...) and the ground. Furthermore, the gait of the four legs of the quadruped robot is designed by considering the conditions of trot, standing, take-off, and walking. Finally, the effectiveness of the foot-end trajectory and the stable gait is verified by conducting experiments on a prototype platform. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has changed the healthcare landscape drastically. Stricken by sharp surges in morbidity and mortality with resource and manpower shortages confounding their efforts, the medical community has witnessed high rates of burnout and post-traumatic stress amongst themselves. Whilst the prevailing literature has offered glimpses into their professional war, no review thus far has collated the deeply personal reflections of physicians and ascertained how their self-concept, self-esteem and perceived self-worth has altered during this crisis. Without adequate intervention, this may (...) have profound effects on their mental and physical health, personal relationships and professional efficacy.MethodsWith mentions of the coronavirus pervading social media by the millions, this paper set out to collate and thematically analyse social media posts containing first-person physician reflections on how COVID-19 affected their lives and their coping mechanisms. A consistent search strategy was employed and a PRISMA flowchart was used to map out the inclusion/exclusion criteria.ResultsA total of 590 social media posts were screened, 511 evaluated, and 108 included for analysis. Salient themes identified include Disruptions to Personal Psycho-Emotional State, Disruptions to Professional Care Delivery, Concern for Family, Response from Institution, Response from Society and Coping Mechanisms.ConclusionIt is evident that the distress experienced by physicians during this time has been manifold, multi-faceted and dominantly negative. Self-concepts were distorted with weakened self-esteem and perceived self-worth observed. The Ring Theory of Personhood (RToP) was adopted to explain COVID-19’s impact on physician personhood as it considers existential, individual, relational and social concepts of the self. These entwined self-concepts serve as ‘compensatory’ to one another, with coping mechanisms buffering and fortifying the physician’s overall personhood. With healthcare institutions playing a vital role in providing timely and targeted support, it was further proposed that a comprehensive assessment tool based on the RToP could be developed to detect at-risk physicians and evaluate the presence and effectiveness of established support structures. (shrink)

In the ethical texts, Aristotle claims that all instances of choice (prohairesis) must be preceded by deliberation, but it is not clear why he believes this. This paper offers an explanation of that commitment, drawing heavily from the De Anima and showing that the account emerging from there complements that of the ethical texts. The view is that the deliberative faculty has the capacity to manipulate reasons combinatorially, while the perceptual/desiderative faculty does not, and choice requires the combinatorial manipulation of (...) reasons. (shrink)

Naming or names (ming 名) is one of the key concepts in Daodejing (道德經). According to a popular understanding, names in Daodejing correspond to features (xing 形) of things; ordinary things have names, but Dao is featureless and nameless. What is missing, however, is atheory of the relationship between names and features explaining why ordinary things have names but Dao does not. In this paper, I develop a theory of names in Daodejing that explains how names relate to things and (...) their features. According to this theory, a name corresponds to a feature that is shared by a group of things, and names provide identity conditions for individuating ordinary things. Further, this theory implies that the various descriptions of Dao in Daodejing do not include names; therefore, talking about Dao while insisting that it is unnamable is not committed to any paradox. (shrink)

The issue of how to identify the liability of subjects after a traffic accident takes place remains a puzzle regarding the SAE classification system. The SAE system is not good at dealing with the problem of responsibility evaluation; therefore, building a new classification system for self-driving cars from the perspective of the subject's liability is a possible way to solve this problem. This new system divides automated driving into three levels: i) assisted driving based on the will of drivers, ii) (...) automated driving based on the will of the manufacturers, and iii) fully automated driving based on social will. The corresponding responsible subjects for level one, level two, and level three are the drivers, the manufacturers, and society, respectively. (shrink)

In the name of safeguarding public interests and ethical principles, China’s National Health Commission bans unmarried women from using assisted reproductive technology (ART), including egg freezing. Supported by local governments, the ban has restricted single women’s reproductive rights nationwide. Although some courts bypassed the ban to allow widowed single women to use ART, they have not adopted a position in favour of single women’s reproductive autonomy, but quite the contrary. Faced with calls to relax the ban and allow single women (...) to freeze eggs electively, the National Health Commission refused to amend their policy, partly to protect women’s well-being paternalistically and partly to implement the central government’s policies to boost the birthrate and maintain traditional family structures. While the government’s concerns about elective egg freezing are not entirely unfounded, they have failed to demonstrate that banning single women’s egg freezing is a suitable, necessary and proportionate means to safeguard societal interests and ethical principles. The authority’s assumptions that women cannot make rational decisions for their health even with adequate informed consent procedures, that banning egg freezing by single women promotes a culture of having children ‘at a proper age’, and that egg freezing by single women offends China’s public moralities have not been substantiated. (shrink)

Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) "opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." And so, whether you agree or disagree with the speculative realism movement, it has to be addressed. Lacanian Realism does just that. This book reconstructs Lacanian dogma from the ground up: first, by unearthing a new reading of the Lacanian category of the real; second, by demonstrating the political and cultural ingenuity of Lacan's concept of the real, and (...) by positioning this against the more reductive analyses of the concept by Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Ranciere, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real. Lacanian Realism is an imaginative and timely exploration of the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

Noted logician and philosopher addresses various forms of mathematical logic, discussing both theoretical underpinnings and practical applications. After historical survey, lucid treatment of set theory, model theory, recursion theory and constructivism and proof theory. Place of problems in development of theories of logic, logic’s relationship to computer science, more. Suitable for readers at many levels of mathematical sophistication. 3 appendixes. Bibliography. 1981 edition.

In this paper I argue that Leibniz's ethics is a kind of virtue ethics where virtues of the agent are explanatorily primary. I first examine how Leibniz obtained his conception of justice as a kind of love in an early text, Elements of Natural Law. I show that in this text Leibniz's goal was to find a satisfactory definition of justice that could reconcile egoism with altruism, and that this was achieved through the Aristotelian virtue of friendship where friends treat (...) each other as “other selves.” Following this decisive moment, Leibniz adopted an Aristotle‐inspired ethical framework where the virtuous agent is central for moral evaluations. I then show that, despite certain developments, Leibniz's ethics retained this essential feature throughout his career. In Leibniz's later writings, God constitutes the foundation of the moral realm, and the fundamental moral endeavor of human beings consists in the imitation of God. (shrink)

Ben shu jie shao le gong zi zhen, wei yuan, yan fu, kang you wei, tan si tong, liang qi chao, chen tian hua, zhang bing lin deng wan qing si xiang jia de zhe xue si xiang.

The discrepancy between measures of preferred and actual participation in decision making was used as a measure of ecological dissonance for an organization and then used to assess its relationship to job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. Questionnaires were administered to 143 faculty and staff members of Mississippi State University. Correlational analyses indicated mild relationships between the measures of ecological dissonance and job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization, thus providing support for ecological dissonance theory (...) (see Miller, Topping, & Wells-Parker, 1989). It was concluded that ecological dissonance in participation in decision making was a predictor of workers’ job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. (shrink)

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies (...) have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms. (shrink)

A common assumption in the selection of nonhuman animal subjects for research and the approval of research is that, if the risks of a procedure are too great for humans, and if there is a so-called scientific necessity, then it is permissible to use nonhuman animal subjects. I reject the common assumption as neglecting the central ethical issue of the permissibility of using nonhuman animal subjects and as being inconsistent with the principle of justice used in human subjects research ethics. (...) This principle requires that certain classes of individuals not be subjected to a disproportionate share of the burdens or risks of research. I argue for an extension of this principle to nonhuman animal research and show that a prima facie violation of the principle occurs because nonhuman animals bear an overwhelmingly disproportionate share of the risks of research without sufficient justification or reciprocal benefit. (shrink)

This book presents a reading of Martin Heidegger's philosophy as an effort to strike a middle position between the philosophies of Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche. Duane Armitage interprets the history of Western philosophy as comprising a struggle over the meaning of "being," and argues that this struggle is ultimately between materialism and idealism, and, in the end, between atheism and theism. This work therefore concerns the question of the meaning of the so called "death of God" in the context of (...) contemporary Continental Philosophy.. (shrink)

What should we do about “tainted” public commemorations? Recent events have highlighted the urgency of reaching a consensus on this question. However, existing discussions appear to be dominated by two naïve opposing views – to remove or preserve them. My aims in this essay are two-fold. First, I argue that the two views are not naïve, but undergirded by concerns with securing self-respect and with the character of our engagement with the past. Second, I offer a qualified defence of vandalising (...) tainted commemorations. The defence comprises two parts. I consider two prominent suggestions – to install counter-commemorations and to add contextualising plaques – and argue that they are typically beset with difficulties. I then argue that in some circumstances, constrained vandalism is a response to tainted commemorations which effectively adjudicates the demands of the two opposing views. (shrink)

Photography in Colorado was encouraged as early as 1861, when newspaper editor William Byers wrote in the Rocky Mountain News, "Secure the shadow, ere the substance perish," and roused the citizenry to take photographs of their families, friends, landscape, homes, and mills in order to document their lives and share them with others. The revised edition of Colorado: A History in Photographs draws on this rich legacy, portraying Colorado's history in images taken from the frontier era to the present, all (...) accompanied by a vivid, updated narrative. Presenting a broad view of countless aspects of life in Colorado and including 270 black-and-white photographs, this book will inform, entertain, and inspire all those who delight in learning more about the history of the Centennial State. (shrink)

Currently, there are two bottleneck problems in the research of college students’ entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial behavior: lack of comprehensive and systematic theoretical framework and empirical analysis to reveal the role path that affects entrepreneurial intention, and most studies ignore the gap between entrepreneurial intention and behavior. Based on the literature review, this study adopted the Theory of Planned Behavior as the theoretical framework introduced entrepreneurial situational factors and entrepreneurial implementation intention, and constructed a two-step extended entrepreneurial intention–behavior model. The (...) structural equation was constructed using AMOS24.0 to empirically analyze the antecedent variables of college students’ entrepreneurial intention and the factors influencing entrepreneurial behavior. The empirical results showed that expected material possessions, expected social reputation, expected self-evaluation, mission and responsibility, and career development are the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial attitude. Support from families and friends, college teachers’ views, and the role models are antecedent variables of entrepreneurial subjective norms. Professional ability, entrepreneurial ability, entrepreneurial experiences, and personality traits are the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial perceived behavior control. In the formation stage of college students’ entrepreneurial intention, attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and entrepreneurial situational factors have significant impacts on the formation of college students’ entrepreneurial intention, while entrepreneurial intention, perceived behavior control, and entrepreneurial situational factors have significant impacts on the transformation phase of entrepreneurial behavior. Entrepreneurial implementation intention plays an intervening role between entrepreneurial intention and behavior of college students. (shrink)

The term, "objectionable commemorations”, refers to a broad category of public artefacts – such as, and especially, memorials, monuments and statues – that are regarded as morally problematic in virtue of what or whom they honour. In this regard, they are a special class of public artefacts that are subject to public contestation. In this paper, we survey the general ethical and political issues on this topic. First, we categorise the arguments on offer in the literature, concerning the objectionable nature (...) of such commemorations. Second, we review common political responses to objectionable commemorations. Finally, we identify fruitful areas for further philosophical inquiry on this topic. (shrink)

Duane Cady views warism and pacifism as polar extremes on a continuum that embraces a full spectrum of ethical positions on the morality of war and peace. Realizing that he could not intellectually defend the notions of just-war theory, he found that he was a reluctant pacifist. In this new edition of From Warism to Pacifism, Cady continues to expose the pervasive, subconscious warism that is the dominant ideology in modern Western culture. He explores the changes over the last twenty (...) years—from the end of the Cold War to the ongoing “war on terror,” as well as Barack Obama winning the Nobel Prize for Peace. Like racism and sexism, the uncritical presumption that war is morally justifiable, even morally required, misguides our attitudes and institutions. In its place, Cady proposes the development of a positive concept of peace. Citing common objections to pacifist values, he describes peace as something more than the mere absence of war and demonstrates that pacifism is a defensible position. (shrink)

Three times in Book 1 chapter 13 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says desire partakes of reason in a way. There is a consensus view in the literature about what that claim means: desire has no intrinsic rationality, but can partake of reason by being blindly obedient to the commands of reason. I argue this consensus view is mistaken: for Aristotle, adult human desire has its own intrinsic rationality, and while it is to be obedient to reason, it is not (...) blind obedience, for when reason tells desire to obey, it includes an explanation supporting its order which desire can at least potentially understand. Thus, the nature of human desire, and also of the characteristic interaction of desire and reason, is much different than it is standardly taken to be. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a structural parallelism between law and physics in Leibniz since his early years, which has significant influence on the formation of his views. I start by examining Leibniz's early physical system and an analogy with juridical laws that he uses to explain the structure of physical laws. Then, I argue that this analogy stems from an envisioned parallelism between law and physics. Finally, I illustrate the significance of this legal-physical parallelism by arguing (...) that it underlies some of Leibniz's mature views. Most importantly, I argue that the parallelism explains the origin of architectonic principles or optimality principles in Leibniz's mature physics. (shrink)