In the twentieth century, in both China and the West, ritual became marginalized in the face of the growth of secularism and individualism. In China, Confucianism and its essentially ritualistic comportment to the world were vigorously suppressed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) under Mao Zedong. But de-ritualization already took place as a result of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 under Sun Yat-Sen. In the West, while the process of de-ritualization has been generally more gradual, it has been nonetheless drastic. In (...) contrast to this situation, this volume investigates the crucial role ritual plays in constituting the human understanding of their place in the cosmos, the purpose of their lives, and imbues human existence with a more complete sense of meaningfulness. This volume presents the work of philosophers from both China and the West as they reflect upon the constitutive role that ritual plays in human life. They reflect not only on ritual in general but also on specific Confucian and Christian appreciations of ritual. This provocative volume is a beacon of warning to Western philosophers, who think they have graduated from the trappings of ritual, and a beacon of hope for Eastern thinkers, who wish to avoid cultural fragmentation. The Editors, both Eastern and Western, have together created a seamless work that not only introduces ritual, but advances an argument for the contribution that ritual makes to cultural renewal. This volume is a work of philosophical thinking about ritual doing, but challenges those who think to realize that the salvation of philosophical thinking rests in the particularity and contingency of ritual doing. Let us hope this volume is widely read, for it points to that which might renew the West. - Jeffrey P. Bishop, Saint Louis University. (shrink)

This volume explores East Asian intellectual traditions and their influence on contemporary discussions of the ethics of war and peace. Through cross-cultural comparison and dialogue between East and West, this work charts a new trajectory in the development of applied ethics. A sequel to the volume Chinese Just War Ethics, it expands the range of the earlier work and includes attention to Japan and other Eastern and Western traditions for contrastive reflection and engages with the full range of Chinese intellectual (...) traditions for comparative analysis. The book scrutinizes pioneering works such as the Mengzi, the Han Feizi, and the Seven Military Classics, investigating their influence in subsequent times. It also engages with new texts and thinkers such as the Four Books of the Yellow Emperor, Zeng Guofan, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong, along with examining recent writings of the scholars of the People's Liberation Army. The final section of the book identifies and discusses some emerging issues in the comparative study of military ethics, just war and peace that derive from the preceding sections. The volume editors then offer some concluding remarks at the end of the book. This book will be of much interest to students of the ethics of war and peace, just war theory, military ethics, Asian studies and International Relations in general. (shrink)

孙显元(1935~),浙江温州人,中国科学技术大学教授,全国逻辑学会理事,安徽省逻辑研究会会长.

In both political science and political theory, democratization has largely been considered a problem for non-liberal democratic countries. Drawing on Chinese political thinker Jiwei Ci’s writings on freedom, democracy, agency, plausibility, and legitimacy, I critically reconstruct Ci’s theory of democratization and his method of theorizing. I argue that a normative account of democratization is embedded in Ci’s political thought, which is based upon a philosophical anthropology of the modern man and focuses on broadening political possibilities in a given society. Ci’s (...) theory allows us to think about democratization beyond the binary of democracy and authoritarianism, as his theory places democratization as an inherent and persistent challenge for all political communities. (shrink)

Computer vision is widely used in manufacturing, sports, medical diagnosis, and other fields. In this article, a multifeature fusion error action expression method based on silhouette and optical flow information is proposed to overcome the shortcomings in the effectiveness of a single error action expression method based on the fusion of features for human body error action recognition. We analyse and discuss the human error action recognition method based on the idea of template matching to analyse the key issues that (...) affect the overall expression of the error action sequences, and then, we propose a motion energy model based on the direct motion energy decomposition of the video clips of human error actions in the 3 Deron action sequence space through the filter group. The method can avoid preprocessing operations such as target localization and segmentation; then, we use MET features and combine with SVM to test the human body error database and compare the experimental results obtained by using different feature reduction and classification methods, and the results show that the method has the obvious comparative advantage in the recognition rate and is suitable for other dynamic scenes. (shrink)

v. 1. Li ze xue -- v. 2. Yu zhou lun xin li xue -- v. 3 Xing shang xue.

Marx, "doctoral dissertation," appendix of the religious debate Plutarch, in his "Notes on the philosophy of Epicurus," 2-3 in a more specific and detailed to show. Plutarch refuted Marx on Epicurus and his anti-religious stance is certainly consistent. This paper aims to "notes" of the study, to figure out how Marx relevant text on Plutarch, Plutarch targeted to refute the doctrine of Epicurus particular religion to refute, how to highlight the philosophy of and religious opposition and overcome religious opposition and (...) reasonable basis. (shrink)

Pertinent to understand the role of fate in this world, issues of political wisdom. "Hamlet" raises a question: potential rulers encountered misfortune, should be how to deal with. Hamlet by showing an error on the fate of the two views, Shakespeare shows consistent with the classical philosopher: personal misfortune should not be attributed to fate or God, but should be attributed to their nature and choice. Hamlet and Homer's epic and drama links, to some extent, reveal the fate of his (...) misunderstanding of the reason. Although Hamlet's view is similar to the fate of Machiavelli, but he vowed to pursue justice, it shows the difference between him and Machiavelli. (shrink)

This article proposes an interpretation of the ‘Thesis that Things do not Shift’ (_Wu bu qian lun,_ 物不遷論) of the early Chinese Buddhist philosopher Sengzhao. We understand Sengzhao to be proposing a version of the philosophy of time found in Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, and then interpreting statements about time from Mahāyāna texts in light of that account. But whatever his limitations as a cross-cultural interpreter, we find Sengzhao surprisingly impressive philosophically, as he proposes a view that is noticeably more advanced towards (...) a modern conception of time than the accounts found in South Asian Buddhist sources. Ironically, his earnest efforts to present his view as falling within the Mahāyāna may have functioned to conceal Sengzhao’s true philosophical achievement. (shrink)

In recent years, the translation of Debray’s writings and the study of his media thoughts have become increasingly popular in China, but the ‘medium’ in his media discourse has never been clarified. Debray pointed out that the focus of the media is ‘mediation’, which actually reveals a new way of thinking and reasoning. He then proposed four stages of mediological reasoning: Message, Medium, Milieu and Mediation. This article believes that based on this framework (i.e. 4M), Debray used McLuhan’s theory as (...) a hub for analysis and launched a set of research methods and tools aimed at exploring the multiple nature of medium and message on the sense of interaction between culture and technology, which also involved the utility of ‘mediasphere’ as an exploration principle to question the past and future of mankind and the media conditions. This approach provides an avenue for us to understand ourselves and transmissions in different space-time categories at both practical and theoretical levels. This article emphasizes that it is better not to interpret Debray’s thoughts as a theory parallel to the existing medium theories because its focus is on research approaches rather than arguments. Besides, although Debray’s medium theory is based on his experience and thinking in Europe and Latin America, there are reasons for the publicity of Debray’s ideology in China. From the perspective of history, culture and human geography, Chinese civilization can be said to contain rich ideological resources of mediation. This is of great significance to re-understand China’s history and reality in the new context of globalization, and to discover the global value of China’s experience. (shrink)

What ultimately is the relationship of the development of scientific technology and the consequent raising of the material level of life to the development of morality? Today, as the realization of the Four Modernizations is accelerated, a thorough examination of this question is highly important and meaningful.

The mounting pollution burden has raised the need for renewable energy demand throughout the world. The study aims to explore the effect of public debt on renewable energy consumption for selected 23 Asian economies for the time period 1990–2019. Long-run empirical findings of the group-wise symmetric ARDL model reveal that increasing public debt results in declining renewable energy consumption. However, findings of the long-run group-wise asymmetric ARDL model reveal that positive shock in public debt reduces renewable energy consumption, and negative (...) shock in public debt results in increasing renewable energy consumption. The economy-wise empirical findings of the FMOLS model reveal that an increase in public debt results in increased renewable energy consumption in nine economies and decreased renewable energy consumption in six economies. The asymmetric FMOLS findings reveal that positive shock in public debt increases renewable energy consumption in nine economies and also decreases renewable energy consumption in nine economies. However, a negative shock in public debt increases renewable energy consumption in 12 economies and decreases renewable energy consumption in 5 economies. Additionally, this research provides numerous policy implications for renewable energy sources in Asian economies. Asian governments should use public debt for the consumption of renewable energy resources. (shrink)

Our fourteenth year of publication begins with an exceptional expansion of our sense of philosophy’s powers and resources. In our special featured article, Brian Schroeder’s groundbreaking essay, “...

Purpose: Discuss the relationship among college students’ media internalized pressure, social physique anxiety, weight control self-efficacy, and sports participation in providing a reference for promoting college students to develop healthy and confident living habits.Methods: Take Southwest University in China as the object, select the subjects by stratified random sampling, and process the data with SPSS19.0 and AMOS21.0 statistical software.Results: Media internalized pressure is positively correlated with social physique anxiety, weight control self-efficacy, and sports participation; social physique anxiety is significantly positively (...) correlated with weight control self-efficacy and sports participation, and weight control self-efficacy is significantly positively correlated with sports participation; media internalized pressure has a direct effect on sports participation, and social physique anxiety and weight control self-efficacy play significant mediating roles in the relationship between media internalized pressure and sports participation, respectively; the chained mediating force of social physique anxiety and weight control self-efficacy also reaches a significant level.Conclusion: Media internalized pressure can influence college students’ sports participation through the direct path as well as indirect paths such as social physique anxiety, the intermediary effect of weight control self-efficacy, and chained intermediary effect of social physique anxiety–weight control self-efficacy, and social physique anxiety is another key factor affecting college students’ sports participation except media internalized pressure. (shrink)

In the spirit of Von Neumann and Morgenstern (Theory of games and economic behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1944), we introduce a notion of network stability. We study the structure of stable economic networks and their associated stable payoff allocations by analyzing the conditions under which complete networks and star networks (both with desirable property of inclusiveness) are stable. We also address conditions for existence and uniqueness of stable set of networks.

This essay breaks new ground in defending the view that contemporary care-based ethics and early Confucian ethics share some important common ground. Luo also introduces the notion of relational virtue in an attempt to bridge a conceptual gap between relational caring ethics and agent-based virtue ethics, and to make the connections between the ethics of care and Confucian ethics philosophically clearer and more defensible.

A prefrontal control system that is less mature than the limbic reward system in adolescence is thought to impede self-regulatory abilities, which could contribute to poor dietary choices and obesity. We, therefore, aimed to examine whether structural morphology of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are associated with dietary decisions and obesity in children and adolescents. Seventy-one individuals between the ages of 8–22 years participated in this study; each participant completed a computer-based food choice task and a T1- and T2-weighted (...) structural brain scans. Two indices of obesity were assessed, including age- and sex-specific body mass index and waist-to-height ratio. The behavioral task included rating 60 food stimuli for tastiness, healthiness, and liking. Based on each participant’s self-ratings, 100 binary food choices were then made utilizing a computer mouse. Dietary “self-control” was calculated as the proportion of trials where the individual chose the healthier food item over the total number of trials. Cortical thickness and amygdala subnuclei volumes were quantified using FreeSurfer 6.0 and CIT168 atlas, respectively. We found that WHtR was negatively associated with the thickness of bilateral superior frontal, left superior temporal, right insula, and right inferior temporal regions. We also found WHtR to be positively associated with the volume of the central nucleus region of the amygdala, after adjusting for the hemisphere, age, sex, and intracranial volumes. A similar data pattern was observed when BMIz was used. Moreover, we found that across all participants, thinner right superior frontal cortex and larger left CEN volumes predicted lower dietary self-control. These results suggest that differential development of the PFC and amygdala relate to obesity and dietary self-control. Further longitudinal studies are merited to determine causal relationships among altered PFC to amygdala neural circuitry, dietary self-control, and obesity. (shrink)

Resumo: A China promove ativamente a prosperidade comum e resolve a contradição do desequilíbrio do desenvolvimento. A capitalização tornou-se o pano de fundo da prosperidade comum. Como entender as mudanças na conotação da prosperidade comum e seus fatores de influência, no contexto da capitalização, tornou-se o tema deste artigo. Acredita-se que o desequilíbrio entre ativos e renda do trabalho e a nova forma de geração de valor são as razões pelas quais a prosperidade comum é difícil de alcançar. A fim (...) de provar a racionalidade dessa conclusão, este artigo examina a questão da capitalização a partir da perspectiva crítica da economia política marxista e toma o caso de capitalização da China como um exemplo para explorar os desafios práticos e os desafios ideológicos enfrentados pela prosperidade comum. Este texto analisa uma nova forma de fetichismo - a essência do fetichismo financeiro introduz o conceito de valor narrativo e revela a distorção e a erosão do valor do fetichismo financeiro sobre os valores das pessoas e o mistério do valor narrativo. (shrink)

The paper has seriously explored the triple meanings of death in western philosophy by taking the instance of Socrates’ death. Comparing to God, the westernphilosophy emphasizes that death is necessary. Comparing to the materials, the western philosophy emphasizes that death is happy. Comparing to the man, the western philosophy emphasizes that death is independent.

This essay breaks new ground in defending the view that contemporary care-based ethics and early Confucian ethics share some important common ground. Luo also introduces the notion of relational virtue in an attempt to bridge a conceptual gap between relational caring ethics and agent-based virtue ethics, and to make the connections between the ethics of care and Confucian ethics philosophically clearer and more defensible.

Bioethical debates on the use of human embryos and oocytes for stem cell research have often been criticized for the lack of empirical insights into the perceptions and experiences of the women and couples who are asked to donate these tissues in the IVF clinic. Empirical studies that have investigated the attitudes of IVF patients and citizens on the donation of their embryos and oocytes have been scarce and have focused predominantly on the situation in Europe and Australia. This article (...) examines the viewpoints on the donation of embryos for stem cell research among IVF patients and students in China. Research into the perceptions of patients is based on in-depth interviews with IVF patients and IVF clinicians. Research into the attitudes of students is based on a quantitative survey study. The empirical findings in this paper indicate that perceptions of the donation of human embryos for stem cell research in China are far more diverse and complex than has commonly been suggested. Claims that ethical concerns regarding the donation and use of embryos and oocytes for stem cell research are typical for Western societies but absent in China cannot be upheld. The article shows that research into the situated perceptions and cultural specificities of human tissue donation can play a crucial role in the deconstruction of politicized bioethical argumentation and the assumptions about “others” that underlie socio-ethical debates on the moral dilemmas of technology developments in the life sciences. (shrink)

For knowledge- and invention-based industries, scholars have introduced the firm value, which is composed of traditional financial capital and intangible intellectual capital, and Tobin’s Q, which is the commonly used approach for intellectual capital valuation. Scholars have thus evaluated firm valuation appropriately by considering corporate governance. This study applies the multi-regression model to present a discussion on the value relevance of intellectual capital and corporate governance concerning the tourism industry in Taiwan. The results show that intellectual capital is positively related (...) to firm valuation, and that corporate governance influences the positive relationship between intellectual capital and firm valuation. The tourism industry must focus on intellectual capital and corporate governance. (shrink)

Social exclusion has a significant impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior. Some behavioral studies investigated how social exclusion affects pain empathy. Conclusions were inconsistent, and there is a lack of clarity in identifying which component of pain empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, we used a Cyberball task to manipulate feelings of social exclusion. Two groups participated in the same pain empathy task while we recorded event-related potentials when participants viewed static images of body parts (...) in painful and neutral situations. The results showed early N2 differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in the central regions in both groups. The pattern at the late controlled processing stage was different. Parietal P3 amplitudes for painful pictures were significantly smaller than those for neutral pictures in the social exclusion group; they did not differ in the social inclusion group. We observed a parietal late positive potential differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in both groups. LPP amplitudes were significantly smaller in the social exclusion group than those in the social inclusion group for painful stimuli. Our results indicate that social exclusion does not affect empathic responses during the early emotional sharing stage. However, it down-regulates empathic responses at the late cognitive controlled stage, and this modulation is attenuated gradually. The current study provides neuroscientific evidence of how social exclusion dynamically influences pain empathy. (shrink)