自然人，如何成為道德／法律權利的主體 法哲學，又叫做法理學， 自19世紀後就因「自然權利」而展開長時間的論爭，延續到今天。 這是「自然法論」與「法實證主義」之間的辯論， 固然推進了專家與學院研究， 但也因很多走向概念化與形式化，漸失與社會及人的連結， 權利主體及方法論轉變的內涵，逐漸被忽略。 法哲學要跟社會對話，重探方法論勢必不可省。 19世紀前的法哲學都是自然法學，但對自然法則有不同的理解方式。本書從法哲學的視野，分成三個部分，探討自然法的起源和轉折、現代自然權利論及當代的論辯。陳妙芬以歷史性及分析性的詮釋方法，探討各時期自然法論 的特色，指出霍布斯的自然主義法形上學為關鍵的轉折，影響了盧梭檢視人性論、自然狀態及社會契約等假設，透過盧梭及康德完成自然權利論，將自然法轉型成為理性法，其最重要的貢獻為建立「權利主體」概念——自然人成 為道德及法律上的權利主體。《法哲學》藉助新康德哲學家卡西勒的盧梭辯證詮釋，梳理法文和德文原著，將基礎研究帶入19世紀至今的論辯，對圍繞自然法與實證法的問題糾結，包括法治與正義等議題，提供宏觀和微細考察 。 專業推薦 在此一民主政治深陷危機的年代，重新審視作為其理論基礎的自然法傳統是一件刻不容緩的事，本書無疑是近年來對此議題最系統性且兼具學術深度與現實關懷的傑作。 ──葉浩（政治大學政治系副教授） 《法哲學：自然法研究》是中文世界第一本系統性介紹自然法思想史的鉅著。陳妙芬教授以平易近人的文字，引領讀者思考「法律是什麼？」的大哉問。不論專業法律人或關心公共事務的一般公民，本書都是必讀佳作。 ──王鵬翔 （中央研究院法律學研究所副研究員） 本書作者使用自己的、清楚的語言風格，完整探索一切法律思維與根本人性的牽繫，藉此在尋找法律本質的路途上鮮明浮現一個勇敢與真誠自然人的影像。 ──黃榮堅（臺灣大學法律學院名譽教授）.

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...) character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has been a growing point of interest in medical education yet has not been assessed in the field of bioethics. This study evaluated the accuracy of ChatGPT-3.5 (April 2023 version) in answering text-based, multiple choice bioethics questions at the level of US third-year and fourth-year medical students. A total of 114 bioethical questions were identified from the widely utilised question banks UWorld and AMBOSS. Accuracy, bioethical categories, difficulty levels, specialty data, error analysis and character count (...) were analysed. We found that ChatGPT had an accuracy of 59.6%, with greater accuracy in topics surrounding death and patient–physician relationships and performed poorly on questions pertaining to informed consent. Of all the specialties, it performed best in paediatrics. Yet, certain specialties and bioethical categories were under-represented. Among the errors made, it tended towards content errors and application errors. There were no significant associations between character count and accuracy. Nevertheless, this investigation contributes to the ongoing dialogue on artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in healthcare and medical education, advocating for further research to fully understand AI systems’ capabilities and constraints in the nuanced field of medical bioethics. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

The wave function in quantum mechanics presents an interesting challenge to our understanding of the physical world. In this paper, I show that the wave function can be understood as four intrinsic relations on physical space. My account has three desirable features that the standard account lacks: it does not refer to any abstract mathematical objects, it is free from the usual arbitrary conventions, and it explains why the wave function has its gauge degrees of freedom, something that are usually (...) put into the theory by hand. Hence, this account has implications for debates in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. First, by removing references to mathematical objects, it provides a framework for nominalizing quantum mechanics. Second, by excising superfluous structure such as overall phase, it reveals the intrinsic structure postulated by quantum mechanics. Moreover, it also removes a major obstacle to ``wave function realism.''. (shrink)

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’.1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous, and that what is implied by its usage will certainly depend on context, particularly in medical settings. Hence, the creation of a unifying definition is less critical than clarification of the implied and intended meanings of each instance of the term’s use. We further argue that interpreting the use of terms like ‘invasiveness’ in medical practice is complicated by the embedding of each use of this term in a different ‘language game’, whereby words and their meanings are understood by an in-group familiar with …. (shrink)

A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), "it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time.” Such an extraordinary feature may appear unattainable in a world like ours. In this paper, I show that it can be achieved in a simple way and (...) discuss its implications for metaphysics and philosophy of science, including natural properties, free will, explanation, and modality. First, I propose a precise definition of strong determinism. Next, I discuss its philosophical ramifications and a toy example. Finally, I provide a realistic example of a strongly deterministic (and simple) physical theory---the Everettian Wentaculus. A surprising consequence is that whether or not our world is strongly deterministic may be empirically underdetermined. (shrink)

Two of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics are (1) what gives rise to the arrow of time and (2) what the ontology of quantum mechanics is. They are difficult because the fundamental dynamical laws of physics do not privilege an arrow of time, and the quantum-mechanical wave function describes a high-dimensional reality that is radically different from our ordinary experiences. -/- In this paper, I characterize and elaborate on the ``Wentaculus” theory, a new approach to time’s (...) arrow in a quantum universe that offers a unified solution to both problems. Central to the Wentaculus are (i) Density Matrix Realism, the idea that the quantum state of the universe is objective but can be impure, and (ii) the Initial Projection Hypothesis, a new law of nature that selects a unique initial quantum state. On the Wentaculus, the quantum state of the universe is sufficiently simple to be a law, and the arrow of time can be traced back to an exact boundary condition. It removes the intrinsic vagueness of the Past Hypothesis, eliminates the Statistical Postulate, provides a higher degree of theoretical unity, and contains a natural realization of “strong determinism." I end by responding to four recent objections. In a companion paper, I elaborate on Density Matrix Realism. (shrink)

CONTINUOUS MODEL THEORY CHAPTER I TOPOLOGICAL PRELIMINARIES. Notation Throughout the monograph our mathematical notation does not differ drastically from ...

以明末清初理學文本與話語為主要研究對象， 試圖重探明清之際思想轉型的重大議題。 從儒者的生死觀、工夫論、舜的聖人形象、孝行與家禮、 夫婦之倫、人性論等主題， 分析明清之際儒學如何在歷史發展及反思中自我修正與轉化， 建構一個能兼顧個人道德修養與家庭社群人倫，能對治晚明學風之弊， 並在日用人倫中重建社會秩序的思想體系。 呂妙芬新作《成聖與家庭人倫：宗教對話脈絡下的明清之際儒學》鎖定明清之際（以十七世紀為主）的理學為主要研究範圍，試圖以更豐富而新穎的史料、新的研究議題與視角，來探討明清之際儒學的發展與轉型，也試圖回應一 些過去學者提出的看法。 呂妙芬在本書裡認為理學的信念在清代仍是支持政治與社會的價值體系，理學的議題也仍是士人關心的問題，清代理學思想與話語也不盡然因襲舊說，而有其推陳出新之處，只是這方面較未被充分探討認知。 《成聖與家庭人倫》一書也強調當時儒學是在高度宗教對話的語境中發言，調整自我義理內涵，書中亦論及儒學宗教化與庶民化的現象，及對過去啓蒙論述的反思。 本書共分三部，第一部「成聖、不朽、家庭人倫」包含三章，主要探討明清之際儒學發展的延續與變化，並標出「成聖」與「家庭人倫」為核心議題。第一章〈生死觀的新發展〉探討明清之際理學話語中，是否出現類似個體靈魂 的概念？是否有關於死後想像的論述？第二章〈儒門聖賢皆孝子〉延續了上一章的討論，主要根據的文本也相近，焦點則轉到清初儒學與晚明儒學的差異。第三章〈聖人處兄弟之變〉考察明清士人對於《孟子》記載舜、象兄弟故 事的不同詮釋，說明士人對於舜的詮釋反映了他們對儒學理想與聖人形象的思索。 第二部「血脈與道脈的雙重認同」包含兩章，內容則離開思想觀念的分析，轉而探討萬里尋親、居家拜聖賢兩種實踐行為，藉此說明家族血脈與儒學道脈在儒家士人心目中具有同等重要的地位。第四章選擇與宗族文化密切相關的 萬里尋親孝行為主題，支持此類孝行的理念正是儒家的孝道思想，以及「家」作為永恆歸屬的觀念。第五章討論明清士人在家拜聖賢的禮儀實踐。明清時期祭拜儒家聖賢之禮，除了在孔廟、鄉賢祠、學校和書院中，或在某些民間 宗教的寺廟中舉行外，它也以一種堅持儒學正統、不與其他宗教混合的方式，走入士人家庭。 第三部「宗教對話語境下的儒學論述」共有兩章，分別討論夫婦之倫、人性論兩個主題。第六章探討儒學在夫婦之道的神聖性與戒淫之間的張力，以及因發言語境之差異所形成關於夫婦之倫的不同論述面向。第七章是針對明清氣 學人性論的探討。結論部分則分別就「從晚明到清初學術思想的延續與創新」、「儒學的宗教關懷與庶民化傾向」、「再思17世紀儒學轉型在中國思想史上的意義」三方面，總結說明本書的主要論點。.

本书以社会文化史的研究取径，研究有明一代最重要的学术运动——阳明学之兴衰。除了循时序描述阳明学派的建构、发展和地方讲会历史外，本书探讨的内容还包括：学者个人思想内涵、论辩议题、学派内部差异、学者个人乃 至群体的行动及其政治意涵、明代教育与科举制度及其衍生之士人群体在整体社会结构上的变化等相关社会现象。所涵盖的向度从个人内心世界延展到政治社会层面，是一部试图将阳明学置放于明代文化脉络中进行研讨的著述。 .

Harry Frankfurt had insightfully pointed out that an agent acts freely when he acts in accord with the mental states with which he identifies. The concept of identification rightly captures the ownership condition (something being one’s really own), which plays a significant role in the issues of freedom and moral responsibility. For Frankfurt, identification consists of one’s forming second-order volitions, endorsing first-order desires, and issuing in his actions wholeheartedly. An agent not only wants to φ but also fully embraces his (...) desire to φ (and φ). Frankfurt’s official theory above encounters some serious problems, especially since it is believed that his concept of wholehearted identification is too strong to be necessary for freedom. In this paper, I propose that we can uncouple identification from wholeheartedness and thus get two different senses of identification: weak identification and strong identification. Then, I argue that this distinction does a better job than Frankfurt’s official theory. On the one hand, weak identification is enough for ownership and freedom and thus more promising than strong identification; on the other hand, this distinction has an attractive implication that it fits well with our intuition about the degree of freedom and responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract: Some first person statements, such as ‘I am in pain’, are thought to be immune to error through misidentification (IEM): I cannot be wrong that I am in pain because—while I know that someone is in pain—I have mistaken that person for myself. While IEM is typically associated with the self-ascription of psychological properties, some philosophers attempt to draw anti-Cartesian conclusions from the claim that certain physical self-ascriptions are also IEM. In this paper, I will examine whether some physical (...) self-ascriptions are in fact IEM, and—if they are—what role that fact is supposed to play in arguments for the anti-Cartesian claim that self-consciousness is consciousness of oneself as a material object. I will argue that if we accept the assumptions required to show that physical self-ascriptions are IEM, then IEM cannot play the role it needs to play in these anti-Cartesian arguments. (shrink)

This study examined the metaphorical expressions of death in Chinese quadrisyllabic idioms. Specifically, the research investigated the cultural connotations and implications conveyed through death-related idioms by analyzing metaphorical examples. Adopting the ‘Great Chain of Being’ framework (Lakoff and Turner, 1989), a total of 579 death-related idioms with metaphorical and euphemistic meanings were classified and examined. These idioms were further categorized based on the gender of the deceased as well as the initial metaphors and expressions employed. Our research findings highlight cultural (...) parallels evident in death-related idiomatic expressions. Both English and Chinese languages employ metaphors like “DEATH IS SLEEP” and “DEATH IS DEPARTURE.” These pervasive metaphors can be attributed to shared aspects of the human experience. Meanwhile, our findings also revealed a strong intertwining of metaphors and culture within death-related idioms, such that the metaphor “TO DIE IS TO FALL” is frequently used in Mandarin but is not as common in English. The metaphorical mapping mechanisms employed in these idioms reflect the Chinese way of projecting thoughts onto objects and highlight the unique features of the Chinese language. Chinese culture places great emphasis on social classes, relationships, and hierarchical structures. These notions are not only reflected in social etiquette and how one handles interactions, but are also evident in euphemisms and idioms associated with death. (shrink)

Guiding you through the topics that shape aesthetics, this introduction explores the truth, meaning, taste, aesthetic merit and the role of perception. Each chapter offers a wealth of examples from Asia, including Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Tan Tai Yong, Kueh Appreciation Day and dragon kiln pottery. They deal with controversies and address central questions, such as: When are artworks considered dangerous? Why does Socrates recommend the banishment of the poets? What are the problems and challenges (...) posed by forgery? Here is a creative and accessible introduction that inspires a love for art and aesthetics. (shrink)

This article explores the profound impact of visualism and visual perception in the context of medical imaging diagnostics. It emphasizes the intricate interplay among vision, embodiment, subjectivity, language, and historicity within the realm of medical science and technology, with a specific focus on image consciousness. The study delves into the role of subjectivity in perception, facilitating the communication of opacity and historicity to the perceiving individual. Additionally, it scrutinizes the image interpretation process, drawing parallels to text interpretation and highlighting the (...) influence of personal biases and individuality in medical practice. By revisiting Husserl’s conceptualization of “image consciousness” and introducing the notion of “image theme”, the paper seeks to establish a theoretical framework for making sense of images within the context of technological interpretation. A key objective is to enhance the phenomenology of technology through a systematic analysis of medical imaging diagnosis, contributing to an expanded epistemological foundation for medical practice. The article recognizes that the construction of medical knowledge incorporates subjective elements, especially within a historical context. The interpretation of images involves both instrumental and expert interpretation, with human subjectivity playing a crucial role. The article asserts that human creativity and conscious engagement are indispensable in interpreting all medical images. (shrink)

This study examines the relation between firms' corporate philanthropic giving and their performance in three other social domains - employee relations, environmental issues, and product safety. Based on a sample of 384 U.S. companies and using data pooled from 1998 through 2000, we find that worse performers in the other social areas are both more likely to make charitable contributions and that the extent of their giving is larger than for better performers. Analyses of each separate area of social performance, (...) however, indicate that the relation between giving and negative social performance only holds for the environmental issues and product safety areas. We find no significant association between corporate philanthropy and employee relations concerns. In general, these findings suggest that corporate philanthropy may be more a tool of legitimization than a measure of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

本书是一本关于陈冲体验人生感悟人生的书法集子。内容包括:悟道篇;明理篇;做人篇;处世篇等。.

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments (...) about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task. (shrink)

本书分为三个部分。第一部分是自序,包括前言、序、代序、序言等;第二部分是他序,即为他人所撰之序;第三部分是自跋。.

Chen Guying’s _Laozi_ includes some of the most significant traditional commentary and influential contemporary scholarship. This book completely changed _Laozi_ studies in China, and its English translation gives scholars a unique inroad to Chinese perspectives on the _Laozi_.

本书收录了作者22篇文章。全书共分三部分,第一部分七篇,是基本的概念分析工作;第二部分八篇,是对文化、艺术等方面的思考;第三部分六篇,是对西方哲学的研究。.

This paper defends a Hackingian approach to the scientific realism debate by arguing against mainstream realists’ and antirealists’ common claim that no experimental arguments for the reality of posited entities can be theory-independent. Opposing this claim, I argue that some experimental arguments can warrant belief in the existence of entities without depending on the truth of the theories that posit the entities and describe their properties and the theories that explain the interactions between the entities and the experimental devices. To (...) achieve this goal, I investigate Hacking’s case of electron spraying, the famous experiment of positioning atoms by means of a scanning tunnelling microscope, and some novel experiments that use Ashkin’s optical tweezers. By introducing the distinction between theoretical properties and ontic properties, I argue that we can build up some theory-independent criteria of reality on the basis of ontic properties. Manipulability is an ontic property and the manipulation criterion is thus a theory-independent one, which should be reexamined and used for those experimental cases along a local approach to the realism debate. Resisting the mainstream realists’ and antirealists’ objections, I contend that some experiments using optical tweezers can warrant belief in the existence of the experimented entities without depending on theories. (shrink)

本书内容包括:生活和著作;查拉图斯特拉如是说;上帝的死亡;狐独;自我的提升——超人;自主的道德;冲创意志;反德意志国家主义等。.

本书主要内容有:先秦社会与伦理思想、德治与法治、伦理道德的理论基础、伦理精神和道德原则、道德规范等。.

Why is education in the open society not open? Why is this option not even considered in the debate over which education is most suited for the open society? Many consider such an option irresponsible. What, then, are the minimal responsibilities of education? The present volume raises these questions and many more. It is a book we have been waiting for. It offers a rare combination of two seemingly opposite, unyielding attitudes: critical and friendly. Dr. Yehezkely applies a rigorous fallibilist-critical (...) approach to issues regarding contemporary education. His diagnosis is that the source of our trouble is the closed undemocratic character of education, which causes education to become, in effect, a fifth column in the open democratic society. Following Popper, he concedes that democracy is every bit as flawed and as problematic as its enemies accuse it of being, particularly in education; still it is our only hope, since open responsible debate of vital problems cannot do without it. Democracy is risky: yet its absence guarantees failure, especially in closed undemocratic education, even when inspired by the most progressive ideas extant, charged with tremendous good will, and executed with selfless love and devotion. Kibbutz education is a case in point. (shrink)

本书包括:科学与技术;技术哲学;技术;技术与社会;产业与产业技术;可持续发展等内容。.

Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of Daoist somatic experiences against the disanalogy objection. The disanalogy objection posits that mystical experiences, in contrast to sense perceptions, are not socially verifiable and thereby lack prima facie epistemic (...) value. We argue that some Daoist mystical bodily states, being essentially spatiotemporal, are exempt from this challenge. This leads to a broader understanding of mysticism and offers a partial resolution to the disanalogy objection. (shrink)

In his Knowledge and Belief (1962), Hintikka establishes his system of epistemic logic with the KK (Knowing that One Knows, in symbols, Kp→KKp) principle (KK for short). However, his system of epistemic logic and the KK principle are grounded upon his strong notion of knowledge, which requires that knowledge is infallible, that is, it makes further inquiry pointless, and becomes ‘discussion-stopper’; knowledge implies truth, to wit, cognitive agents will not be mistaken in their knowledge; cognitive agents will be ‘perfect logicians’, (...) i.e. they have infinitive capability of logical inference. Hintikka calls the argument for KK from the strong notion of knowledge as the ‘transcendental argument’ for KK. Obviously, the strong notion of knowledge is far away from our ordinary conception of knowledge; based on such a strong sense of knowledge, epistemic logic has met the problem of logical omnipotence, and is difficult to apply in our ordinary cognitive practice. Moreover, there is no close connection of the KK principle with internalism or externalism. (shrink)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis asserts that people who organize their experience with the help of different languages can have different pictures of the world.

All concepts, methods, and techniques of the philosophy of language arise from its conceptions of language. Conceptions of language have determined the character of the philosophy of language and the direction of its philosophical research. Various schools and currents within the philosophy of language differ from each other, mainly in the way they understand the referential character of the sign—that is, the relationship between the meaning of a word and its referential object.

本书围绕“儒学与全球化”的中心议题,就全球化与文化多元发展的关系、全球化发展趋势下儒学的价值及面临的问题等议题,收入了64篇文章。.

In the contemporary epistemological literature, peer disagreement is often taken to be an instance of a more general phenomenon of “higher-order evidence.” Correspondingly, its epistemic significance is often thought to turn on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence in general. This chapter attempts to evaluate this claim, and in doing so to clarify some points of unclarity in the current literature – both about what it is for evidence to be “higher-order,” and about the relationship between disagreement and higher-order evidence. (...) We will begin by considering some candidate definitions of “higher-order evidence,” and offering our own definition that attempts to capture the phenomenon of interest. We will then consider, in light of this definition, whether disagreement and its epistemic significance are best-understood as a kind of higher-order evidence. We’ll argue that although peer disagreement can be epistemically significant qua higher-order evidence, this role doesn’t exhaust its significance, and that it can also serve as straightforward first-order evidence. Finally, we’ll suggest that inattention to this latter point has made broadly conciliatory views about peer disagreement seem somewhat easier to resist than they in fact are. (shrink)

Banks play a unique role in society. They not only maximize profits but also consider the interests of stakeholders. We investigate whether banks consider firms’ pollution records in their lending decisions. The evidence shows that banks offer significantly higher loan spreads, higher total borrowing costs, shorter loan maturities, and greater collateral to firms with higher levels of chemical pollution. The costly effects are stronger for borrowers with greater risk and weaker corporate governance. Further, the results show that banks with higher (...) social responsibility account for their borrowers’ environmental performance and charge higher loan spreads to those with poor performance. These results support the idea that banks with higher social responsibility can promote the practice of business ethics in firms. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions became the most widely read book about science in the twentieth century. His terms 'paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' entered everyday speech, but they remain controversial. In the second half of the twentieth century, the new field of cognitive science combined empirical psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. In this book, the theories of concepts developed by cognitive scientists are used to evaluate and extend Kuhn's most influential ideas. Based on case studies of the Copernican revolution, (...) the discovery of nuclear fission, and an elaboration of Kuhn's famous 'ducks and geese' example of concept learning, this volume, first published in 2006, offers accounts of the nature of normal and revolutionary science, the function of anomalies, and the nature of incommensurability. (shrink)

Jin Yuelin (1895?1984), a Chinese logician and philosopher, is greatly influenced by Hume's and Russell's philosophies. How should we respond to Hume's problem of induction? This is an important clue to understand Jin's whole philosophical career. The first section of this paper gives a brief historical review of Russell and Jin. The second section outlines Hume's skeptical arguments against causality and induction. The third section expounds Russell's justification of induction by discussing his views on Hume's skepticism, causality, principle of induction, (...) and empirical postulates. The fourth section clarifies Jin's justification of induction by discussing his critique of Hume's epistemology and his arguments for the reliability of causality and the eternal truth and apriority of the principle of induction. The final section compares Jin's justification of induction with Russell's and concludes that there are similarities and differences between their projects and that both their attempts fail. This paper takes the similar responses to the problem of induction by Jin and Russell to demonstrate the communication that there has been between Chinese philosophers and the Western ones. (shrink)