Drawing on the behavioral theory, this study examines how the misalignment between a firm's environmental effort and the level of subsidies received from the government in affecting the firm's investment in non-environmental R&D. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2008 to 2019 and using polynomial regression techniques, our findings reveal that firms in the “low effort-high subsidies” group exhibit lower non-environmental R&D intensity compared to firms in the “high effort-low subsidies” group. This study contributes to the (...) literature by shedding light on the interplay between corporate environmental efforts, government subsidies, and non-environmental R&D investment. The findings suggest the importance of aligning the environmental efforts of firms with subsidy levels from the government to effectively allocate resources for different types of R&D. The implications of this research suggest that firms should carefully consider aligning their environmental efforts with government subsidies to optimize their investment in non-environmental R&D and overall innovation strategy. Furthermore, the study indicates that firms and governments should prudently balance the relationship between environmental R&D and non-environmental R&D to avoid any negative impact on the latter. (shrink)

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 this article, I explore the promise and pitfalls of medium as environment by tracking the twin developments of environmental thinking and set design in China, considering it as a problematic of epistemology, technology, and aesthetics. I treat huanjing (environment) as a neologism, a new episteme, a dispositif, and a mode of power, taking set design as the companion medium that reconnects art and technology, aesthetics and politics. Reconceptualizing set, design, and environment at the intersection of industrial design and progressive (...) education, I focus on modernist and propagandistic practice of set design in China in the 1930s and ’40s, moving from set design in film and theater to the design and practice of human/environment that constitutes the landscape of the social. How these aesthetic and technical experiments rework the social will help us reconfigure the human in the reassemblage of our medium/environment complex. (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)

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)

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 ...

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)

Ben shu zi xi shu li le yang ming xue zhong yao ren wu Zou Dongguo xian sheng de jia shi pu xi, you xue jiang hui xing zhuang, bing fu you Zou shi jia zu ren wu xiao zhuan.

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 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 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 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。.

Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as ontology, possibility, explanation, induction, counterfactuals, time, determinism, and fundamentality. I suggest that laws are fundamental facts that govern the world by constraining its physical possibilities. I examine three hallmarks of laws-simplicity, exactness, and objectivity-and discuss whether and how they may be (...) associated with laws of physics. (shrink)

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。.

Let $\mathscr {C}$ be a class of finite and infinite graphs that is closed under induced subgraphs. The well-known Łoś–Tarski Theorem from classical model theory implies that $\mathscr {C}$ is definable in first-order logic by a sentence $\varphi $ if and only if $\mathscr {C}$ has a finite set of forbidden induced finite subgraphs. This result provides a powerful tool to show nontrivial characterizations of graphs of small vertex cover, of bounded tree-depth, of bounded shrub-depth, etc. in terms of forbidden (...) induced finite subgraphs. Furthermore, by the Completeness Theorem, we can compute from $\varphi $ the corresponding forbidden induced subgraphs. This machinery fails on finite graphs as shown by our results: –There is a class $\mathscr {C}$ of finite graphs that is definable in first-order logic and closed under induced subgraphs but has no finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs.–Even if we only consider classes $\mathscr {C}$ of finite graphs that can be characterized by a finite set of forbidden induced subgraphs, such a characterization cannot be computed from a first-order sentence $\varphi $ that defines $\mathscr {C}$ and the size of the characterization cannot be bounded by $f(|\varphi |)$ for any computable function f.Besides their importance in graph theory, the above results also significantly strengthen similar known theorems for arbitrary structures. (shrink)

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)