Both thinkings on Dao in Chinese philosophy and metaphysics in Western philosophy investigate things on a spiritual level that transcends experience, but there are incommensurable differences between them. The objective of “metaphysics” is ontological knowledge about nature from the perspective of epistemological “truth-pursuing”. Western metaphysics is thus a “metaphysics of nature”. Dao in Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, more often manifests itself in “good-pursuing” by means of the internal, experiential pursuit of moral stature and spiritual security. Philosophy of Dao (...) is thus a “metaphysics of ethics”. The cause of this difference can be traced back to the differences between the rational tradition of the West, characterized by the dualism of the subject and the object, and the moral tradition of China, characterized by the integration of man and nature. (shrink)

GIS is important equipment in the substation system in a complex microgrid network. Due to the long-term service in harsh operation environments, the electrical performance of GIS equipment will be seriously affected. Therefore, the regular maintenance of GIS equipment in the substation system is a routine task so as to ensure the normal operation of the microgrid networks. The traditional method relies on manual labor, where not only with the low operation efficiency but also regarding some maintenance, labors cannot reach (...) the inside of the GIS equipment, which seriously restricted the completion of GIS equipment maintenance operation. Based on the above analysis, a basic configuration of a GIS equipment maintenance robot with smart structure, convenient control, and stable motion characteristic has been proposed in this paper. Through the optimization design of the chassis adsorption system, the GIS inspection robot can achieve hanging and vertical adsorption inside the GIS equipment and some special motion status. In this way, the entire GIS equipment can be inspected without blind spots. Through establishing the mechanical model of the GIS inspection robot under the hanging and vertical motion state, the robustness and stability of the GIS inspection robot in the special status have been analyzed, and the corresponding GIS inspection robot robust stability motion control method has also been proposed. Finally, through the integrated design of mechanical system and hardware and software control system, the GIS inspection robot physical prototype system has been developed and the maintenance operation experiment has been carried out in Hunan Electric Power Company Maintenance Company through simulating the internal GIS equipment. The physical prototype can realize the basic movement and special movement in internal GIS equipment without any blind spots and complete the inspection task of GIS equipment operation; the movement of GIS robot is dexterous and stable in the whole operation process, which has strong robust stability. The research of GIS inspection robot in the complex microgrid networks has important theoretical significance and practical application value for the intelligent operation and maintenance management of substation system in complex microgrid networks. (shrink)

A core feature of drug-resistant epilepsy is hyperexcitability in the motor cortex, and low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is a suitable treatment for seizures. However, the antiepileptic effect causing network reorganization has rarely been studied. Here, we assessed the impact of rTMS on functional network connectivity in resting functional networks and their relation to treatment response. Fourteen patients with medically intractable epilepsy received inhibitive rTMS with a figure-of-eight coil over the vertex for 10 days spread across two weeks. We designed (...) a 6-week follow-up phase divided into four time points to investigate FNC and rTMS-induced timing-dependent plasticity, such as seizure frequency and abnormal interictal discharges on electroencephalography. For psychiatric comorbidities, the Hamilton Depression Scale and the Hamilton Anxiety Scale were applied to measure depression and anxiety before and after rTMS. FNC was also compared to that of a cohort of 17 healthy control subjects. The after-effects of rTMS included all subjects that achieved the significant decrease rate of more than 50% in interictal epileptiform discharges and seizure frequency, 12 patients with the reduction rate above 50% compared to the baseline, as well as emotional improvements in depression and anxiety. In the analysis of RSNs, we found a higher synchronization between the sensorimotor network and posterior default-mode network in epileptic patients than in healthy controls. In contrast to pre-rTMS, the results demonstrated a weaker FNC between the anterior DMN and SMN after rTMS, while the FNC between the aDMN and dorsal attention network was greater. Importantly, the depressive score was anticorrelated with the FNC of the aDMN-SMN, which was markedly different in the good and bad response groups treated with rTMS. Based on the vertex suppression by rTMS, it is possible to achieve temporary clinical efficacy by modulating network reorganization in the DMN and SMN for patients with refractory epilepsy. (shrink)

Sequential recommendation algorithm can predict the next action of a user by modeling the user’s interaction sequence with an item. However, most sequential recommendation models only consider the absolute positions of items in the sequence, ignoring the time interval information between items, and cannot effectively mine user preference changes. In addition, existing models perform poorly on sparse data sets, which make a poor prediction effect for short sequences. To address the above problems, an improved sequential recommendation algorithm based on short-sequence (...) enhancement and temporal self-attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, a backward prediction model is trained first, to predict the prior items in the user sequence. Then, the reverse prediction model is used to generate a batch of pseudo-historical items before the initial items of the short sequence, to achieve the goal of enhancing the short sequence. Finally, the absolute position information and time interval information of the user sequence are modeled, and a time-aware self-attention model is adopted to predict the user’s next action and generate a recommendation list. Various experiments are conducted on two public data sets. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper has excellent performance on both dense and sparse data sets, and its effect is better than that of the state of the art. (shrink)

本书以律师法制建设为主题,围绕律师角色定位、辩护律师权利、律师执业道德与责任这一主旨,收录了40多篇论文,包括“控辩和谐论”、“论辩护权的存在根据”、“论律师对法庭的真实义务”等文章。.

本书从市场失败出发,越出经济学的范畴,以超越现代性的视角,重新评估并构建了经济伦理学。阐明了道德失败同市场与政府失败构成广义经济学的三大失败,美德机制和良知具有超越一般价值取向和规范的意义。.

As a comparative study of the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Confucius, this book explores how they each reflect upon human good and virtue out of their respective cultural assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and philosophical perspectives. It does not simply take one side as a framework to understand the other; rather, it takes them as mirrors for each other and seeks to develop new readings and perspectives of both ethics that would be unattainable if each were studied on its own.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the stock market reaction to green bond issuance announcements for a large, international sample of listed companies. Existing empirical studies find mixed results regarding this issue. Using a sample of 595 green bonds issued between 2014 and 2021, we conducted a series of event studies to analyze the changes in issuer returns and liquidity following the announcements. We find that the market reaction is significantly negative, more severe compared to conventional bond issues, but (...) improves over time. Green bonds issued by companies with poor environmental performance or without prior experience in issuing such bonds generate a more negative market reaction. We also find that stock liquidity improves for issuers with good environmental performance. Our findings have significant implications as they suggest the existence of economies of scale in repeated issuances of green bonds and/or increasing reliability in the bond’s greenness. (shrink)

No research explored intellectual capital about green innovation or environmental management. This study wanted to fill this research gap, and proposed a novel construct – green intellectual capital – to explore the positive relationship between green intellectual capital and competitive advantages of firms. The empirical results of this study showed that the three types of green intellectual capital – green human capital, green structural capital, and green relational capital – had positive effects on competitive advantages of firms. Moreover, this study (...) found that green relational capital was the most common among these three types of green intellectual capital, and the three types of green intellectual capital of Medium & Small Enterprises (SMEs) were all significantly less than those of large enterprises in the information and electronics industry in Taiwan. In sum, companies investing many resources and efforts in green intellectual capital could not only meet the trends of strict international environmental regulations and popular environmental consciousness of consumers, but also eventually obtain corporate competitive advantages. (shrink)

No research explored intellectual capital about green innovation or environmental management. This study wanted to fill this research gap, and proposed a novel construct - green intellectual capital - to explore the positive relationship between green intellectual capital and competitive advantages of firms. The empirical results of this study showed that the three types of green intellectual capital - green human capital, green structural capital, and green relational capital - had positive effects on competitive advantages of firms. Moreover, this study (...) found that green relational capital was the most common among these three types of green intellectual capital, and the three types of green intellectual capital of Medium & Small Enterprises were all significantly less than those of large enterprises in the information and electronics industry in Taiwan. In sum, companies investing many resources and efforts in green intellectual capital could not only meet the trends of strict international environmental regulations and popular environmental consciousness of consumers, but also eventually obtain corporate competitive advantages. (shrink)

An improved image enhancement approach via nonsubsampled contourlet transform is proposed in this article. We constructed a geometric image transform by combining nonsubsampled directional filter banks and a nonlinear mapping function. Here, the NSCT of the input image is first decomposed for L-levels and its noise standard deviation is estimated. It is followed by calculating the noise variance and threshold calculation, and computing the magnitude of the corresponding coefficients in all directional subbands. Then, the nonlinear mapping function is used to (...) modify the NSCT coefficients for each directional subband, which keeps the coefficients of strong edges, amplifies the coefficients of weak edges, and zeros the noise coefficients. Finally, the enhanced image is reconstructed from the modified NSCT coefficients. Three experiments are carried out respectively on images from subjective vision quality and objective evaluation measures. The first experiment is the algorithm performed on images. The subsequent experiments are the information entropy and spatial frequency. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can gain better performance in enhancing the low-contrast parts of an image while keeping its clear edges. (shrink)

Growth mindset refers to our core belief that our talents can be developed through practice, which may influence our thoughts and behaviors. Growth mindset has been studied in a variety of fields, including education, sports, and management. However, few studies have explored whether differences in individuals’ growth mindsets influence college students’ self-reported mental health. Using the Growth Mindset Scale, Adolescent Self-rating Life Events Checklist, and SCL-90 Scale, data was collected from 2,505 freshmen in a University in China. Findings revealed that (...) the students within the growth mindset group scored significantly lower on “mental health issues” and “stress due to life events” than the students in the fixed mindset group. Our findings suggest that individuals with a growth mindset are less prone to mental health problems than individuals with a fixed mindset. (shrink)

The main purpose of this essay is not to give a full-scale and systematic exploration of the historical process concerning the acceptance of Habermas' works in the Chinese-spoken world but to examine the historical effect of Habermas in the Chinese-spoken context and try to find a proper way to establish a good relationship between Habermas and the Chinese-spoken world by discussing the introduction, study, and application of Habermas' most famous work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, by Chinese scholars (...) in recent years. (shrink)

With the development of mobile communication technology, location-based services are booming prosperously. Meanwhile privacy protection has become the main obstacle for the further development of LBS. The k-nearest neighbor search is one of the most common types of LBS. In this paper, we propose an efficient private circular query protocol with high accuracy rate and low computation and communication cost. We adopt the Moore curve to convert two-dimensional spatial data into one-dimensional sequence and encrypt the points of interest information with (...) the Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan homomorphic encryption scheme for privacy-preserving. The proposed scheme performs the secret circular shift of the encrypted POIs information to hide the location of the user without a trusted third party. To reduce the computation and communication cost, we dynamically divide the table of the POIs information according to the value of k. Experiments show that the proposed scheme provides high accuracy query results while maintaining low computation and communication cost. (shrink)

In "Cultural Variation and Cultural Creation in Chinese Biographical Writing and Carnegie's Work" Weidong Zhou discusses the impact on Chinese biographical writing via biographies written in Chinese and translated from English about Andrew Carnegie's life and work. The interpretation of Carnegie's philanthropy includes Chinese traditional cultural concepts such as "righteousness," "cause and effect," and "self-cultivation" which constitute the unique understanding of "philanthropy" in modern Chinese literature. From a "moral model" to "successful person" the overall images following Carnegie can reflect (...) the processes of acceptance of Western "individualism." Zhu argues that Carnegie's example was shaped as a "Youth Idol" in the May Fourth Movement from which the unique route of modernization in Chinese literature and culture can be traced. (shrink)

教育部人文社会科学重点研究基地基金资助全国高校人文社科重点研究基地清华大学高校德育研究中心重大课题项目.

本书以中国共产党八十五年历程中所发生的重大事件为纲,以具体的思想道德建设的理论与实践为目,介绍了中国共产党思想道德建设的理论与实践历程。.

Recent studies have demonstrated neural overlap between resting state activity and self-referential processing. This “rest-self” overlap occurs especially in anterior cortical midline structures like the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (PACC). However, the exact neurotemporal and biochemical mechanisms remain to be identified. Therefore, we conducted a combined electroencephalography (EEG)-magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) study. EEG focused on pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) power changes to assess the degree to which those changes can predict subjects’ perception (and judgment) of subsequent (...) stimuli as high or low self-related. MRS measured resting state concentration of glutamate, focusing on PACC. High pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) alpha power significantly correlated with both perception of stimuli judged to be highly self-related and with resting state glutamate concentrations in the PACC. In sum, our results show (i) pre-stimulus (e.g., prior to stimulus presentation or perception) alpha power and resting state glutamate concentration to mediate rest-self overlap that (ii) dispose or incline subjects to assign high degrees of self-relatedness to perceptual stimuli. (shrink)

Compared with another founder of philosophical anthropology Max Scheler, Plessner is desolated by Chinese academe. His works have not been translated into Chinese systematically, and there are few articles about his life and thoughts. The reasons for this are complicated, but the most important point of these is that Plessner has paid most of his attention to the German problems. However, Plessner’s thought, especially his critique of social radicalism, enlightens us a lot. Plessner’s critique of modernity stimulates us to think (...) about the controversy which broke out between New Left-wingers and Liberalists in the late 20th century and to discern the common ground between the two parties: Radicalism. (shrink)

“Fadheit”, im Sinne des französischen Philosophen und Sinologen Françios Jullien, bedeutet nicht Langeweile, Geschmacklosigkeit oder Indifferentismus, sondern stellt einen grundlegenden Wert der chinesischen Kultur dar. Sie beruht auf Harmonie und enthält als das Ursprüngliche – wie das Wasser, “das später als gebräuchliche Referenz der Fadheit dienen wird”Françios Jullien, Über das Fade – eine Eloge zu Denken und Ästhetik in China. Berlin: Merve Verlag 1999, S. 65. – alle Geschmäcke als Möglichkeiten und verbindet sie untereinander. Von Jullien als das Lebensideal der (...) Chinesen bzw. der chinesischen Intellektuellen angesehen, besagt “Fadheit” eine Lebenshaltung, die dem Gesetz des Neutralen folgt. (shrink)

What is the significance of bodily awareness for bodily action? The orthodox philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy claims that bodily awareness is necessary for bodily action. Whilst O'Shaughnessy's account appears to be consonant with the phenomenology of ordinary agency, it falls afoul to empirical counterexamples. The failure of O'Shaughnessy's account and its cousins might suggest that bodily action does not depend on bodily awareness. On the contrary, I argue that the contrast between the character of afferented and deafferented agency shows that (...) bodily awareness is crucial to explaining the distinctive character of bodily action in neurologically normal agents. In particular, the capacity to feel one's body ‘from the inside’ appears to be a condition on the capacity to act with one's body in a way that is not like remote control. This dependency of capacities is at once empirically adequate and in tune with the phenomenology of ordinary agency. (shrink)

Although emerging evidence has implicated structural/functional abnormalities of patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder, definitive neuroimaging markers remain obscured due to inconsistent or incompatible findings, especially for structural imaging. Furthermore, brain differences defined by statistical analysis are difficult to implement individual prediction. The present study has employed the machine learning techniques under the unified framework in neuroimaging to identify the neuroimaging markers of patients with ASD and distinguish them from typically developing controls. To enhance the interpretability of the machine learning model, (...) the study has processed three levels of assessments including model-level assessment, feature-level assessment, and biology-level assessment. According to these three levels assessment, the study has identified neuroimaging markers of ASD including the opercular part of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, the orbital part of right inferior frontal gyrus, right rolandic operculum, right olfactory cortex, right gyrus rectus, right insula, left inferior parietal gyrus, bilateral supramarginal gyrus, bilateral angular gyrus, bilateral superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, and left inferior temporal gyrus. In addition, negative correlations between the communication skill score in the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and regional gray matter volume in the gyrus rectus, left middle temporal gyrus, and inferior temporal gyrus have been detected. A significant negative correlation has been found between the communication skill score in ADOS_G and the orbital part of the left inferior frontal gyrus. A negative correlation between verbal skill score and right angular gyrus and a significant negative correlation between non-verbal communication skill and right angular gyrus have been found. These findings in the study have suggested the GM alteration of ASD and correlated with the clinical severity of ASD disease symptoms. The interpretable machine learning framework gives sight to the pathophysiological mechanism of ASD but can also be extended to other diseases. (shrink)

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a evolução das formas de embalagens de mercadorias sob a perspectiva da evolução da mídia e da filosofia da arte. Primeiramente, analisamos a evolução histórica das embalagens de mercadorias, no processo de evolução dos meios, do design artesanal ao digital, revelando as mudanças dos meios de embalagem em diferentes períodos. Posteriormente, na perspectiva da filosofia da arte, tratamos da conotação da embalagem commodity, como forma de arte, e discutimos o uso de elementos artísticos (...) no design de embalagens e seu papel na transmissão de emoções e conceitos. Neste contexto, adotamos a evolução da filosofia da mídia e da arte como ponto de entrada para analisar a evolução das formas de embalagem de mercadorias. (shrink)

The Motin family proteins (Motins) are a class of scaffolding proteins consisting of Angiomotin (AMOT), AMOT‐like protein 1 (AMOTL1), and AMOT‐like protein 2 (AMOTL2). Motins play a pivotal role in angiogenesis, tumorigenesis, and neurogenesis by modulating multiple cellular signaling pathways. Recent findings indicate that Motins are components of the Hippo pathway, a signaling cascade involved in development and cancer. This review discusses how Motins are integrated into the Hippo signaling network, as either upstream regulators or downstream effectors, to modulate cell (...) proliferation and migration. The repression of YAP/TAZ by Motins contributes to growth inhibition, whereas subcellular localization of Motins and their interactions with actin fibers are critical in regulating cell migration. The net effect of Motins on cell proliferation and migration may contribute to their diverse biological functions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Benjamin I. Schwartz' "China and Contemporary Millenarianism—Something New under the Sun"Lin Yu-shengIn the spring of 1998, my colleague Mike Clover, a historian of the ancient West and an admirer of Benjamin I. Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China, invited Professor Schwartz to participate, with Heiko Oberman, J. C. Heesterman, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, among others, in a conference he had been organizing on "Eurasia and Africa (...) during the Last Thousand Years." The essay that follows—the last piece of scholarly writing by Ben Schwartz, finished thirty-seven days before his passing—was read by me on his behalf at the conference, held on October 11 and 12, 1999, in Madison.From my telephone conversations with Ben in the summer of 1999, I learned that while he intended to work on a paper for the conference to be titled "The Idea of Unilinear Evolution and the Destinies of China," his attention was very much drawn to the fact of the onset in America of unbridled consumerism and materialism, whose characteristic of feeding on themselves with ever increasing intensity and widespread impact seemed to indicate to him the rise of a profoundly disturbing new phenomenon in this world. When I visited with Ben and Bunny (Mrs. Schwartz) in Cambridge on October 2 and 3, Ben was in the midst of writing an essay on what he would call the "new technological-economic millenarianism" or "materialistic apocalypticism." He said that he preferred to have me read this essay, which he would finish before the conference, rather than the one he originally intended to write. Since the conference was meant to take note of the significance of the passage of time from a world-historical perspective, the reflections by a thinker as deeply serious and searching as Ben Schwartz at the juncture of the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third on the implications of an entirely new worldwide phenomenon as he perceived it—though having little direct bearing on China's past—would of course be most welcome at the conference.Ben's health deteriorated almost immediately after he had completed the essay on Friday, October 8, and he died on November 14, 1999. We now know from hindsight that Ben had probably felt that he might soon leave us, but he summoned enough energy not to let this happen before his completion of the essay, partly due to his sense of responsibility to deliver what he had promised and partly, and more importantly, because of the imperative he felt to issue, in the spirit of the old prophets, as his parting words, a grave warning to his fellow human beings.The essay is discursive, with many important points implied through nuance rather than formally argued. We can hardly expect more, given the physical condition of its author at the time of its writing. Although this does not, in my opinion, diminish its importance, it does demand close reading from its readers. The following is my brief attempt at this task, for whatever it may be worth. [End Page 189]To begin with, that Ben chooses to use religious language (which is related to "ultimate concerns")—words like "millenarianism" or "apocalypticism," which are ordinarily reserved for depicting the rare and drastic deliverance of humankind from "the vast burden of human suffering and despair"—as a means to explore metaphorically the nature and implications of the new consumerism and materialism is indicative of how serious he has perceived the onset of the phenomenon under consideration to be.To the extent that consumerism and materialism promise to their true believers "a totally new way of neutralizing the age-old causes of human suffering" (italics mine) through their "total attention on every aspect of human life from the techno-economic side," it is legitimate to speak of them as "materialistic apocalypticism," in that they transcend all tensions and agonies in life and elevate the true believers to a state of salvation. However, in its exclusive concern with "unalloyed, unreflective contentment" and pleasure in the self without any regard for the ethical consequences of techno-economic progress, it is a new materialism very different from... (shrink)

Many studies have observed modulation of the amplitude of the neural index mismatch negativity (MMN) related to which member of a phoneme contrast [phoneme A, phoneme B] serves as the frequent (standard) and which serves as the infrequent (deviant) stimulus (i.e., AAAB vs. BBBA) in an oddball paradigm. Explanations for this amplitude modulation range from acoustic to linguistic factors. We tested whether exchanging the role of the mid vowel /ε/ vs. high vowel /ɪ/ of English modulated MMN amplitude and whether (...) the pattern of modulation was compatible with an underspecification account, in which the underspecified height values are [−high] and [−low]. MMN was larger for /ε/ as the deviant, but only when compared across conditions to itself as the standard. For the within-condition comparison, MMN was larger to /ɪ/ deviant minus /ε/ standard than to the reverse. A condition order effect was also observed. MMN amplitude was smaller to the deviant stimulus if it had previously served as the standard. In addition, the amplitudes of late discriminative negativity (LDN) showed similar asymmetry. LDN was larger for deviant /ε/ than deviant /ɪ/ when compared to themselves as the standard. These findings were compatible with an underspecification account, but also with other accounts, such as the Natural Referent Vowel model and a prototype model; we also suggest that non-linguistic factors need to be carefully considered as additional sources of speech processing asymmetries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remarks at Harvard University Memorial Service for Benjamin I. SchwartzYu-sheng LinAmong the eminent intellectual historians in the world after World War II, Ben Schwartz was one of the most subtle and profound. He was deeply rooted in—but not confined by—the humanist tradition of Montaigne and Pascal, and this provided him with insights into the wretchedness as well as the grandeur of the human condition and with a conscious Socratic (...) moral and intellectual drive toward self-examination as a prerequisite for any inquiry into human affairs. Indeed, the distinctivecharacter of Ben's scholarship lay in his integration of morality and intellect. These humanistic resources in combination with his outstanding intellectual endowment enabled Ben to reach great heights of scholarly endeavor.To mention just a few of his many enduring achievements: Ben's thesis, advanced as early as 1951 and based on a study of the inner history of the rise of the Chinese Communist movement from a comparative perspective, developed the idea that the trajectory of Marxism eastward to Russia and China was, in fact, "a steady process of decomposition." This powerful argument has stood the test of time, whereas both the notion, on the Right, of a monolithic world communism and the idea, on the Left, of the Chinese Communist movement as the embodiment of the intellectual and moral legitimacy of Marxism fell by the wayside.His In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, which offers a double mirror, with modern China illuminated by the modern West and vice versa, is a trailblazing work in intercultural intellectual history. Furthermore, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Ben's prizewinning magnum opus, which treats the whole range of ancient Chinese thought from a world-historical perspective, has achieved a methodological, no less than a historiographical, breakthrough. Ben's discussion of the need to "descend from the level of total cultural orientations to the level of shared problématiques" advances boldly beyond Max Weber's ideal-typical analysis in comparative world history. Historiographically, Ben's study of the general orientations in ancient China and their dialectical relations with the problématiques manifested in different schools of thought is the most incisive and comprehensive treatment of ancient Chinese thought to date.These great achievements derived from his ability to combine deep insights into historical realities with a humane simplicity in holding onto what is central in life. Such a simplicity was manifest in his spontaneous humility, a quality that furnished him with the moral and intellectual resources by which to develop empathetic understanding of the various strands of thought in China as well as in the West. Ben's analyses of human problems from a world-historical perspective, while characteristically erudite, subtle, complex, and at times extraordinarily brilliant, were singularly free from any trace of the influence of intellectual fashions and from any sort of [End Page 187] posturing or self-exhibition. He always struggled at the center of life and history, making the best effort to enter into the depth of human reality, drawing out its significanceas fully as he could. These great attainments were, I submit, a natural outgrowth of the strength of his moral and intellectual character, which led him to be truly open-minded and thus acutely perceptive. It was because he was so seriously interested in the study of humanity that he so seriously studied the Chinese. His universalist concerns fused with his humanist humility and thus empowered him to lift the field of Chinese studies out of its various forms of parochialism.The Confucian philosopher Xun Zi once said that the genuine scholar "explains with a humane compassion, listens with a studious attitude, and engages in disputation with an impartial mind." I know no one other than Ben Schwartz to have attained this ideal. His absolute joy in intellectual give-and-take and his delight, with his eyes gently sparkling, in reaching an understanding of a complex issue were infectious. It was indeed my good fortune and great privilege to be able to sit at the feet of Professor Schwartz. He embodied most eloquently the very essence of humanistic scholarship; his spirit is and shall always be a... (shrink)