This paper discusses Confucian notions of moral autonomy and moral agency that do not follow strict and ideal notions of autonomy that one can find in many Western theories of moral philosophy. In Kantian deontology, for example, one's autonomy, specifically one's rational will to follow universal moral rules, is a necessary condition of moral agency and moral responsibility. In Confucian moral philosophy, however, this type of strict moral autonomy is rarely observed. A Confucian moral agent is often depicted as a (...) partially heteronomous individual who often accepts and follows others' moral authority and considers external contingencies in her moral deliberations. Yet active moral agency is maintained in Confucian philosophy. In this paper, I will explain and analyze a partially heteronomous but active form of moral agency in Confucian moral philosophy. First, I will survey different notions of moral autonomy and explore philosophical theories of partial autonomy and heteronomy. Second, I will discuss, on the basis of interactive, responsive, and situated notions of the self, how Confucian moral agency can be explained without strict standards of autonomy. In Confucianism, morality or virtuosity reflects the relational, responsive, and situated nature of human being that resonates with other human beings and their environmental contingencies. Mencius, for example, acknowledges and discusses interactive or relational nature of moral action and the dependency of the moral self on external conditions of life without giving up active moral effort and full moral responsibility. Third, based on my analysis of moral autonomy and responsibility in early Confucian philosophy, I will argue that Confucian moral philosophy provides a unique way of understanding moral agency, not through self-enclosed independency but through relational and interactive interdependency of communal agency. (shrink)

The body is not a physical reservoir or temporary means of cognitive processes but the part and parcel of our cognitive and moral life. Confucian philosophy provides insightful discussions and examples of how the body serves the moral mind not only causally but also constitutionally.

This paper compares and contrasts Mencius's moral philosophy with recent development in cognitive science regarding mental capacity to understand moral rules and principles. Several cognitive scientists argue that the human mind has innate cognitive and emotive foundations of morality. In this paper, Mencius's moral theory is interpreted from the perspective of faculty psychology and cognitive modularity, a theoretical hypothesis in cognitive science in which the mind is understood as a system of specialized mental components. Specifically, Mencius's Four Beginnings (the basic (...) human emotions that serve as the foundations of morality) are interpreted as vertical faculties, comparable to Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid's moral faculties. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of shame and develops an interdisciplinary and comparative interpretation of Confucian shame as a moral disposition, the ability of critical moral-development and self-cultivation.

This article discusses philosophical influence, especially the influence made by Confucianism and Daoism, on the way Asian people see and understand the world. Recently, Richard Nisbett drew a connection between Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and the cognitive profiles of the people who live in Asian countries where Confucianism and Daoism are strong social and cultural traditions. He argues that there is a peculiar way that Asians think and perceive things and this cognitive pattern is influenced by a group of (...) principles derived from Chinese philosophy. This article critically analyzes Nisbett’s explanation, his emphasis on the principle of change in particular, and provides an alternative explanation of the connection between Chinese philosophy and cognitive peculiarities of Asians. Asians combine and integrate opposite viewpoints not because they believe that things change in all unexpected directions, but because they see the world as a big system with interrelated and mutually influencing components. (shrink)

Since the publication of Fodor's (1983) The Modularity of Mind, there have been quite a few discussions of cognitive modularity among cognitive scientists. Generally, in those discussions, modularity means a property of specialized cognitive processes or a domain-specific body of information. In actuality, scholars understand modularity in many different ways. Different characterizations of modularity and modules were proposed and discussed, but they created misunderstanding and confusion. In this article, I classified and analyzed different approaches to modularity and argued for the (...) unity of modularity. Modularity is a multidimensional property consisting of features from several dimensions specifying different aspects of cognition. Among those, there are core features of modularity, and these core features form a cross-dimensional unity. Despite the diverse and liberal characterizations, modularity contributes to cognitive science because of the unity of the core features. (shrink)

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why isn’t good moral intention always rewarded? Franklin Perkins discusses these challenging questions about good and evil in his recent book Heaven and Earth Are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy. As the title suggests, Perkins focuses on the unique Chinese notion of heaven and its related philosophical issues of undeserved misfortune and limited moral efficacy. The subtitle of the book is equally intriguing. Perkins discusses these philosophical issues (...) from the perspective of the problem of evil. The problem of evil is the problem of the positive existence of evil and its seemingly random and arbitrary... (shrink)

In this book, Edward Slingerland criticizes and rejects a pervasive and widely accepted viewpoint in Chinese philosophy: holism. Simply speaking, holism is a non-discrete and non-analytic pattern of thinking that avoids the adoption of mutually exclusive and dualistic concepts such as mind-body, theory-practice, reason-emotion, and macrocosm-microcosm typically found in many Western philosophical theories. In the context of Chinese philosophy, it is understood as an interpretational framework where Chinese philosophy is characterized as a fundamentally and essentially non-dualistic system of thought. According (...) to Slingerland, holism is not simply one of the characteristics of Chinese philosophy but a deeply rooted... (shrink)

This article reviews Owen Flanagan’s latest book “The Geography of Morals, Varieties of Moral Possibilities”. By exploring the space of moral possibility, Flanagan argues that ethics is not simply a study of a priori conditions of normative rules and ideal values but a process of developing a careful understanding of varying conditions of human ecology and building practical views on living good life. The goal of this geographical exploration of the moral possibility space is surveying different traditions of morality and (...) finding tractable ways of human flourishing. This article, by following the chapters of his book, explains his views on moral diversity and his interdisciplinary and naturalistic approach to ethics. It also discusses interactive and dynamic ways to expand the moral possibility space. (shrink)

This chapter develops an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of Mencius’s moral psychology from the perspective of cognitive science. The chapter has three major objectives. First, the author explains Mencius’s moral philosophy in the broad moral psychological context of the Confucian heart-mind as an intriguing combination of reason and emotion. Second, the author surveys major approaches to moral cognition currently discussed and debated in many areas of psychology and neuroscience and compares them with Mencius’s approach to affective empathy and other-concerning emotions. (...) Specifically, Mencius’s discussion of ceyin zhi xin (惻隱之心 the heart-mind of pity and compassion) is analyzed on the basis of recent psychological studies of empathy as perspective taking, affective sharing, and emphatic concern. Third, Mencius’s moral psychology is characterized as a theory of other-regarding, developmental, and embodied moral emotions and its uniqueness is explained by the Mencian creature (a prototypical moral agent in Mencius’s moral psychology). The distinctive characteristics of the Mencian creature are listed, analyzed, and compared against the psychological properties of the Kantian, Humean, and Rawlsian creatures in Western moral psychology. By drawing from psychological theories of affective empathy and other-concerning emotions, this chapter provides a stimulating opportunity for us to deepen our understanding of Mencius’s moral psychology and the Confucian heart-mind. (shrink)

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have studied functional structure of human mind. So called 'faculty psychology' is the study of innate structure of human cognition. However, it is Gall's theory of faculties that started the study of domain specific and autonomous units of human mind. This dissertation discusses modularity of mind, i.e., the idea that mind consists of such domain specific and autonomous units, i.e., cognitive modules. ;In the first of the dissertation, I discuss faculty psychology as (...) a historical precursor of modularity and recent theories of modularity that are developed to capture different aspects of a cognitive system. ;In the second part of the dissertation, I discuss Fodorian modularity, a comprehensive and well developed theory of modularity. Two problems of Fodorian modularity are discussed. First, Fodorian modularity is problematic because it has a problematic element, i.e., neural specificity. Fodor explains informational encapsulation of a cognitive system in terms of specific neural structure of the system. However, I argue that neural specificity is not fully demonstrated in psychology. Second, Fodorian modularity is an internally specified property of a cognitive system. Modularity, however, can be understood as an external property, a property that is specified by a cognitive system's relation to other objects and properties in the world. (shrink)

Many comparative philosophers discuss ceyinzhixin 惻隱之心 and its moral psychological nature to understand the Confucian heart-mind and the unique Confucian approach to other-concerning love. This essay examines and analyzes different interpretations of ceyinzhixin. First, it surveys and compares the four interpretations in recent publications of comparative Chinese philosophy, and analyzes their moral psychological viewpoints. Second, three major approaches to ceyinzhixin and their differences are analyzed. Third, the moral psychological complexity of ceyinzhixin and the advantage of the integrative approach are discussed. (...) The integrative approach, in comparison to other approaches, explains both the complexity and the unity of ceyinzhixin better and develops an inclusive and comprehensive interpretation of ceyinzhixin and the unique moral psychological nature of the Confucian heart-mind in its empathic other-concerning love. (shrink)

This book provides a rigorous analysis of Owen Flanagan's comparative philosophy. The contributors discuss his philosophy of human flourishing and naturalized approach to Asian Philosophy. The essays critically analyse Flanagan's naturalized eudaimonics, naturalized Buddhism, and theory of Confucian human flourishing and moral modularity.

In The Emotional Mind, Asma and Gabriel develop their grand vision of affect. Their goal is to demonstrate the foundational and pervasive nature of emotion in the mind, culture and society through the embodied, embedded, and enactive process of evolution. The book discusses how affective adaptation supports or leads diverse facets of human psychology and society. In this paper, however, I raise three critical questions about Asma and Gabriel’s approach to emotion: whether emotion is a natural kind, whether internalized self-critical (...) emotions came to exist through the adaptive and interactive process of decoupling, and whether the variance and integrity of the tripartite layers of the mind can be maintained. (shrink)

This chaper discusses homelessness from the perspective of the corporeal consciousness. Psychologists such as Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud report and discuss a strange psychological state of Unheimliche. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan elaborate and analyze this alienating strangeness in our experience of the self and the world. Since the German word Heim means home, Unheimliche refers to a state of homelessness or unhomeliness. Unheimliche is often translated into English as uncanniness. Uncanniness refers to the disturbing and (...) puzzling experience of familiarly unfamiliar images or scenes. It is a mode of experience that reveals the in-between-ness of human existence and the primordial anxiety that derive from the dual nature of the body, i.e., the body as both an object of perception and a subject of feeling. From the perspective of the fundamental corporeality and the externalizing intimacy of human existence and consciousness, the author will argue that lived experience of uncanniness or homelessness is one of the intriguing aspects of human psychology and humane existence, caused by the continuous cycle of the familiarizing and the alienating processes of the intrinsically embodied mind. The conscious mind is living in this dual image of going home and going out to the world as it experiences the familiarly unfamiliar self that is intrinsically corporeal. The author will explain and analyze the homelessness and uncanniness from the viewpoint of the duality of corporeal consciousness. (shrink)

Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy is a comprehensive and insightful book that shows how some central tenets of Confucian philosophy are supported by contemporary research in psychology. More specifically, Bongrae Seok shows “that Confucian moral philosophy is a philosophical tradition of the embodied moral mind with the potential to develop a viable theory of embodied moral psychology”. He begins part one of his book with a chapter on “What is Embodied Cognition?” saying that it generally refers to (...) “the physical mechanism of a cognitive system, in the processes of gathering, processing, storing, and accessing information”. He.. (shrink)

In this article, we apply the notion of interval neutrosophic sets to ideal theory in BCK/BCI-algebras.

Role-based database management systems are most widely used for information storage and analysis but are known as vulnerable to insider attacks. The core of intrusion detection lies in an adaptive system, where an insider attack can be judged if it is different from the predicted role by performing classification on the user’s queries accessing the database and comparing it with the authorized role. In order to handle the high similarity of user queries for misclassified roles, this paper proposes a deep (...) metric neural network with strategic sampling algorithm that properly extracts salient features and directly learns a quantitative measure of similarity. A strategic sampling method of heuristically generating and learning training pairs through Monte Carlo search is proposed to select a training pair that can represent the entire dataset. With the TPC-E–based benchmark data trained with 11,000 queries for 11 roles, the proposed model produces the classification accuracy of 95.41%, which is the highest compared with the previous models. The results are verified through comparison of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and the feature space modelled in the neural network is analysed by t-SNE algorithm. (shrink)

Statistical analysis is often used to evaluate the strength of evidence for or against scientific hypotheses. Here we consider evidence measurement from the point of view of representational measurement theory, focusing in particular on the 0-points of measurement scales. We argue that a properly calibrated evidence measure will need to count up from absolute 0, in a sense to be defined, and that this 0-point is likely to be something other than what one might have expected. This suggests the need (...) for a new theory of statistical evidence in the context of which calibrated evidence measurement becomes tractable. (shrink)

Medical missionaries made a breakthrough in Korean history in healing and caring for many Hansen and tuberculosis patients. There was a missionary who had no less good influence than medical missionaries at this time. The person is missionary Sarah Barry, who inspired and developed one of the most influential student movements in South Korea. The aim of the present study is to examine life of Sarah Barry and her ministry, focusing upon her positive influences on Korean intellectuals. The relevance of (...) the study is conditioned by the fact that there is no professional academic research on her ministry except for one short paper, which discusses the importance of her role in formulating campus evangelism. In order to achieve the aim of the study, the method of analysis and synthesis of biographical and historical data was used. As a result of the study, Sarah Barry’s biography was researched and systematized. It gave ground to a conclusion that her role in South Korea’s gradual resurgence after the Civil War was seminal. (shrink)

럼플과 골리앗에 대한 앨런 기버드의 유명한 사례가 소개된 이후 물체 중복(Material Coincidence)의 가능성은 많은 형이상학자들의 관심을 끌었다. 이 논쟁에 대해 복수론자들은 서로 다른 두 물체가 같은 시각, 같은 장소에 공존할 수 있다고 주장한 반면, 단일론자들은 그러한 가능성이 터무니없다고 믿었다. 당연하게도 복수론자들이 제시한 물체 중복의 사례들에 대해 다양한 방식의 반론들이 단일론자들에 의해 제기되었고 그 중 특히 근거지움 문제는 많은 복수론자들을 괴롭혔다. 하지만 최근 캐서린 코슬리키를 비롯한 일련의 복수론자들은 물체의 구성에 대한 아리스토텔레스의 질료형상론을 바탕으로 이 근거지움 문제를 해결하려고 시도한다. 같은 시각, 같은 (...) 장소에 두 물체가 존재할 수 있다는 믿음은 보통 그 장소에서 하나의 물체가 모두 가질 수는 없는 복수의 성질들이 예화되고 있다는 근거에 의해 지지되는데, 아리스토텔레스주의 복수론자들은 그러한 성질의 예화를 그 물체들이 각각 가지는 형상적 부분에 근거지우려고 한다. 여기서 나는 근거지움 문제에 대한 코슬리키의 해결책에 집중하면서 그의 이론이 심각한 문제에 직면함을 보인다. 다만 그러한 문제는 그가 개발하고 있는 신아리스토텔레스주의적 이론의 핵심 주장들을 포기하지 않고서도 해결될 수 있기 때문에 본 연구의 마지막에 그의 이론을 수정한 새로운 질료형상론의 가능성을 제시한다. (shrink)

우리는 일상의 다양한 사물들을 시각 경험을 통해 어렵지 않게 구분하고 판단한다. 이러한 시각경험의 인식론적 역할은 시각 경험이 가지는 고유한 현상적 특질을 통해서도 쉽게 설명된다. 레몬을 시각적으로 경험할 때와 라임을 시각적으로 경험할 때의 현상적 차이 때문에 우리는 그것들을 쉽게 구분할 수 있는 것이 그 예다. 하지만 최근 알렉스 번과 데이비드 소사에 의해 시각 경험의 현상적 특질은 우리가 외부세계에 대한 지식을 습득하는 과정에서 그 어떠한 인식론적 역할도 수행하지 못한다는 주장이 각기 제기되었다. 나는 이들의 주장이 현상적 특질의 본질에 대한 특정 이론에만 의존하고 있음을 (...) 보이고, 현상적 특질에 대한 외재주의적 관점에서 외부세계에 대한 시각경험의 인식론적 역할을 증명하고자 한다. 오직 외재주의적 관점에서 현상적 특질을 이해했을 때에만 시각경험의 인식론적 역할에 대한 우리의 상식적 판단의 근거를 마련할 수 있는 것이다. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether the pattern of firms’ corporate social responsibility activities affects firm value. If firms do permanently CSR activities for strategic purposes, firms’ value is more likely to increase. Using firms known to do CSR in Korea, we examine the valuation effect by adopting an earnings response coefficient model and document firms with permanent CSR activities, which show higher ERCs than other firms regardless of the level of CSR activities. This result partly explains the inconsistency among the results (...) of previous studies by showing the differential implication for firm value depending on the CSR activity pattern. Also, the results of our paper imply that investors need to consider the pattern of firms’ CSR activities in their economic decision making. (shrink)