We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to (...) examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information. (shrink)

This is an overview of the philosophy of dance that is a subset of Western philosophical aesthetics. There is a new, substantially updated and revised full-text version available as of November 2019 available at the Stanford Encylclopedia of Philosophy website.

This study introduces the self-construction methods of consumers and the tendency characteristics of experiential purchase to study the effects of physical purchase and experiential purchase on wellbeing. The dependent self-builders obtain higher happiness from experiential purchase; however, the independent self-builders get higher happiness from physical purchase. Furthermore, consumers with a high purchase experience get higher happiness from experiential purchase. Consumers with high material consumption tendency get significantly higher happiness than physical purchase from experiential purchase. Consumers with high materialism tendency gain (...) higher happiness in experiential purchase, which is in line with the expectations of self-construction and consumption theories. This study provides the first evidence for the impact of self-construction methods on wellbeing with different consumption choices. (shrink)

One kind of generalized measures called quantum measures on finite effect algebras, which fulfil the grade-2 additive sum rule, is considered. One basis of vector space of quantum measures on a finite effect algebra with the Riesz decomposition property (RDP for short) is given. It is proved that any diagonally positive symmetric signed measure \(\lambda \) on the tensor product \(E\otimes E\) can determine a quantum measure \(\mu \) on a finite effect algebra \(E\) with the RDP such that \(\mu (...) (x)=\lambda (x\otimes x)\) for any \(x\in E\) . Furthermore, some conditions for a grade-2 additive measure \(\mu \) on a finite effect algebra \(E\) are provided to guarantee that there exists a unique diagonally positive symmetric signed measure \(\lambda \) on \(E\otimes E\) such that \(\mu (x)=\lambda (x\otimes x)\) for any \(x\in E\) . At last, it is showed that any grade- \(t\) quantum measure on a finite effect algebra \(E\) with the RDP is essentially established by the values on a subset of \(E\). (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on improvisation in the arts as discussed in philosophical aesthetics, supplemented with accounts of improvisational practice by arts theorists and educators. It begins with an overview of the term improvisation, first as it is used in general and then as it is used to describe particular products and practices in the individual arts. From here, questions and challenges that improvisation raises for the traditional work-of-art concept, the type-token distinction, and the appreciation and evaluation of the arts (...) will be explored. This article concludes with the suggestion that further research and discussion on improvisation in the arts is needed, particularly in the areas of non-jazz improvisation. (shrink)

What appears irrelevant or negligible to readers of one cultural tradition may be seminal and indispensable to those of another. This article studies a prominent Chinese mode of living—the earnest pursuit of the aesthetic qualities of life—to help bridge the “impasses of noncommunication” in cross-cultural understanding. It constructs the working concept of “the aesthetic dimension of life” from Chinese formative thoughts before it applies the concept to the reading of “Forever by Your Side,” a “short-short story” by a contemporary peasant (...) writer in China. The discussion focuses on how the ethical and the aesthetic are mutually entailing and how aspirations for the aesthetic in life affect human actions in general and ordinary people’s everyday choices and behavior in particular. Approaching the story from Chinese cultural tradition and analyzing it with Chinese conceptual paradigms, this article offers an in-depth understanding of contemporary China in its civilizational context and shows a way to overcome obstacles of cross-cultural communication. (shrink)

Since the mid-1980s and especially after the early 1990s, women's organizations have increased exponentially throughout Africa as have the arenas in which women have been able to assert their varied concerns. Women are organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the continent on an unprecedented scale. They have in many countries been aggressively using the media to demand their rights in a way not evident in the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to land, inheritance (...) and associational autonomy to court in ways not seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that do not uphold gender equality. In addition, they are increasingly moving into government, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions previously the nearly exclusive domain of men. In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the new political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the openings were limited and precarious. This second generation of activism is markedly different from the earlier post-independence generation of women's mobilization. The reasons for these shifts are varied: the rise of multi-partyism and demise of military rule; the growing influence of the international women's movement; shifting donor strategies; the expansion of the use of the cell phone and the Internet in the late 1990s; coupled with a significant increase in secondary and university educated women. The article explores the major changes in women's mobilization in Africa by contrasting the current women's movements with those that emerged after independence. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of improvisational artistry in live dance performance that construes the contribution of the dance performer as a kind of agency. Andy Clark’s theory of the embodied and extended mind is used in order to consider how this account is supported by research on how a thinking-while-doing person navigates the world. I claim here that while a dance performer’s improvisational artistry does include embodied and extended features that occur outside of the brain and nervous system that (...) this can be construed as “agency” rather than “thought.” Further I claim that trained and individual style accounts for how this agency acquires its artistic nature. This account thus contributes to the philosophy of improvisation in dance performance in a way that includes motor as well as cognized intentions. (shrink)

This book reinterprets classical Chinese philosophical tradition along the conceptual line of human dignity. Through extensive textual evidence, it illustrates that classical Confucianism, Mohism and Daoism contained rich notions of dignity, which laid the foundation for human rights and political liberty in China, even though, historically, liberal democracy failed to grow out of the authoritarian soil in China. The book critically examines the causes that might have prevented the classical schools from developing a liberal tradition, while affirming their positive contributions (...) to the human dignity concept. Analysing the inadequacies of the western concept of human dignity, the text covers relevant teachings of Kongzi, Mengzi, Xunzi, Mozi, Laozi and Zhuangzi (in comparison with Rousseau). While the Confucian notions of humanity (Ren), righteousness (Yi), and gentleman (Junzi) bear most directly on the conception of dignity, Mohism and Daoism provide salutary corrections to the ossification of the orthodox Confucian practice (Li). (shrink)

Tianyi Zhang offers in this study an innovative philosophical reconstruction of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī's (d. 1191) Illuminationism. Commonly portrayed as either a theosophist or an Avicennian in disguise, Suhrawardīappears here as an original and hardheaded philosopher who adopts mysticism only as a tool of philosophical inquiry. Zhang makes use of Plato's cave allegory to explain Suhrawardī's Illuminationist project. Focusing on three areas-the theory of presential knowledge, the ontological discussion of mental considerations, and Light Metaphysics-Zhang convincingly reveals the (...) Nominalist and Existential nature of Illuminationism, and thereby proposes a new way of understanding how Suhrawardī's central philosophical ideas cohere. (shrink)

This paper formulates a Deweyan theory of performing arts practice that relies for its support on two main things: The unity Dewey ascribed to all intelligent practices (including artistic practice) and The observation that many aspects of the work of performing artists of Dewey’s time include features (“dramatic rehearsal,” action, interaction and habit development) that are part of Dewey’s characterization of the moral life. This does not deny the deep import that Dewey ascribed to aesthetic experience (both in art and (...) in life), but it does suggest that we might use his theory of ethical practice in conjunction with his theory of art as experience in order to create a more robust and unified Deweyan theory of what the performing artist does. (shrink)

Truth pluralism is the view that there is more than one truth property. The strong version of it (i.e. strong pluralism) further contends that no truth property is shared by all true propositions. In this paper, I help strong pluralism solve two pressing problems concerning mixed discourse: the problem of mixed inferences (PI) and the problem of mixed compounds (PC). According to PI, strong pluralism is incompatible with the truth- preservation notion of validity; according to PC, strong pluralists cannot find (...) any appropriate truth property for mixed compound propositions, whose atomic constituents are from different domains of discourse (e.g., <sky is blue and chocolate is tasty>). I argue that the strong pluralist is motivated to take the truth predicate in truth-involving universal statements to be deflationary to avoid the two pressing problems. Such a move entails that the truth predicate in the platitude of validity (V) for any argument, it is valid if and only if necessarily its conclusion is true when its premises are all true does not denote any substantive truth property. Instead, it is merely an expressive device to help people generalize instances of (V) to (V). Analogous stories hold for the truth predicate in the platitudes of compound (e.g., conjunction). The upshot is that, the strong pluralist can solve PI and PC by further conceding that mixed compounds are true/false in a deflationary way. (shrink)

This chapter, composed of three parts by three different authors, proposes that one of the many possible ways that dance might embody philosophic thought and discourse is via embodying ethical practice. Each author contributes a different perspective on the relationship between dance and ethical activity. The perspectives can be read both as separate ideas and as interrelated thoughts. Einav Katan-Schmid views ‘dance’ as a metaphor for ‘embodied ethics’. She analyses dance as an embodied activity of decision-making which regulates the tension (...) between co-existing physical dynamics. Following from the idea of ‘dancing’, she suggests that one think of ‘embodied ethics’ in performative terms – as a contemplative activity. Aili Bresnahan goes on to show how dance practice provides examples of applied ethics within the traditional western philosophical categories of both virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics. In the third section, Sara Houston argues that dance can encompass an ethics of care. She demonstrates how dance with an ethic of care involves attentiveness, putting person before form, and for the dance artists to give up a degree of control and autonomy over the work made. (shrink)

中国儒学缄默维度是在语言关闭的缄默中，转向静的深度体证，具有渊与根两个特征，集约表达为“藏心于渊，美厥灵根”，诗意表达为“氤氲一气似初春”。本书从孔子观周见金人“三缄其口”开始，以方以智证成太极丸春结 束，选取颜回、言偃、扬雄、周敦颐、朱熹、杨简、文天祥、王阳明及其后学胡直与万廷言、刘宗周、王夫之等重要儒者，溯源至孟子、《易传》、庄子、屈原四个先秦流派的展开与互动，围绕罕言与雅言、深静与真动、冲然与 恬愉、主静与持敬、艺术大美与道德至善等重点问题，挖掘中国儒学缄默维度的深蕴及特质，并展望其在现代语境的展开，重写中国儒学史。.

This chapter will analyze the experience and, in particular the conscious experience, of dancing in time from the perspective of the trained dancer while performing. The focus is thus on the experience and consciousness of a dancer who is moving her body in time rather than on the experience of a seated audience member or dance appreciator who is watching a dancer move. The question of how temporality is experienced in dance by the appreciator will therefore not be addressed here. (...) The primary kind of “experience” that will be the focus of my discussion of temporal experience comes from classical pragmatists William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, for whom experience is “a series of purposive bodily activities immersed in the ongoing flow of organism-environment interactions” (Johnson 2006: 48). The mind-body engaged in this experience, according to the pragmatists, is one that is sensate to its environmental stimuli and interactions while acting within it. Both Peirce and Dewey, for example, view the person as a “psycho-physical” organism – one that is conscious of both qualitative experiences such as feelings towards the environment (attraction, repulsion, and the like) as well as physical sensations (see Peirce 1998/1892: 263 and Dewey 2008/1925: 229). James acknowledges that we are aware of qualitative aspects of our experience such as sensations of difference or change (see James 1950/1890a: 495). My account of the experience of dancing in time will also include conscious aspects of this experience (what-it-feels-like-to-the-dancer herself) as well as any sensorimotor pre-conscious or 2 non-conscious processes of which she is not aware by virtue of her bodily engagement with the world (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2008/1945: 235-239). (shrink)

Dance can be appreciated from all sorts of perspectives: For instance, by the dancer while dancing, by the choreographer while watching in the wings, by the musician in the orchestra pit who accompanies the dance, or by the loved-one of a dancer who watches while hoping that the dancer performs well and avoids injury. This essay will consider what it takes to appreciate dance from the perspective of a seated, non-moving audience member. A dance appreciator in this position is typically (...) someone who can hear and see, who can feel vibrations of sound through their skin, and who can have other human, kinaesthetic responses and perceptions as well as the cognitive ability to process them. This appreciator is also someone who is a person with a history that may or may not include experiences of dance that have conditioned his or her responses to watching dance. Based on both this experience, and the skill and capacity to focus, pay attention, make judgments, and convey those judgments, there are different types and levels of audience appreciation. This essay will consider three: 1. Innocent Eye Appreciation, 2. Dance-Trained Appreciation, and 3. Critical Appreciation. (shrink)

An important branch of environmental theory frames the climate crisis as a moral problem in need of a moral solution: human hubris is responsible for environmental degradation and must be atoned for through humility. Politically indeterminate, however, such argumentation is vulnerable to de-politicizing and mal-politicizing capture. In an effort to fend off the threat of either, this paper turns to the history of political thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who theorized the environment as both a moral and a political domain. I (...) examine how Rousseau understood the availability of republican self-rule to be contingent both on the natural environment and on the relationship we construct with it such that freedom, in his words, is not automatically ‘a fruit of every Clime.’ This is the case, he suggests, because of the environment’s intersection with political economy and political culture. At the same time, Rousseau contends, republican self-rule is also a moral practice; republican polities afford citizens a public means of achieving and exercising moral agency. Triangulating the relationship between polity, morality, and environment, Rousseau’s thought offers an integrative logic through which to imbue the environment with both moral and political salience, thereby circumventing the dangers of mere moralization alone. (shrink)

In his paper, “A Causal Argument for Physicalism” (Zhong, 2023), Zhong presents a novel argument for non-reductive physicalism (which he calls “A2”), based on the causal argument for reductive physicalism (which he calls “A1”), and claims that A2 is better than A1 since the premises in A2 are more plausible than those in A1. In this paper, I will argue that A2 fails to be a sound argument for non-reductive physicalism, or even physicalism per se, because the premises in A2 (...) can be fulfilled by the kind of dualism which claims that the physical event (P), the mental event (M), and their effect (E) form a causal chain and that P and M are simultaneous causes. Also, I will argue that we do have ways to strengthen A2 to block the aforementioned problem. But the only plausible way to strengthen the argument is to appeal to the conservation of energy and momentum. And this favors A1 more than A2. So, I conclude that A2 is not better than A1, and a causal argument for physicalism still naturally favors reductive physicalism. (shrink)

To understand the qualities of Western civilization and its modernity, to think about the future of humanity, and to understand how modern science was gestated in Western civilization: in the author’s view, these are the most important reasons to do history of science research in China. Study of the history of Western science in China is in its infancy, and there are great deficiencies leading to its lagging behind the international world of scholarship. In this situation, the most urgent task (...) is to translate as soon as possible a batch of high quality and classic books in the field, to establish a basic academic platform for research in the history of science, and, once that foundation has been laid, to deepen our researches further. Given these considerations, this essay discusses why the author translates works on the history of science, how he chooses books for translation, and his experiences as a translator. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis holds that both artworks and selves are ”culturally emergent entities." Culturally emergent entities are distinct from and not reducible to natural or physical entities. Artworks are thus not reducible to their physical media; a painting is thus not paint on canvas and music is not sound. In a similar vein, selves or persons are not reducible to biology, and thought is not reducible to the physical brain. Both artworks and selves thus have two ongoing and inseparable ”evolutions”—one cultural (...) and one physical. Rather than having fixed ”natures” that remain stable for any purpose other than numerical identity, artworks and selves have ”careers” due to their cultural evolution that change with the course and flux of history, interpretation and reinterpretation. The question for this essay is how a Margolisian encultured artist, who is also an individual ”self," can construct an identifiable ”career” that is both from culture and develops culture constructively in a way that involves an individual, as well as collective, contribution. In answering this question I will provide a theory that shows how Margolis’ work on the artist as cultural agent leaves room for creative innovators within a cultural context. In short, I claim that Margolis’ idea that a person is a thinking-and-doing practitioner that emerges from and works within a cultural context does allow for the agent to use that same context to acquire the tools and skills necessary to make something new. I will then consider how this innovation might be possible by making recourse to some theories of creativity from neuroscience and psychology. This essay will focus on Margolis’ theory of the creative artist as cultural agent as supplemented with an account of the nature of the human being as a raw set of genetic materials and capacity for acquiring cultural competence. My claim is that this is the site for an adequate account of how some encultured persons are able to create exceptional innovations in artistic domains and others are not. I agree with Margolis that it is true that innovation is not possible by any pre- or non-encultured self but I also think that extremes of cultural mastery and innovation, as in the case of highly creative and innovative artists, are not possible without an inborn potentiality to develop to a high level of cultural ability under the right conditions. This is not to deny Margolis’ theory of artists as cultural agents. Indeed, I accept Margolis’ view of the deep importance of culture to the development of the self and to the creative artist wholeheartedly. I also agree that this is a crucial aspect of artistic agency and creativity that has been given short shrift in analytic aesthetics. My intention here is only to answer one question that is still left unanswered after understanding and acknowledging the importance of culture: How do we account for the disparity in ability in cultural agents and artists that cannot be attributed to cultural training and socio-historical factors? How do we account for the existence of the exceptionally creative artist in a situation where the cultural and socio-historical factors are roughly equivalent for others who demonstrate lesser amounts of creativity? (shrink)

C.S. Peirce offered an evaluation of Bentham's philosophy to the effect that on some points Bentham's performance was of great value, but essentially, he was ‘a shallow logician’ confined to analysis of ‘lower motive’. This paper argues that Bentham's logic is deeply metaphysically based, multi‐levelled, and comprehensive. There are at least three constituent parts in his utilitarian logic: the first is his ontology, with its distinction between real and fictitious entities, and with pain and pleasure constituting the core real entities; (...) the second is his reductionism in, and analytical view of, simple and complex pleasures and pains; the third is the distinction between private ethics and public ethics. Bentham's logic is staunchly based on empiricism and truth and he developed a pragmatic utilitarian solution to overcome the potential impasse of Hume's scepticism through a mechanism of reflection. Even the doctrines of belief and abduction embraced and developed by Peirce are contained in Bentham's utilitarian logic. Bentham would certainly take Peirce's philosophy as ipse dixitism. Peirce was not in fact a serious reader of Bentham and failed to employ the distinction between argument and argumentation in his study of Bentham's logic. (shrink)