In this article, I examine the textual underpinnings of participatory Confucian democracy and Confucian meritocracy and propose realist Confucian democracy as an alternative following a balanced reading of classic Confucianism. I argue that Confucian plebeian values do not square with the political meritocrats’ advocacy for meritocratic rule while Confucian elitist values undermine participatory democrats’ ardor for justifications of active democratic participation. A shared difficulty with both groups is that they tend to overuse one aspect of Confucianism while leaving the status (...) of other elements in limbo. The discussion of participatory democracy and meritocracy is followed by the introduction of an eclectic reading that strikes a dynamic balance between elitist and plebeian values in Confucianism, and which points to the wide gamut of realist democracy that combines democratic election with strong leadership. (shrink)

This essay examines prominent New Confucian Mou Zongsan’s account of Confucian democracy by focusing on his key notion of “self-restriction.” According to Mou, true sage-kings would willingly respect ordinary people’s individual endeavors in the political realm and endorse democracy as a form of government. This move of self-restriction then aligns Confucianism with democracy in a way that fundamentally restructures traditional Confucian rulership. I make contributions on two fronts. First, I offer a reading of Mou’s self-restriction different from existing ones that (...) can help to disambiguate many aspects of Mou’s political thought. Second, what is often left out of existing discussion on Mou is the narrative of political myth and distinctive personality types associated with it. For Mou, political leadership’s impetus for transcending rule-based order and the people’s aspirations for the “superman” run deep and lie in the lasting appeal of political myth. Invoking Nietzsche, I discuss the sense in which transforming traditional rulership is not only a question of ought—why Confucians ought to adopt self-restriction—but a question of how it is possible for self-restriction to fulfill its mission. Commentators on his thought have so far largely glossed over this second aspect of Mou’s thought, thereby selling short the complexity of the idea of self-restriction. My key argument is that Mou’s self-restriction shows an effort to revamp the superman’s politics of the extraordinary into a politics of the ordinary. (shrink)

What kind of polity is justified by classic Confucian values? Adopting an interpretive approach, this paper explores the idea of leadership democracy being expressive of classic Confucian values by first introducing the models of leadership democracy associated with Weber and Schumpeter and second connecting Confucian elitist values to them. I argue that leadership democracy best realizes the Confucian emphasis on the people as the source of legitimacy and the ruler as the engine of good governance. The Confucian idea of people-rootedness (...) is borne out by citizens behaving as democratic plebeians who are empowered to choose their leader but devoid of moral and intellectual capabilities for collective decision-making. The Confucian idea of rulership is expressed by democratic leaders displaying competent statesmanship and compensating for intra-elite tensions within the Confucian tradition. (shrink)

Recent debates on Confucian meritocracy largely center around outright normative critiques rather than its textual basis. The unflattering upshot is the lack of attention to a mode of critique that scrutinizes Confucian meritocracy by questioning the way meritocrats invoke Confucian concepts and values. Focusing on three meritocrats—Bai Tongdong 白彤東, Daniel A. Bell, and Kang Xiaoguang 康曉光, this article ventures a text-based normative approach by examining continuities and ruptures between core meritocratic arguments they make, and the messages conveyed by Confucian masters. (...) The core argument that I advance is that the meritocratic thesis about the political division of labor does not mesh with the classic Confucian understandings of voluntariness and political authority, which generates uneasy normative consequences for Confucian meritocracy. Ultimately, classic Confucianism does not provide a conceptually secure platform for the meritocratic part of Confucian meritocracy as its ardent advocates claim. (shrink)

For many contemporary Confucians today, an urgent task is to reflect on the challenges of modernity and look for what Mou Zongsan calls a "New Outer Kinghood."1 In the political realm, this task implies identifying ways in which Confucianism can meet the challenges of, and potentially reconcile itself with, liberal and democratic values. One of the most contested terrains that emerged out of the recent debate is the relationship between Confucianism and democracy. Theorists not only differ in their understandings of (...) the specific weight and scope of Confucianism in the political framework, but also contest the status of democracy as seemingly the "only game in town."2 Quite recently, Joseph Chan offered systematic... (shrink)

Han Fei was a central figure in Chinese Legalism, which was a leading school of thought in the Warring States period of China, and which left a huge imprint on political culture in imperial China. This article examines the complex duality of public and private interests in Han Fei’s political thought, a crucial aspect of his thinking. I argue that Han Fei adopted a sophisticated statist approach to understanding public and private interests. For Han Fei, public interests are embodied in (...) the state while private ones have dual functions. On the one hand, private interests threaten public ones by inviting corrupt material interests, personal morality, and knowledge, as well as human relationships. On the other hand, self-centered human psychology plays a dialectic role in strengthening the state. (shrink)

Tongdong Bai’s ambitious book, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case, aims to not only draw on classic Confucianism to shed light on contemporary issues but also make Confucianism universally applicable to the human conditions widely shared around the globe. Bai’s Confucian political theory carries distinctive merits in both its innovative approach and comprehensive scope, but there are still ambiguities of which he owes us more explanation. In this review article, I offer a brief summary of Bai’s book and critically engage (...) with three aspects of his account: the acceptability of the Confucian hybrid regime, its relationship with Confucian compassion, and hierarchical international order. First, Bai’s pursuit of service to the people as an end result makes it difficult to apply to societies that champion political equality and participation. Second, neither the supremacy of the Confucian value of compassion nor the hybrid regime’s ability to carry it through is self-evidently clear. Third, the Confucian idea of unity among all-under-heaven undermines Bai’s advocacy of patriotic allegiance to a particular state and hierarchical inter-state order where the multiplicity of states, albeit unequal, is preserved. (shrink)

The established view in Confucian scholarship today is that Confucian political order serves to promote the material and moral well-being of ordinary people. Loubna El Amine turns this view on its head by arguing that Confucian political order revolves not around the interest of the people but the demands of security, stability, and prosperity. Min are expected to be virtuous only to the extent that they help to sustain such an order. As such, Confucian politics does not follow from ethics (...) in any straightforward manner. In this article, I argue against her revisionist reading. I argue that her account not only lacks arguments for her core thesis of the ethics/politics division, but also goes against Confucians’ concern over the universality of humanity, popular welfare, and the integrity of Confucian thought. I also draw on discussion on political realism to flesh out the sense in which classic Confucianism is realist. (shrink)

This dialogue addresses the global risk that broke out of the North Korean development of nuclear weapons and missiles. It starts from the brutal consequences of the national division for Korea and asks why North Korea has been so preoccupied with nuclear projects as has been found to be the case since the 1990s, and how much and why Kim Jung-un today differs from his father in terms of his future, and where the fundamental limit lies in Moon Jae-In’s as (...) well as Trump’s approaches to Korean denuclearization and peace. The highlight of this dialogue is to explain the intrinsic difficulties for Donald Trump and Kim Jung-un in finding a reasonable solution to their respective demands for denuclearization and regime security, and explore the likely future of the Korean Peninsula from the vantage point of Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine Policy and metamorphosis. (shrink)

We develop a theory of necessity operators within a version of higher-order logic that is neutral about how fine-grained reality is. The theory is axiomatized in terms of the primitive of *being a necessity*, and we show how the central notions in the philosophy of modality can be recovered from it. Various questions are formulated and settled within the framework, including questions about the ordering of necessities under strength, the existence of broadest necessities satisfying various logical conditions, and questions about (...) their logical behaviour. We also wield the framework to probe the conditions under which a logicist account of necessities is possible, in which the theory is completely reducible to logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to develop and test a model capturing the effects of ethics institutionalization on employee experiences in work life and overall life satisfaction. It was hypothesized that explicit ethics institutionalization has a positive effect on implicit ethics institutionalization, which in turn enhances employee experiences in work life. It was also hypothesized that employee work life experiences have a positive effect on overall life satisfaction and happiness, moderated by work–family life conflict. Data were collected though a (...) survey of marketing managers in Italy. The data provide good but partial support for the model. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

This work focuses on a multiagent system with time-varying interval uncertainty in the system matrix, where multiple agents interact through an undirected topology graph and only the bounding matrices on the uncertainty in the system matrix are known. A reduced-order interval observer, which is named the reduced-order neighborhood interval observer, is designed to estimate the relative state of each agent and those of its neighbors. It is shown that the reduced-order IO can guarantee the consensus of the uncertain multiagent system. (...) Finally, simulation examples are proposed to verify the theoretical findings. (shrink)

Objective wealth plays an important role in social interaction and economic decision making. Previous studies indicate that objective wealth of others may influence the way we participate in resources allocation. However, the effect of objective wealth on responses to fairness-related resource distribution is far from clear, as are the underlying neural processes. To address this issue, we dynamically manipulated proposers’ objective wealth and analyzed participants’ behavior as responders in a modified Ultimatum Game, during which event-related potentials were recorded. Behavioral results (...) showed that participants were prone to reject unfair proposals although that rejection would reduce their own benefit. Importantly, participants were more likely to accept unfair offers from proposers with low objective wealth than from proposers with high objective wealth, with a drastic increase in acceptance rates of unfair offers from 32.79 to 50.59%. Further electrophysiological results showed that there was significantly enhanced feedback-related negativity amplitude toward proposers with high objective wealth for unfair offers. Furthermore, the late frontal negativity amplitude was larger for all the conditions which are not high-fair, which might be the only option that did not elicit any ambiguity. These findings suggest a strong role of proposers’ objective wealth in modulating responders’ behavioral and neural responses to fairness. (shrink)

本书是从林语堂的著作中,选择有关人生的部分编辑而成。全书分“梦想·欢乐”、“性·女人”、“行为·习惯”、“衣·食”及“自然·情趣”共5部分。.

Rather than starting with traits and speculating whether selective forces drove evolution in past environments, we propose starting with a candidate gene associated with a trait and testing first for patterns of selection at the DNA level. This can provide limitations on the number of traits to be evaluated subsequently by adaptationism as described by Andrews et al.

Socioeconomic status refers to the social position or class according to their material and non-material social resources. We conducted a study with 60 college students to explore whether SES affects past self-evaluation and used event-related potentials in a self-reference task that required participants to judge whether the trait adjectives describing themselves 5 years ago were appropriate for them. Behavioral data showed that individuals’ positive past self-evaluations were significantly higher than individuals’ negative past self-evaluations, regardless of high or low SES. Individuals (...) with high SES had significantly higher positive past self-evaluations than those with low SES. ERP data showed that in the low SES group, negative adjectives elicited a marginally greater N400 amplitude than positive adjectives; in the high SES group, negative adjectives elicited a greater late positive potential amplitude than positive adjectives. N400 is an index of the accessibility of semantic processing, and a larger N400 amplitude reflects less fluent semantic processing. LPP is an index of continuous attention during late processing; the larger LPP amplitude is elicited, the more attention resources are invested. Our results indicated that compared with college students with low SES, the past self-evaluations of college students with high SES were more positive; college students with high SES paid more attention to negative adjectives. However, college students with low SES were marginally less fluent in processing negative adjectives. (shrink)

ELSI efforts long have been troubled by critiques that they privilege scientific frameworks and grant scientists the power to set ethical agendas. As the first director of the Human Genome Project’...

A tic disorder (TD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by tics, which are repetitive movements and/or vocalizations that occur due to aberrant sensory gating. Its pathophysiology involves dysfunction in multiple parts of the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits. Spontaneous brain activity during the resting state can be used to evaluate the baseline brain state, and it is associated with various aspects of behavior and cognitive processes. Theta–gamma coupling (TGC) is an emerging technique for examining how neural networks process information through interactions. However, the (...) resting-state TGC of patients with TD and its correlation with cognitive function have not yet been studied. We investigated the resting-state TGC of 13 patients with TD and compared it with that of 13 age-matched healthy children. The participants underwent resting-state electroencephalography with their eyes closed. At the global level, patients with TD showed a significantly lower resting-state TGC than healthy children. Resting-state TGC with the eyes closed was significantly negatively correlated with the attention quotient calculated for omission errors in a selective visual attention test. These findings indicate that the resting-state brain network, which is important for the attentional processing of visual information, is dysfunctional in patients with TD. Additionally, these findings support the view that TGC reflects information processing and signal interactions at the global level. Patients with TD may have difficulty gating irrelevant sensory information in the resting state while their eyes are closed. (shrink)

With the growth of online commerce, companies have created virtual communities where users can create posts and reply to posts about the company’s products. VCs can be represented as networks, with users as nodes and relationships between users as edges. Information propagates through edges. In VC studies, it is important to know how the number of topics concerning the product grows over time and what network features make a user more influential than others in the information-spreading process. The existing literature (...) has not provided a quantitative method with which to determine key points during the topic emergence process. Also, few researchers have considered the link between multilayer physical features and the nodes’ spreading influence. In this paper, we present two new ideas to enrich network theory as applied to VCs: a novel application of an adjusted coefficient of determination to topic growth and an adjustment to the Jaccard coefficient to measure the connection between two users. A two-layer network model was first used to study the spread of topics through a VC. A random forest method was then applied to rank various factors that might determine an individual user’s importance in topic spreading through a VC. Our research provides insightful ways for enterprises to mine information from VCs. (shrink)

In an increasingly complex external environment, innovation is an important way for companies to build sustainable competitiveness. This research discusses employee creativity from the perspective of Family Supportive Supervisor Behavior based on conservation of resource theory, social exchange theory, psychological capital theory and emotional spillover theory. Through a series of surveys of employees in different companies and jobs, we can understand the impact of family-supporting supervisors’ behavior on their creativity. Combined with the survey data, a structural equation model is constructed (...) to analyze the mediating effects of psychological capital and positive emotions based on the causal mediation model. The research found that the positive influence of family-supporting supervisors’ behavior on employees’ creativity has three forms. First, supervisors improve employees’ motivation and sense of efficacy by providing various support resources. Second, supervisors can generate positive spillover effects among employees by influencing employees’ psychological state. Third, supervisors stimulate the creativity of subordinates by promoting work participation and mobility. According to the research conclusions, in order to improve the employee creativity, we should provide incentives to encourage supervisors to carry out family support behaviors, identify employee characteristics to help supervisors provide personalized support, cultivate family supportive leaders, and attach importance to emotional support and play the role of psychological capital and positive emotions. (shrink)

1. Hanʼguk Yuhak ŭi sŏmak ŭl yŏn Yuhakchadŭl -- 2. Tʻoegye rŭl kyesŭnghan Yuhakchadŭl -- 3. Yŏngnam ŭi Yuhakchadŭl -- 4. Kiho ŭi Yuhakchadŭl -- 5. Horak nonjaeng ŭi Yuhakchadŭl -- 6. Kyŏngse, Sudo, Chʻŏngŭn ŭi Yuhakchadŭl.

This article aims at an active dialogue between Ulrich Beck and East Asia with respect to cosmopolitan imagination. Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology requires a reflective cosmopolitan publicness to cope with various kinds of global risks. We therefore extract three different layers of publicness from neo-Confucianism – survival-oriented, deliberative, and ecological – and argue that Beck’s cosmopolitan vision can be better conceptualized when properly linked to, or founded upon, the Tianxiaweigong normative potentials of neo-Confucianism. In so doing our intention is to make (...) Beck’s implicit sensibilities and the implicit Asian orientations explicit, as a double process of cosmopolitan self-reflection and dialogue. We also draw attention to the analysis of the cosmopolitan actor in East Asia. Finally, we note that the cosmopolitan future of East Asia still remains uncertain and that reconciling global risk politics, national interests and cosmopolitan morality presents a big challenge to second modern transformation. (shrink)

The relationship between children and their maternal uncles in contemporary Mosuo culture reveals a unique parenting mode in a matrilineal society. This study compared the responses of Mosuo and Han participants from questionnaires on the parent–child and maternal uncle–child relationship. More specifically, Study 1 used Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment to assess the reactions of the two groups to the relationship between children and their mothers, fathers, and maternal uncles. The results show that while Han people display a higher (...) level of attachment toward their fathers than their maternal uncles, Mosuo people do not exhibit a significant difference in this aspect. Study 2 used a scenario-based method to compare how adults and teenagers perceive the rights and responsibilities of fathers/maternal uncles toward their children/nephews or nieces. The results show that Han adults attribute more rights and responsibilities to their own children than nephews/nieces, while their Mosuo counterparts have the reverse pattern and assign stronger responsibilities to their nephews/nieces than their own children. Both groups perceive the fathers to be the bearer of rights and responsibilities, although this perception was weaker among Mosuo. This paper concludes that in the Mosuo society, fathers have a relatively weak social role as a result of their unique matrilineal social structure. (shrink)