In Book 2 of The Peloponnesian War, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides describes the Plague of Athens which killed an estimated 75,000 people in 430 BC, the second year of the war. Thucydides i...

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

Jason Clower publishes English translations of this most famous and influential of modern Chinese philosophers for the first time. In essays chosen for their clarity and approachability, this leading contemporary Confucian speaks on the topics that best define his career: the future of Chinese culture and philosophy, the unique achievements of Confucianism, the place of Buddhism and Daoism in Chinese culture, and the possibility of a new partnership between Chinese and Western thought.

v. 1-32. Mou Zongsan xian sheng quan ji -- [33] Mou Zongsan xian sheng quan ji. Zong xu xiang mu.

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

Bo Mou steuert einen eigenständigen Beitrag zu einer zeitgemäßen Lesart des Yijing bei, der sich nur ganz am Rande mit der Philosophie Uwe Meixners – und hier mit der Idee eines Ausgleichs zwischen den konfligierenden Strebungen der einzelnen Substanzen – beschäftigt. Bo Mous Artikel zeigt sehr deutlich, wie viel von der Wahl der primären Kategorien abhängt, wenn es darum geht theoretisch zu erschließen, was als “echter Aspekt der Welt” gelten kann und was nicht.

How are Chinese philosophy and analytic philosophy-two very distinct traditions-alike? In this volume, fifteen distinguished scholars compare and contrast the methodologies, finding areas in which each tradition can learn from, contribute to, and complement the other.

In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical analysis of the core idea of deflationism by discussing some basic conceptual and methodological issues involved in the debate between deflationism and substantivism. In so doing, I argue for three positive points. First, the crux of the dispute between deflationism and substantivism is whether or not truth is substantive in its metaphysical nature and in its explanatory role in philosophical enterprises, rather than whether or not a minimal approach regarding conceptual resources is taken (...) to explain truth; a minimal approach itself is philosophically innocent. Second, there is no intrinsic connection between the core idea of deflationism and the Tarski-style equivalence thesis, which is often identified as implying or supporting the former. Third, there are some unbridged fundamental gaps between the core idea of deflationism and various redundancy theses; these redundancy theses cannot be identified as the former, nor can they be used to justify the former on their own. (shrink)

The work explains a unifying pluralist account of truth that combines representative truth-concern approaches in Chinese philosophy to posit one foundation of the various movements of thought in Chinese philosophy that pursue “how things are.” Mou contributes a unique, Eastern view to contemporary exploration of the philosophical issue of truth.

The original meaning of the term Dao is a road. As the Explanation of the Characters says, "What we walk on is a way [Dao]." The character is derived from two parts: shou, a head, and chuo, to walk and stop and walk again—that is, to walk. The head indicates the way to go and the body walks in this direction. Later, the term Dao was extended in meaning from the concrete to the general, gradually becoming a more general and (...) abstract word. Thus it took on the sense of norm, law, -ism, guide, method, and technique. Yet all these meanings are still consonant with the original sense of the Way. In Laozi's time, most thinkers had not raised Dao to become a wholly independent philosophical concept. It was still a limited thing; thus, we find "the Way of heaven," "the Way of human beings," and "the Way of spirits.". (shrink)

This book presents a systematic unifying-pluralist account--a "constructive-engagement" account--of how cross-tradition engagement in philosophy is possible. The goal of this "constructive-engagement" account is, by way of reflective criticism, argumentation, and methodological guiding principles, to inquire into how distinct approaches from different philosophical traditions can talk to and learn from each other for the sake of making joint contributions to the contemporary development of philosophy. In Part I of the book, Bo Mou explores a range of fundamental theoretic and methodological issues (...) in cross-tradition philosophical engagement and philosophical interpretation. In Part II, he analyzes several representative case studies that demonstrate how relevant resources in the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions can constructively engage with each other. These studies cover issues in philosophical methodology, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. The book's theoretical and practical approaches expand the vision, coverage, and agenda of doing philosophy comparatively, and promote worldwide joint efforts of cross-tradition philosophical inquiries. Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy will be of interest to graduate students and scholars interested in comparative philosophy and the intersection of Chinese and Western philosophy. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the ways in which cross-tradition philosophical engagement can enhance contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. (shrink)

Whole Set of Contents of Current Issue (for cross-reference reading and hard-copy preservation of the whole issue).

This study investigated the immediate and delayed effects of moderate-intensity continuous exercise and high-intensity interval exercise on working memory. Fifty healthy young adults engaged in a MICE session, 20 min of continuous running on a treadmill at an intensity of 40–59% of heart rate reserve ; a HIIE session, 10 sets of 1 min running at an intensity of 90% HRR, interspersed by 1 min self-paced walking at 50% HRR; and a control session, resting in a chair and reading books (...) for 24 min. A spatial 2-back task was performed to assess working memory before, immediately after and 30 min after each intervention. Reaction time in the 2-back task was significantly reduced immediately after both MICE and HIIE interventions. The enhanced working memory associated with HIIE sustained for 30 min after the exercise, whereas the beneficial effects associated with MICE returned to the pre-exercise level at 30 min after the exercise. These results suggest that although both MICE and HIIE enhance working memory in young adults, the positive effect sustains longer in HIIE than that in MICE. The current study extends the existing knowledge base by suggesting that improvements in working memory with HIIE last longer than with MICE. (shrink)

In this article, through a comparative analysis of Dewey's and Laozi's relevant accounts, I examine a pragmatic insight concerning moral rules and moral experience to the effect that (i) fixed and formulated moral rules should not be taken as the final absolute moral authority, and (ii) attention needs to be paid to the moral agent's own moral experience that responds to the felt demands in concrete situations. The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding the crucial points of the (...) pragmatic insight and to look at how, in certain complementary ways, Dewey's and Laozi's distinct approaches could contribute to the pragmatic insight and learn from each other. I endeavour to show several points: (1) The pragmatic insight has its distinct metaphysical foundations in Dewey's and Laozi's accounts, whose combination could enhance each other's visions and overcome each other's limitations; (2) Both Dewey and Laozi reject some sharp dualism to look at the nature of moral experience that responds to the felt demands in concrete situations; in so doing, their distinct focuses on different aspects, or developing stages, of such moral experience could be complementarily coordinated into a whole; (3) Their characterisations of the pragmatic insight are also based upon their distinct but related naturalistic perspectives to human moral foundation; Laozi's approach could provide some constructive insight for and due natural limitations on Dewey's account. (shrink)

This article gives a holistic re-examination of the semantic content and syntactic structure of the concept of relative identity: it suggests and explains an expanded and enhanced dual-track characterization of relative identity. It is expanded in this sense: its due coverage is not narrowly restricted to the equal-status case of identity statements (the symmetric case for identity simplex) but also includes the category-assimilating case (the asymmetric case for identity complex), both of which are unified by the shared semantic core content (...) of relative identity. It is enhanced in this sense: it is intended to give a more refined characterization of relative identity for the sake of enhancing our understanding of the structure and content of real-life relative-identity statements in people’s basic employment of language in view of the relation between thought, language, and the world. (shrink)

In reflective explorations of the nature of truth in the philosophical concern with truth (as conceived in people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth), there are two seemingly opposed strategic directions of explaining the relationship between the two closely related but distinct basic semantic notions, truth (with sentential truth bearers) and reference (with referring terms at the subject position): by virtue of which to hook up to the world in the fundamental relationship between language, thought and the world; eventually which one is (...) more fundamental in this connection, explaining truth by virtue of reference or explaining reference by virtue of truth. In this essay, through elaborating a holistic double-reference explanatory basis of truth, I explain how our pre-theoretic “way-things-are-capturing” understanding of truth fundamentally plays its normative-basis role for a unifying pluralist account of truth through the complementary interplay of its vertical “double-reference-based” dimension and horizontal “sentential-predication-based” dimension. For illustration and for a relatively complete understanding, in Appendix, I present a sample version of the suggested unifying pluralist account of truth which consists of the referentially enhanced base account, as explained in this essay, and sample accounts of some distinct types of perspective elaborations. (shrink)

When doing philosophy, there is one norm-like common basis of which we have our pre-theoretic understanding (the “same-object-recognizing” understanding for short) to the effect that, given an object (to be under examination), there is a way that the object objectively is such that we can all talk about that same object even though we may say different things about it, neither resulting in “anything goes” nor bringing about radically different objects thus without genuine engagement. A theoretic examination of the metaphysical (...) issue of the self-identity (as sameness) of given objects (or, in plain words and in a semantic ascent way, “how is it possible to talk about the same object differently?”) can enhance and refine the “same-object-recognizing” understanding as one significant common normative basis of doing philosophy in a constructive-engaging way. In this essay, with relevant theoretic resources of the enhanced account of relative identity and the refined characterization of the law of identity as explained in the recent literature, I examine the metaphysical issue of the self-identity (as sameness) of given objects in two closely related layers, i.e., the “way” layer and the “being” layer of “the way things are” regarding self-identities of given objects. In a holistic way, I first examine several distinct but representative types of (relative) sameness involved in the “way” part of self-identities of given objects; I then focus on five representative types of existential sameness in the “being” part at the “base” level of given objects. Their relation can be highlighted in this way: metaphysically, in the sense to be explained, distinct types of sameness at the “way” layer without existential sameness at the “being”-base layer is “empty” of base, while existential sameness at the “being”-base layer without distinct types of sameness at the “way” layer is “blind” to differentiation. (shrink)

From the modern point of view, the Daoist regimen culture in China is actually a kind of oriental bionomy. Although it is less developed than the Western life sciences in terms of details and techniques, it has unique advantages in terms of its comprehensive grasp and dynamic observation of life, as well as its emphasis on the development of life potentiality and on the self adjustment and improvement of living bodies. Chen Yingning reestablished a Daoist bionomy through Xianxue 仙学 (Philosophy (...) of Immortals) which involves religious faith, philosophy and sciences, leaving us a valuable legacy. To establish a new bionomy system required by the modern society through learning from the Daoist bionomy, the academic circle has to seriously explore the four issues: (1) at the level of faith, to turn the Daoist faith in deities and gods into a pursuit of ideal personality; (2) with respect to the principles of regimen, to extend the dual cultivation into a kind of universal concept; (3) as with the way of regimen, to learn from the regimen thought of Daoism and combine the inner cultivation with the outer one, and static exercise with dynamic exercise; and (4) with regard to the ways of treatment of diseases, to combine the Daoist medicine with the Western medicine. (shrink)

From the vantage point of comparative philosophy, this anthology explores how analytic and "Continental" approaches in the Western and other philosophical traditions can constructively engage each other and jointly contribute to the contemporary development of philosophy.