The intellectual legacy of Confucianism has loomed large in efforts to understand China's past, present, and future. While Confucian ethics has been thoroughly explored, the question remains: what exactly is Confucian political thought? Classical Confucian Political Thought returns to the classical texts of the Confucian tradition to answer this vital question. Showing how Confucian ethics and politics diverge, Loubna El Amine argues that Confucian political thought is not a direct application of Confucian moral philosophy. Instead, contrary to the conventional (...) view that Confucian rule aims to instill virtue in all members of society, El Amine demonstrates that its main aim is to promote political order. El Amine analyzes key aspects of the Confucian political vision, including the relationship between the ruler and the people, the typology of rulers, and the role of ministers and government officials. She also looks at Confucianism’s account of the mechanisms through which society is to be regulated, from welfare policies to rituals. She explains that the Confucian conception of the political leaves space open for the rule of those who are not virtuous if these rulers establish and maintain political order. She also contends that Confucians defend the duty to take part in government based on the benefits that such participation can bring to society. Classical Confucian Political Thought brings a new understanding to Confucian political theory by illustrating that it is not chiefly idealistic and centered on virtue, but rather realistic and driven by political concerns. (shrink)

Taking its distance from classical liberalism, political liberalism seeks to avoid controversial metaphysical assumptions by starting from institutional features of modern polities. Political liberalism also extends the limits of liberal toleration by envisioning societies that it considers nonliberal but decent. This article is concerned with the relationship between these two dimensions of political liberalism, specifically as they are instantiated in the work of John Rawls. I show that these two dimensions are in tension with each other. Put simply, if political (...) liberalism is institutional, then decent societies are impossible. Decent societies are only conceivable within the ahistorical realm of values—a realm that Rawls sometimes slips into, even though its avoidance is central to political liberalism’s claim of distinctiveness. Rawls’s appeal to hypotheticals to defend his account of decent societies only serves to mask this tension and to foreclose important avenues of inquiry about the non-Western world. I also deploy throughout the article archival material that evinces Rawls’ concern with ethnocentrism but also the difficulties he faced in coming up with an adequate account of non-Western societies. On the argument I offer here, this intractability is to be expected, since Rawls did not recognize that the problems with his account were not purely philosophical, but in fact, sociological, political, and historical. (shrink)

In recent years, the world knew many challenges concerning the propagation of infectious diseases such as avian influenza, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, etc. These epidemics caused a change in the healthy balance of humanity. Also, the epidemics disrupt the economies and social activities of countries around the world. Mathematical modeling is a vital means to represent and control the propagation of infectious diseases. In this paper, we consider a stochastic epidemic model with a Markov process and delay, which generalizes many models existing (...) in the literature. In addition, we show the stochastic threshold for the extinction of the disease. Furthermore, numerical examples are discussed to confirm the theoretical result. (shrink)

In this paper, we study a stochastic epidemic model with double epidemics which includes white noise and telegraph noise modeled by Markovian switching. Sufficient conditions for the extinction and persistence of the diseases are established. In the end, some numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate our analytical results.

Immer mehr sehen wir uns in die Lage versetzt, aktiv Einfluss nicht nur auf unsere Existenz und unser Leben, sondern auch auf die Bedingungen unseres Sterbens zu nehmen. Alterungsprozesse aber auch unser Tod gelangen zunehmend in den Verfügungsbereich unserer Selbstbestimmung und sind zu einem gewissen Grade gestaltbar geworden. Offen ist, wohin dieser Trend vor dem Hintergrund aktueller technologischer Fortschritte noch führen mag. Gegenwärtig sind wir mit den Problemen einer alternden Bevölkerung, einer unzureichenden Altenpflege und einer mangelhaften Alterskultur konfrontiert, die nach (...) gesellschaftspolitischen und medizinethischen Handlungsoptionen verlangen. Zugleich kursieren Zukunftsvisionen, in denen der physiologische Verfall im Zuge des Alterns und damit auch die Leiblichkeit des Menschen insgesamt als defizitär betrachtet wird. Alternative Lebensentwürfe in post- oder transhumanistischen Kreisen betrachten den Tod als extreme Grenzerfahrung, die es zu verhüten gilt. Eine selbstbestimmte Existenz wird mit Selbstoptimierung gleichgesetzt – und sei es auch um den Preis des eigenen Leibes. Werden hier die Grenzen des Menschseins erweitert oder verengt? (shrink)

I argue in this essay that the past holds the potential for liberating us from modern categories and thus for helping us envision alternative political futures. More specifically, I show how China’s non-feudal past offers resources for a future model of governance based on unity and social mobility.

In this article, I show that women are depicted in the early Confucian texts not primarily as undertaking household duties or nurturing children but rather as partaking in rituals of mourning and ancestor worship. To make the argument, I analyze, besides the more philosophical texts like the Analects and the Mencius, texts known as the “Five Classics,” which describe women in their social roles in much more detail than the former. What women’s participation in rituals reveals, I contend, is that (...) the domestic-political distinction does little to illuminate the philosophical vision offered by the early Confucian texts. Relatedly, while women’s involvement in communal religious rituals has also been noted about early Greece, the political import of such participation is even more pronounced in the Confucian case. Specifically, I show that, by embodying intergenerational continuity, the mourning and ancestor rituals that women partake in are foundational to the Confucian state. (shrink)

In his review of my book, Classical Confucian Political Thought, David Elstein argues that my interpretation of Classical Confucian political thought draws too sharp a distinction between Confucians’ ethical standards and their political standards, thus veering perhaps a bit too far from the “conventional wisdom” that views Confucian politics as an extension of Confucian ethics. As I write in the book, “To the extent that the political standard is a normative standard, it is difficult to insist that it has nothing (...) to do with morality”. My aim in the book is thus not to posit a complete break between ethics and politics. Rather, my aim is to show where the two intersect and... (shrink)

Can we respond to the charge that human rights are a Western product without relinquishing human rights altogether? Can we be sensitive not only to the dominant voices in the non-Western world but also to the "margins of the margins"? Can the academic discussion on human rights be more attuned not only to scholarly arguments but also to "human rights activism and struggles for human rights"? Can it also be attuned to the fact of the new "globalizing modernity"? In Reframing (...) the Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights, Jeffrey Flynn thoughtfully addresses these hugely important and challenging... (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Los más diversos teóricos de la modernidad suelen presentar este período como un proceso continuo de desarrollo tecnológico y económico, progreso en las artes y las ciencias, expansión de la democracia y racionalización de las instituciones y las costumbres. Sin embargo, persisten las contradicciones del capitalismo, el colapso de la civilización es inminente y el Pueblo no vive ni ha vivido en la modernidad tal y como sus teóricos la describen. Esto es tanto más cierto en nuestro país, habitado por (...) una suerte de magdaleniense o pre-Tartessos lleno de cacharritos con iconos, llamadas, avisos, avatares, tamagotchies, móviles y juegos online integrados sin la menor discrepancia sobre una capa de rituales del año de la polka, fetiches, incienso, lágrimas, sangre, joyas, ofrendas, sacrificios, reliquias de miembros de santos y matriarcas fenicio-neolíticas devenidas madres de Cristo al tiempo que supporters del equipo de fútbol local. El ultrarracionalismo se presenta como un nuevo método y movimiento filosófico cuya voluntad es afrontar los desafíos del futuro sin dejar de hacer justicia a esta auténtica marejada de lo grotesco. (shrink)

After reading Professor El Amine’s response to my review of her Classical Confucian Political Thought, I realize we are not as far apart on many issues as it appeared. Nevertheless, some areas of substantive disagreement remain. I will take the opportunity to highlight a couple of these. One is whether the good qualities expected of the common people should be properly considered virtues, that is, whether they are different in kind from the virtues that mark a superior man or (...) even potentially a sage. This is especially relevant because it bears on the question of whether “political order, not moral edification, is the end” of the moral education that we agree is part of government’s role.... (shrink)

Confucian political philosophy is enjoying a renaissance. In the last two decades a number of significant monographs in English have appeared, to say nothing of the Chinese studies that are virtually beyond count. If they have a common theme, it is that Confucian politics is an extension of its ethical thought. Confucian politics is not a mere application of techniques for producing order, as in Legalism, nor does it separate politics and personal morality, as in liberalism. Considering a wide array (...) of sources, in Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation, Loubna El Amine notes how prevalent the view is that the goal of politics is moral transformation. It is precisely... (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Considero un acierto el que se haya otorgado al escritor Amin Maalouf el premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras 2010. Merece la pena tomarse la molestia de leer con atención a este autor, pues ilumina como pocos los distintos ángulos concernientes a la convivencia y la diversidad.

This book moves beyond seeing the commons in the past tense, an entity passed over from the public into the private, to reimagine the commons as a process, a contest of force, a reconstitution, and a site of convening practices. It highlights new spaces of gathering opening up, such as the digital commons, and new practices of being in common, such as community economies and solidarity networks. The commons is seen as a contested domain of the collective and as a (...) changing way of being in common, with the balance poised in the tensile play between political economy and social innovation. The book focuses on the possibility of recovering a future in which more can be held by the many, focusing on three concepts: nation and nature as a commons, publics and rights, and bodies, concerning the management of lives and livelihoods. Across these three passage points, the book finds evidence of a commons under attack but also defended in fragile though promising ways. With contributions from leading scholars, this thought provoking book will be of great interest to students and scholars in geography, environmental studies, politics, anthropology, and cultural studies. (shrink)

In these days, there is an increasing technological development in intelligent tutoring systems. This field has become interesting to many researchers. In this paper, we present an intelligent tutoring system for teaching mathematics that help students understand the basics of math and that helps a lot of students of all ages to understand the topic because it's important for students of adding and subtracting. Through which the student will be able to study the course and solve related problems. An evaluation (...) of the intelligent tutoring systems was carried out and the results were encouraging. (shrink)

A numeral system is an infinite sequence of different closed normal -terms intended to code the integers in -calculus. Barendregt has shown that if we can represent, for a numeral system, the functions Successor, Predecessor, and Zero Test, then all total recursive functions can be represented. In this paper we prove the independancy of these three particular functions. We give at the end a conjecture on the number of unary functions necessary to represent all total recursive functions.

Plus d’une trentaine d’années après la création des premières structures dédiées à sa promotion, l’intégrité scientifique s’est progressivement constituée en tant que thématique de recherche à part entière. Aujourd’hui, une communauté scientifique et académique est réunie autour de cet objet, comme en témoignent la publication d’un nombre croissant d’articles, la création de revues spécialisées ou encore l’organisation de conférences spécifiquement dédiées. Néanmoins, rares sont les travaux qui ont cherché à proposer une vue d’ensemble de la littérature académique relative à l’intégrité (...) scientifique. C’est dans cette perspective que cet état de l’art s’inscrit et entend apporter une contribution. Avec la volonté de rendre compte des principales tendances de la recherche en la matière, nous avons principalement ciblé dans ce travail des articles, des commentaires ou encore quelques documents institutionnels qui ont cherché à approfondir la compréhension que l’on a de l’intégrité scientifique, à explorer les diverses façons de la promouvoir, à mieux cerner l’occurrence des manquements qui y sont liés, ou encore à proposer une lecture de ces questions sous un angle spécifique. Certaines des thématiques qui sont abordées dans cet état de l’art sont incontournables dans le paysage de la recherche et font l’objet d’une attention marquée depuis longtemps, à l’image de l’étude des manquements à l’intégrité scientifique. D’autres, à l’instar des études historiques de l’intégrité scientifique, représentent des pistes de recherche un peu moins explorées mais dont l’intérêt nous semble assez important pour appeler à davantage de développements. (shrink)

This article offers an account of the responsibility that individuals bear by virtue of their national belonging alone. Via their national pride, the living connect themselves actively with select actions performed by others who might long be dead. They imagine themselves as having won past wars, built ancient empires and the like. This same feat of their imagination imposes on them a responsibility for the bad outcomes that were brought about through their imagined exploits. Their national responsibility for the "sins (...) of the fathers" however lends itself only to the kinds of responses that these living agents can demand of themselves. While their national responsibility can be captured by either the vocabulary of guilt or that of shame, the latter turns out to be more promising as it better accounts for the strong hold that the national idea has on contemporary political thinking. (shrink)