?Information? has been postulated by the Daoist theory of Qi-energy fields system to be encoded and inherent in the Qi-energy complex (Qi) since the beginning of time. This became the origin of intelligence when it was passed onto humankind. This abstract entity is extended as a concept of ?quantum information/intelligence? (QI) when correlated with quantum physics. Human psychic power, spread over interconnected biological to cosmic spatial fields, would constitute a new Fifth Dimension, woven into the fabric of space and time. (...) This would create a psycho-bionomic model of the universe. (shrink)

Pedagogy of power, oppression and empowerment: a Western theoretical underpinnings -- A Chinese confucian articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese legalistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese taoistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- A Chinese maohistic articulation of power, oppression and empowerment -- Conclusion: a dynamic and holistic Chinese cultural articulation of power, oppression and empowerment.

In Hong Kong, transfer students encounter different challenges unfolding in their transition from community college to university study. However, limited research has been conducted to explore their discipline-specific challenges. To address this gap, in this study three engineering and science faculties were selected from which to collect data through 35 in-depth interviews with transfer students, followed by a thorough thematic analysis. With the concept of in-betweenness, three main themes were identified: “shifted the focus of study” academic excellence in community college; (...) future career in the university; and university life); “encountered challenges in the transition” non-matching program articulation; heavy study workload and its associated consequences; and non-specific administration arrangement and support from university); and “students’ voices to enhance learning experiences” modify the study duration; improve program articulation; improve social adjustment; and overseas exchange). The results of this study indicate the challenges faced by transfer students in their transition from community college to university and have implications for universities to design and implement appropriate strategies to prepare for the future. (shrink)

In contrast to the traditional and ordinary interpretation of Xunzi’s theory of human nature, which considers Xunzi’s theory as claiming that human nature is bad or evil, this article aims at, first, arguing that the interpretation is wrong or at least incomplete and, second, constructing a new interpretation that, according to Xunzi’s text, there are some factors in human nature that are able to promote good behaviors. I shall demonstrate that some major paragraphs in Xunzi’s text were misinterpreted and misarranged, (...) analyze that the word wei (artifice) in the chapter of “Zhengming” has two different but related senses, one of which designates some of the potential capacities of human nature, and argue that the 23 words in the chapter of “Rongru” should not be deleted as redundant, as was done by the two famous philologists in Qing dynasdy, Wang Niansun and Wang Xianqian. (shrink)

In this first original collection of essays on Catholic Biblical Ethics ever done in English, renowned Jesuit moral theologian James Keenan brings together distinct voices from numerous cultures and language groups. The result is a volume representing a truly global community of Catholic ethics scholars. The Bible and Catholic Theological Ethics deepens contemporary understandings of the relationship between the Holy Bible and the world of Catholic ethical reflection. Like the four other books in the prestigious CTEWC Series, this volume aims (...) at offering a more systematic, comprehensive, and global perspective than typical Anglo-centric or North American-focused offerings. (shrink)

According to the perceptual theory of emotions, emotions are perceptions of evaluative properties. The account has recently faced a barrage of criticism recently by critics who point out varies disanalogies between emotion and paradigmatic perceptual experiences. What many theorists fail to note however, is that many of the disanalogies that have been raised to exclude emotions from being perceptual states that represent evaluative properties have also been used to exclude high-level properties from appearing in the content of perception. This suggests (...) that emotions are perceptions of high level properties and perceptual theorists can marshal the arguments used by proponents of high-level perception to defend the perceptual theory. This paper therefore defends an account of emotion as high-level perception. (shrink)

This book is a companion to logical thought and logical thinking in China with a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It introduces the basic ideas and theories of Chinese thought in a comprehensive and analytical way. It covers thoughts in ancient, pre-modern and modern China from a historical point of view. It deals with topics in logical (including logico-philosophical) concepts and theories rooted in China, Indian and Western Logic transplanted to China, and the development of logical studies in contemporary China and (...) other Chinese communities. The term “philosophy of logic” or “logico-philosophical thought” is used in this book to represent “logical thought” in a broad sense which includes thinking on logical concepts, modes of reasoning, and linguistic ideas related to logic and philosophical logic. Unique in its approach, the book uses Western logical theories and philosophy of language, Chinese philology, and history of ideas to deal with the basic ideas and major problems in logical thought and logical thinking in China. In doing so, it advances the understanding of the lost tradition in Chinese philosophical studies. (shrink)

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion and (...) show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

This study aims to explore if local responsiveness pressure and subsidiary resources influence green management adoption of overseas subsidiaries, and to investigate the relationships between the level of green management adoption and performance. The 101 effective samples were collected from 583 Taiwanese firms, which are listed in the top 1000 manufactory firms and have invested in China. Though structural equation model analysis' empirical results indicate that local responsiveness pressure and subsidiary resources both have positive effects on the level of green (...) management adoption of the subsidiary. This study also suggests that the level of green management adoption is positively related to the subsidiary's performance. (shrink)

BackgroundIn its 2015 decision in Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom overruled the long-standing, paternalistic prudent doctor standard of care in favour of a new reasonable patient standard which obligates doctors to make their patients aware of all material risks of the recommended treatment and of any reasonable alternative treatment. This landmark judgment has been of interest to the rest of the common law world. A judicial trend of invoking Montgomery to impose more stringent (...) requirements on doctors is discernible in subsequent decisions since then.Main bodyIn this narrative review, without questioning the idea that properly informed patients should play a more active role in procedures affecting their own health in furtherance of their autonomy, safety, and consumer rights, we identify and analyse, with the aid of realistic clinical thought experiments, three practical conundrums that the Montgomery standard may inflict on the daily work of doctors, unfairly exposing them to arbitrary legal risks.ConclusionsThese conundrums pertain to the ascertainment of the risks that must be disclosed to the patient under the test of ‘materiality’; the legal uncertainty as to the scope of the exceptions; and the actual ability of doctors to cope with the pressures of time. These conundrums offer ripe opportunities to rethink the proper role of judicially developed medical law in modern health care practice. (shrink)

A. C. Graham thinks that the parallelism in the Neo‐Moist Canons is about the deduction of sentences. On the contrary, Chad Hansen thinks that they are not plausibly treated as inference of deductive forms since the later Moists are at pains to show that they can “go wrong.” In this article, I shall try to provide a logical analysis and a constructive rather than defeatist interpretation of parallelism in the text. I argue that the Moists tend to express their ideas (...) in the “material mode of speech” to build up their semantic and pragmatic sensibility in philosophical thinking. (shrink)

Why would God make us ask for some good He might supply, and why would it be right for God to withhold that good unless and until we asked for it? We explain why present defences of petitionary prayer are insufficient, but argue that a world in which God makes us ask for some goods and then supplies them in response to our petitions adds value to the world that would not be available in worlds in which God simply supplied (...) such goods without our asking for them. This added value, we argue, is what we call ‘partnership with God’. (shrink)

Shuilu fahui is a Buddhist rite for saving all sentient beings (pudu) with a complex layer of ritual activities incorporating elements of all schools of Chinese Buddhism, such as Tantric mantras, Tian Tai rituals of asking for forgiveness (chanfa), and Pure Land reciting of Amitabha’s name. The ritual can be dated to the Tang Dynasty (c. 670–673 CE) and has been one of the most spectacular and popular rituals in Chinese Buddhism. Shuilu fahui is still performed in China, Hong Kong, (...) Taiwan and Singapore, and continues to be very popular amongst such Chinese communities. This study is an aid to understanding how Chinese Buddhism is practised by monks and nuns in Hong Kong, and how they interact with lay Buddhists through Shuilu fahui. This rite constructs and represents a unified religious world that contains many important and profound religious meanings, and it continuous to ­develop in order to accommodate the various demands of people in Hong Kong. (shrink)

This article aims at providing a general picture of the idea of correlative thinking developed by sinologists and philosophers in the field of Chinese and comparative studies, including Marcel Granet, Joseph Needham, A. C. Graham, David Hall and Roger Ames. As a matter of fact, there is no exactly the same view among these scholars when they use the term "correlative thinking"? to describe the Chinese mode of thinking; but they all recognize, more or less, the term's implication as "non-logical"? (...) or "pre-logical", "non-rational"? or "irrational", "intuitive-associative"? or "beyond analytic thinking". ?Based on this presumption, some of them think that there is "irreducibility"?from the root level of (correlative) thinking to the upper level of (analytic) thinking or that there is "incommensurability"? between correlative and analytic thinking. Based on the contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially Donald Davidson's holism of the mental and the principle of charity, I shall argue that the thesis of "pre-logical", ?"illogical"? or "non-logical" is self-refuting. I shall also demonstrate that the view of "incommensurability"? between correlative and analytic thinking and the thesis of "unanalyzability" of correlative thinking shared by most of these scholars are not well-argued but taken as a primary fact. The conclusion of this article is that there is no thinking by correlation and analogy which cannot be understood in terms of analytic concepts and which can escape from the logical or rational space. (shrink)

A.C. Graham, a widely respected Sinologist, may be the first scholar in the context of Chinese philosophy to express opinions counter to Donald Davidson’s principle of charity and to his view on the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

All along, many commentators stressed the differences of Chinese and Western philosophy and method of Qi, that philosophy and approach to the Western emphasis on analysis, argumentation and logic, and China's philosophical method is longer than intuition, and permits will be realized. Different methods by which they believe will give different results: the knowledge of the outside world through Western methods may be, can be obtained through the French inner truth. The former purpose we got outside, after all is also (...) in the contented. The authors believe that this orthodoxy and popular opinion is a great problem. One problem is: with or without the so-called intrinsic truth, they say, intuitive method of physical certificates but not feasible. In addition to resorting to a very small number of believers of the first-person authority, they can not explain the methods and procedures, they can not prove its effectiveness. In addition, they oppose the West, although on the surface of the speculative method, which emphasizes the importance of reflexivity within the card, but when their faith in order to convince the people off the outer ring of authenticity Wuzhen Dao, in fact, they unwittingly use on the Western speculative methods, but not the logic of Western speculative, but now the speculative. The purpose of this article, first through a thought experiment of the anti-theory, went on to argue that the orthodox view of the popular errors and false. The authors believe that: this say just false, but logically self-denial. (shrink)

In contrast to the traditional and ordinary interpretation of Xunzi’s theory of human nature, which considers Xunzi’s theory as claiming that human nature is bad or evil, this article aims at, first, arguing that the interpretation is wrong or at least incomplete and, second, constructing a new interpretation that, according to Xunzi’s text, there are some factors in human nature that are able to promote good behaviors. I shall demonstrate that some major paragraphs in Xunzi’s text were misinterpreted and misarranged, (...) analyze that the word wei in the chapter of “Zhengming” has two different but related senses, one of which designates some of the potential capacities of human nature, and argue that the 23 words in the chapter of “Rongru” should not be deleted as redundant, as was done by the two famous philologists in Qing dynasdy, Wang Niansun and Wang Xianqian. (shrink)

Shun argues that the distinction made between emotions experienced from the first-person perspective and those from the third-person perspective does not capture our everyday emotional experience. My proposal is that even if we accept this claim, first- and third-person perspective taking is still crucial in the development of our emotional psychology. This is so in two respects. First, the features of intimacy and impartiality that mark adult emotional response are a product of a developmental process that involves perspective taking. Second, (...) perspective taking is a crucial part of refining and developing virtuous emotional responses. (shrink)

With the increasing degrees A.I.s and machines are applied across different social contexts, the need for implementing ethics in A.I.s is pressing. In this paper, we argue for a pluralist hybrid model for the implementation of moral A.I.s. We first survey current approaches to moral A.I.s and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral A.I.s can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an (...) A.I. based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that incorporates different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that calculates the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as (i) it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including different moral principles, while (ii) it reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making compared with a bottom-up system by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision making. (shrink)

Low-wage migrant workers in Singapore are legally entitled to healthcare provided by their employers and supported by private insurance, separate from the national UHC (universal health coverage) system. In practice, they face multiple barriers to access. In this article, we describe this policy-practice gap from the perspective of HealthServe, a non-profit organisation that assists low-wage migrant workers. We outline the healthcare financing system for migrant workers, describe commonly encountered barriers, and comment on their implications for the global UHC movement’s key (...) ethical concepts of fairness, equity, and solidarity. (shrink)

Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes and I show how (...) insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited. (shrink)

Borrowing Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobject, this article explores questions of network and scale in generative adversarial networks (GAN) images. In this context, the term network refers to the omnipresence of algorithmic images today and their significant impact on our lives. Such images are massively distributed in time and space beyond any sensible human-scale. Scale, in this context, denotes the relations between different operational layers of algorithmic images, such as the pictorial layer in contrast to the data layer. An algorithmic (...) image is simultaneously a visual image, a symbol, a data point and part of a mass visual milieu. Its meaning is thus polymorphic and can, arguably, never be exhausted. The article explores these terms through analysis of the website www.thispersondoesnotexist.com. (shrink)

In the current version of Mozi, there are six special chapters on knowledge, language, logic, ethics, politics and science. They include “Canon I ” and “Canon Explanation I ”, “Canon II ” and “Canon Explanation II ”, and “Major Illustrations” and “Minor Illustrations”. Later scholars give the names “Mohist Canons ” for the first four chapters and “Mohist Dialectical Chapters” for all the six. The content of these six chapters indicates that the later Mohists follow Mozi’s cognitive spirit in dealing (...) with ethical and socio-political issues and,most importantly, apply an analytic approach to investigate philosophical problems, especially, in knowledge, language and logic. (shrink)

In this article, I shall try to argue that some existing interpretations of the Analects cannot provide a satisfactory understanding of the concept of ren, on the one hand, and the relation between ren and li, on the other. Ren is not a thin concept such as right and wrong, good and bad, because it is not a non-substantive concept whose descriptive content has to be identified by a specific criterion which is not included in the concept itself. It is (...) also not or not merely a thick concept such as courage, cruelty, truthfulness, and kindliness. In comparison with a thick concept, ren like courage, but unlike right, has substantive content. Nevertheless, unlike courage and other thick concepts, ren is not only about the ideal quality of a virtuous agent and the moral property of the agent's actions; it is also about the internal capacity of the agent and the principle believed by the agent for making moral actions. Since the meaning of the term is not only related to the external behavior but also related to the internal mind and the relevant principle, here, I call ren a “heavy” concept. It is “heavy” in the sense that it is not a concept of observable or substantive entity, but a theoretical construct which is used to explain the complicated relational property of morality, that is emerged from the internal realm and exhibited in the external realm of an agent. (shrink)

In three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics, photography is treated not as the final product but as data to be extracted, information to be mapped onto and raw material to augment 3D models. Texture maps, normal maps and bump maps, created from photographic data, describe the reflectance properties of an object in a virtual scene. They give instructions to the render engine to calculate the correct pixel value, generating a near imperceptibly natural scene for the human eye. Computer graphics utilizes a network (...) of images taken from different perspectives and at different scales to achieve photorealism. The project investigates one of many algorithmic visual systems that act as a backbone of virtual reality and gaming. (shrink)

In Italy, notably Florence, the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries witnessed the proliferation of texts that discuss the relationship between the mirror and painting. In them, the mirror is closely associated with major innovations of the time such as naturalistic representation and linear perspective. On a technical level, the authors describe the mirror's function in the painting of self-portraits and recommend it be used to draw foreshortened objects more easily and to judge the quality of finished paintings. The technical (...) aspects often lead over to theoretical considerations such as the limitations of perspective, the origins of painting, the analogy between the mirror image and the painted image, and the concept that the mind of the painter resembles a mirror. The fact that these texts do not mention the concave mirror projection method described by Hockney and Falco speaks strongly against its use in the early Renaissance. (shrink)

Literature on ethical behavior has paid little attention to the mechanism between macro-environmental variables and environmental performance. This study aims at constructing a model to examine the relationships which link cultural values, population growth, economic development, and environmental performance by incorporating the mediating role of education. The multiple linear regression model was employed to test the hypotheses on a 3-year-pooled sample of 51 countries. Empirical results conclude that national culture, economic development, and population growth would significantly influence environmental performance directly. (...) In addition, through the mediating effect of education, population growth and national culture would significantly affect environmental performance indirectly. These findings provide theoretical and managerial implications for constructing the mechanism of cultural values and ethical behavior in general and environmental management in particular. (shrink)

-/- CONCLUSION “The experience in California is clear. Affirmative action has helped to dismantle barriers such as "old boys' networks" that have excluded not only women and individuals of racial or ethnic minorities, but also white American men who did not belong to networks of privilege. Affirmative action has also worked to ensure that our schools, workplaces, and other social institutions fully use our diverse talents, thereby helping our government and social institutions to better serve their communities. -/- In short, (...) affirmative action has helped to bring out the best in us as a society. It challenges us to have the courage of our convictions that: (1) we do want a truly equal opportunity society; and (2) we believe that all Americans, including women and minorities, are competent individuals who have talents to contribute. Passing the CCRI would completely eliminate affirmative action, and thus have the same effect as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." The "baby" —active and affirmative commitment to equal opportunity— is barely out of its infancy. We must not now abandon our commitment, just when we have taken our first steps towards creating a truly equal opportunity society.” -/- (This essay was written against the backdrop of legislative efforts in the mid 1990s, to overturn “affirmative action” policies at educational institutions, which had given more equal access to higher education for students from previously under-represented communities, particularly white women but also racialized communities. By mischaracterizing affirmative action programs as “gender or racial preferences”, opponents were able to pass the 1996 ballot measure, Proposition 209, the so-called “California Civil Rights Initiative” (CCRI). The ban on “preferences” gained the support of 54.6% of all California voters, including 58% of white women and 66% of white men voters. Use of language was key, as a slight majority of Americans approved of some affirmative actions but opposed racial preferences. The CCRI has had a huge toll on Latino and African American enrollment at UC Berkeley and UCLA, which has never recovered. State contracts for firms owned by women and minorities also dropped sharply. Similar initiatives failed in some states but succeeded elsewhere. See online Encyclopedia). (shrink)

My dissertation is an exploration of the role of emotion in our moral and social lives. It consists of a series of essays that explore the nature and normativity of emotion structured into two large sections. The first section explores the nature of emotion, where I attempt to provide a philosophical psychology of emotion that explains its centrality to our normative nature. Essentially, I argue that emotions are evaluative perceptions that have a direct modulatory effect on our motivational profile. The (...) second section focuses more on normative questions of emotion. I begin by setting up a framework to approach the question of how to determine when an emotion is fitting. The kinds of emotions and fittingness standards that rightly demand our normative allegiance, I suggest, are those that constitutively secure for us key prudential and moral goods. I then apply some of the lessons gleaned to look at two emotions: shame and disgust. I provide analyses of them and try to elucidate the kind of value that they alert us to and enable. Both shame and disgust, often maligned emotions, play important roles and ought not to be discarded from our moral and social lives. (shrink)

本书是叶锦添艺术随笔集,囊括他在服装,舞台,电影美术,视觉艺术,当代艺术创作等多元领域的美学观点与实践层面的探索,承袭了讲求意境的中国审美传统,游走于东方美学中两种不同的美感之间,以充满创意与可能性, 流美华丽的表达方式,向世人展示了一个富有东方诗意的艺术世界,诠释了独树一帜的艺术主张,以及从传统与文化中生发创意的方法.

Mismatch negativity is the electroencephalographic waveform obtained by subtracting event-related potential responses evoked by unexpected deviant stimuli from responses evoked by expected standard stimuli. While the MMN is thought to reflect an unexpected change in an ongoing, predictable stimulus, it is unknown whether MMN responses evoked by changes in different stimulus features have different magnitudes, latencies, and topographies. The present study aimed to investigate whether MMN responses differ depending on whether sudden stimulus change occur in pitch, duration, location or vowel (...) identity, respectively. To calculate ERPs to standard and deviant stimuli, EEG signals were recorded in normal-hearing participants who listened to roving oddball sequences of artificial syllables. In the roving paradigm, any given stimulus is repeated several times to form a standard, and then suddenly replaced with a deviant stimulus which differs from the standard. Here, deviants differed from preceding standards along one of four features. The feature levels were individually chosen to match behavioral discrimination performance. We identified neural activity evoked by unexpected violations along all four acoustic dimensions. Evoked responses to deviant stimuli increased in amplitude relative to the responses to standard stimuli. A univariate analysis yielded no significant differences between MMN responses following violations of different features. However, in a multivariate analysis, acoustic features could be decoded from the topography of mismatch responses, although at later latencies than those typical for MMN. These results support the notion that deviant feature detection may be subserved by a different process than general mismatch detection. (shrink)