Research in the field of Empirical Ethics (EE) uses a broad variety of empirical methodologies, such as surveys, interviews and observation, developed in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Whereas these empirical disciplines see themselves as purely descriptive, EE also aims at normative reflection. Currently there is literature about the quality of empirical research in ethics, but little or no reflection on specific methodological aspects that must be considered when conducting interdisciplinary empirical ethics. Furthermore, poor methodology in an EE (...) study results in misleading ethical analyses, evaluations or recommendations. This not only deprives the study of scientific and social value, but also risks ethical misjudgement. (shrink)

The present-day languages and language situation of the Silk Road regions of Central Asia reflect the consequences of the former use of many different languages and the multilingual trading along these routes, as demonstrated by the existence today of a number of hybridized languages whose emergence may in part be attributable to the trading activities on the Silk Road. These languages have, until very recently, received little attention, if any, by linguistic scholars. It has been mainly (...) through the large Language Atlases project mentioned in note 1 below that interest has become focused on them. (shrink)

The Silk Road originated in China in the 1st century B.C.E. The purpose of the route was to expand silk trade which initially was elaborated exclusively by the Chinese. European aristocrats showed great devotion for this textile, which was carried mainly by Persian merchants. Seveal commercial silk routes were created to connect China with Mongolia, Korea, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Europe. Due to its geographic position, Korea served as the last Silk Route destiny (...) for the Arab merchants in the Asian Continent. As early as the Three Kingdoms period in Korea, Muslim traders travelled from the Caliphate of Turkey to Tang China and established contact with Shilla. Trade and cultural exchange were developed significantly and foreign influence reached Korea through the Silk Road. Arab merchants who arrived during the Koyeo Dynasty period were in fact the first to coin the English name “Korea”. In modern period, Korea maintained an important role in the New Silk Road, participating actively during the splendid periods of Unified Shilla and the Koryeo Dynasty. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the observation of the work of The Second International Forum on Higher Medical Education, which was conducted at China Medical University in Shenyang, China in May, 26-27, 2018. About 300 participants from 49 medical higher educational institutions, located in 15 countries took part in this academic event. The main topics, which were discussed during the forum, were internationalization of higher medical education, implementation of modern innovations in teaching and learning processes, quality assurance in medical education (...) and searching for the adequate forms of its assessment. (shrink)

Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production. This paper presents a periodization of Asian Studies in Turkey (...) in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world. (shrink)

Diogenes, Ahead of Print. Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production. This paper presents a periodization of (...) Asian Studies in Turkey in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world. (shrink)

Regional studies in Turkey have long focused on Europe and the Middle East, with which Turkey has traditionally been associated. East Asian studies seem to remain out of the spotlight. This study claims firstly that different phases of Asian studies scholarship in Turkey have all been geared towards confirmation and validation of the process of Turkish national identity formation. Secondly, this process also reflects the Western-centrism of Turkish academic knowledge production. This paper presents a periodization of Asian Studies in Turkey (...) in three phases to contextualize and demonstrate these claims. During the first phase of the early republican years, the first Sinology departments were expected to actively contribute to writing Turkish national history. Throughout the second phase of the Cold War years, Turkey found itself in both political and intellectual isolation. In the final phase of post-Cold War globalization, the scope of regional studies scholarship expanded to include East Asia. Despite this development, academic scholarship in Turkey still suffers from Western-centrism and it is not able to directly communicate with East Asia. Knowledge production on East Asia in Turkey is still filtered through the theoretical framework of the Western Anglophone academic world. (shrink)

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/silk-roadThe ancient Silk Road is an image and metaphor that has been revived as the basis for what President Xi has called ‘the project of the ce...

Along the Silk Roads in Mongol Eurasia: Generals, Merchants, and Intellectuals. Edited by Michal Biran, Jonathan Brack, and Francesca Fiaschetti. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Pp. xv + 335. $85, £70 (cloth); $29.95, £25 (paper, ebook).

The problems and the history of contacts between distant continents in bygone ages and long before the age of fast and easy travel, have always fascinated both professional scholars and the interested public. Was ancient history really nothing but the history of co-existing and isolated geographic, cultural and political “islands?” Already at school we learned too much about migrations of peoples, economic contacts, influences on art styles, conquests, and the rise, expansion and fall of empires to believe that. The (highly (...) improbable) theory that certain archaeological finds in America suggest, or even prove, Mediterranean influence (e.g., the arrival of Phoenician ships), or the alleged Viking discovery of America centuries before Columbus, or Thor Heyerdahl's adventurous journey to prove South American influence on remote Pacific islands did not fail to cause widespread interest and even excitement (although many scholars still feel that Heyerdahl's epic adventure, thrilling as it is, failed to prove what it set out to prove). The island of Madagascar is pretty close to the African continent, but its language exhibits more points of contact with Polynesian than with African tongues. And the blow-bellows used by Malagache smiths are similar to those used in Malaysia and unlike those known to African metalworkers. Clearly the Polynesians, those great ancient mariners, sailed further than originally seemed likely. Musicologists studying the cantillation of the Hebrew Bible in the liturgy of the ancient Jewish communities on the Malabar coast in India discovered to their surprise that it was similar to the cantillation not of the Babylonian but of the Yemenite Jews! This surprise was, of course, no surprise to those who knew anything about trade-winds and shipping routes between South Arabia and the Indian coast. Historians of religion, even more than general historians, studying the spread and expansion of religious ideas and movements have realised long ago that the beginning of all wisdom is a basic knowledge of economic geography. (shrink)

The Silk Road, which began operating more than two thousand years ago, constituted certainly for many centuries the main cultural and linguistic highway between peoples of the East and peoples of the West, and to an even greater extent between the peoples of the East or West and those living along the Silk Road in Central Asia. This is reflected by the many loan words transmitted along the Silk Road from one end to the (...) other, especially those connected with the textile trade. (shrink)

Afghanistan: Forging Civilizations along the Silk Road. Edited by Joan Aruz and Elisabetta Valtz Fino. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Pp. viii + 134, illus. $35. [Distributed by Yale University Press] Afghanistan: Forging Civilizations along the Silk Road. By Frank L. Holt. Hellenistic Culture and Society, vol. 53. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xxi + 343, illus. $39.95.

Excavated from the ruins of a Han dynasty postal and relay station located in the Gansu Corridor, the Xuanquan manuscripts provide a precious chance to look into the daily traffic along the ancient Silk Road. After a brief introduction to the Han postal system, this paper translates and examines some of the Xuanquan documents directly related to foreigners traveling to Han China, such as passports, records of lodging and boarding, and files concerning trade disputes. The author concludes that (...) the management of traffic and trade along the Silk Road was a business tightly controlled by the early Chinese empire. (shrink)

In recent years, Chinese clothing cultural heritage and knowledge genealogy along the Silk Road have become the research headline attracting public attention. In particular, Kazakh clothing in Northwestern China has become the focus of today's traditional national culture. Kazakh, located at the intersection of the Silk Road, has an important position. The traditional clothing made by various social factors reflects the style and identity integration throughout history in cultures along the Silk Road, taking women's (...) clothing as an example. Kazakh women are good at crafts, which is reflected in their strong grit. They gradually changed their role and traditional values, which has guided their social role. At the same time, it also reflects the awakening of Kazakh women's feminist consciousness to a large extent, and complies with Confucianism, along with the mainstream value of “advanced gender culture” of the world's outstanding civilization achievements. This paper summarizes the form, color, and patterns of Kazakh women's clothing by analyzing the garment, headdress, and footwear in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum, Aksai Kazakh National Museum, and Capital Museum of China. Through the analysis, this paper further probes into the multicultural integration between Kazakh and the regions along the Silk Road and interprets the idea represented by the forms, colors, and patterns in the clothing to promote the inheritance and development of traditional and regional cultures together with ethnic features along the Silk Road. (shrink)

From time immemorial the Silk Road, with its hundreds of byways, was considered the highway that linked the worlds of East and West. In the mid dle of the twentieth century, scholarly research revealed the crucial role played by oases in linking the North to the South; these oases, even more than the transversal lines of the Silk Roads, played the role of crossroads where successive waves of nomads, farmers, pastoral groups and city dwellers met. Today, thanks (...) to UNESCO, we are working on land and sea to secure a different destiny for this network of roads. By balancing warp and woof, each side can give back some of its native wealth and help realize the ancient dream of peace. (shrink)

Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “ (...) class='Hi'>silk”, name of a commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West. (shrink)

Even though the languages that are spoken and written in the territories crossed by commercial and cultural routes between Asia and Europe - the “Silk Roads” - have been the object of research for many decades, the popular notion of “languages along the Silk Road” is of fairly recent origin. It is worth giving some thought to the problem of whether, or to what extent, it is actually possible and practical to continue with linguistic research in the (...) context of the “Silk Roads.”. (shrink)

ReOrienting Histories of Medicine: Encounters Along the Silk Roads, by Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. xvi+236 pp.; Hb $115.00 USD; Pb $39.95. ISBN-13: 9781472512574.

劉智與賈米這兩位時隔幾百年、跨越幾千公里的波斯與中國學者沿著古老的絲綢之路，通過兩者的著述和譯文建立了學術與思想上的聯繫。本書以絲綢之路上的人文交流為時代背景，以波斯蘇非典籍從中亞到中國內地的傳播途徑 與方式為切入點，研究明清時期中國穆斯林知識份子群體出現與發展的歷史背景，以及漢文譯著活動的文化動因，並以此為基礎揭示出劉智與賈米哲學思想的淵源。.

As we all know, the Silk Road, as a famous ancient transportation route, was a trade line cross-Eurasian continent in history. Its name was from the delivery of silk. However, no Chinese ancient documents mentioned the name of “Silk Road”. German F. V. Richthofen (1933-1905) firstly used the term “Silk Road” in his book China, published in 1877. Afterwards, the name of “Silk Road” has been accepted universally and used by the (...) world widely. The Silk Road was an ancient business channel, acrossing the middle of China and countries in Central Asia, gradually forming after Qian Zhang visited Western Regions twice, two thousand and one hundred years ago. The north-west land Silk Road started from Chinese ancient Capital Chang’an (now Xi’an), acrossing Central Asia, and reaching ancient Rome in Europe. It was a bridge for communication of politics, economy, and culture between ancient China and the Western. Before 11 Century, the Sino-Western silk trade mainly depended on the land transportation. During Han Dynasty, it was a competition between the Huns and the Hans for occupy the Silk road. The silk as a kind of material culture was a sort of intermediary for making people to know how to get along together.This article attempts to describe the Sino-Western silk trade conditions before and after the two missions of Qian Zhang to Western Regions (Xiyu), including archaeological evidences, kinds of silk and trade scale, transportation routes, trade participants, and so on. (shrink)

This timely book offers revealing insights into the changing role of China in world governance as exemplified by the Silk Road Initiative, the People's Republic's first published major initiative for external affairs. Focusing on various aspects of the Silk Road Initiative, particularly those that are largely neglected in current discussions, including culture and philosophy, finance and investment, environmental protection and social responsibility, judiciary and lawyers, the authors explore a wide range of contexts in which China's role (...) as an emerging power in international relations and international law is examined. In the current era of ever-increasing populism, protectionism and challenges to globalization, the authors explore the Chinese philosophy underpinning Chinese norms of regional and international development. Bearing in mind the political and economic uncertainties hampering the establishment of such norms, the authors offer crucial insights into how the Silk Road Initiative could or should be developed and regulated. Given its depth of coverage, the book is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the Initiative and its social-legal implications. (shrink)

Most evolutionary analyses of animal communication suggest that low-cost signals can evolve only when both the signaller and the recipient rank outcomes in the same order. When there is a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, honest signals must be costly. However, recent work suggests that low-cost signals can be evolutionarily stable, even when the sender and the receiver rank outcomes in different orders, as long as the interest in achieving coordination is sufficiently great. In this paper, we extend (...) this body of work by analysing a game theory model that shows that low-cost signals can evolve when there are conflicts of interest and no interest in coordination, as long as individuals interact repeatedly. We also present an empirical example indicating that female rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, use honest, low-cost, vocal signals to facilitate interactions when conflicts of interest exist. (shrink)

Traditional wisdom in linguistic semantics is that comparatives of the form ‘x is ADJ-er than y’ are not vague. I show that gradable adjectives can exhibit vagueness phenomena in the comparative form. Vagueness can be associated not only with how ADJ something must be to count as ADJ, but with how ADJ things are. The latter sort of vagueness cannot be reduced to indiscriminability or fuzziness in relevant dimensions, standards, or measurement procedures. The comparative sorites cases that I provide raise (...) a challenge for traditional formal semantics for gradation. I develop a semantics with semiorders, a type of well studied threshold structure. The semantics captures the truth of tolerance claims expressing that adjacent items in a sorites series are relevantly indistinguishable; and it avoids treating the tolerance claim as implying the inductive premise in a three-step sorites argument. (shrink)

The mainstream literature on corporate governance is based on the premise of conflicts of interest in a competitive game played by variously defined stakeholders and thus builds explicitly and/or implicitly on masculinist ethical theories. This article argues that insights from feminist ethics, and in particular ethics of care, can provide a different, yet relevant, lens through which to study corporate governance. Based on feminist ethical theories, the article conceptualises a governance model that is different from the current normative orthodoxy.

The first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest book, The Birth of Tragedy, this important volume by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern examines the work in detail: its place in Nietzsche's philosophical career; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture; its place in the history of German ideas, and its value as a theory of tragedy and music. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Lesley Chamberlain, illuminating its (...) enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this accessible study has been revived for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

This paper considers three horary quadrants of strikingly similar design and underlying mode of conception. Two are dated, 1398 and 1399, while the third, undated instrument can now be dated for the first time with some certainty to 1400. The parameters used in their construction are analysed, and the latitude for which they were made is elucidated. This shows that all three were made for use in London or southern England. One of the three, dated 1399, has previously been attributed (...) to the patronage of Richard II, King of England, by virtue of the badge decorating the quadrant. The badge on the second quadrant, dated 1398, for a long time also associated with Richard II, has now been established to have been used by Richard's half brother, John Holland, Duke of Exeter. The third quadrant undoubtedlybelongs to the group, but cannot be assigned to the patronage of any individual. (shrink)

Today many scholars seem to agree that citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on science and technology issues. This interest in public deliberation has gained attraction in many practical settings, especially in the European Union, and holds the promise of more legitimate governance of science and technology. In this article, the authors draw on the European Commission’s report ‘‘Taking the European Knowledge Society Seriously’’ to ask how legitimate these efforts to ‘‘democratize’’ scientific expertise really are. While the report borrows (...) from deliberative democrats’ normative accounts of legitimacy, the authors identify a tension between the principles for legitimate rule prescribed by deliberative democratic theory and the report’s celebration of diversity and dissent. While this inconsistency suggests that the legitimacy of deliberative governance arrangements is justified on empirical rather than normative grounds, it remains an open question whether studies of science and technology offer enough empirical support for such a justification. In this article, the authors address this pressing question and propose three possible responses. (shrink)