Health Care Ethics Health care ethics is the field of applied ethics that is concerned with the vast array of moral decision-making situations that arise in the practice of medicine in addition to the procedures and the policies that are designed to guide such practice. Of all of the aspects of the human body, and … Continue reading Health Care Ethics →.

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding ...

The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The finely tuned mechanisms that control cell cycle progression go awry in cancer, pointing to proto‐oncogene products as important players in cell‐cycle regulation. One such proto‐oncoprotein, c‐Src, has previously been directly implicated, based on its requirement for growth factor‐stimulated DNA synthesis. Roche et al.(1) have now shown that c‐Src or its close relatives are also required for cell division to occur. The demonstration of essential functions for the Src family at multiple points in the cell cycle raises important questions about (...) the normal and transforming activities of these and other proto‐oncoproteins. (shrink)

Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. -/- Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways (...) of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. (shrink)

Confucian political philosophy has recently emerged as a vibrant area of thought both in China and around the globe. This book provides an accessible introduction to the main perspectives and topics being debated today, and shows why Progressive Confucianism is a particularly promising approach. Students of political theory or contemporary politics will learn that far from being confined to a museum, contemporary Confucianism is both responding to current challenges and offering insights from which we can all learn. The Progressive Confucianism (...) defended here takes key ideas of the twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan as its point of departure for exploring issues like political authority and legitimacy, the rule of law, human rights, civility, and social justice. The result is anti-authoritarian without abandoning the ideas of virtue and harmony; it preserves the key values Confucians find in ritual and hierarchy without giving in to oppression or domination. A central goal of the book is to present Progressive Confucianism in such a way as to make its insights manifest to non-Confucians, be they philosophers or simply citizens interested in the potential contributions of Chinese thinking to our emerging, shared world. (shrink)

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication.

This volume presents the fruits of an extended dialogue among American and Chinese philosophers concerning the relations between virtue ethics and the Confucian tradition. Based on recent advances in English-language scholarship on and translation of Confucian philosophy, the book demonstrates that cross-tradition stimulus, challenge, and learning are now eminently possible. Anyone interested in the role of virtue in contemporary moral philosophy, in Chinese thought, or in the future possibilities for cross-tradition philosophizing will find much to engage with in the twenty (...) essays collected here. (shrink)

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse - reaching back to important, though neglected, origins of that discourse in 17th and 18th century Confucianism - with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about (...) the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement. (shrink)

Data science is characterized by engaging heterogeneous data to tackle real world questions and problems. But data science has no data of its own and must seek it within real world domains. We call this search for data “prospecting” and argue that the dynamics of prospecting are pervasive in, even characteristic of, data science. Prospecting aims to render the data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available and tractable to data science method and epistemology. Prospecting precedes data synthesis, analysis, (...) or visualization, and is constituted by the upstream work of discovering disordered or inaccessible data resources, thereafter to be ordered and rendered available for computation. Through this work, data science positions itself in the middle of all things—capable of engaging this, that, or any domain—and thus prospecting is a key driver of data science’s ongoing formation as a universal science. (shrink)

"Growing Moral engages its readers to reflect on and to practice the teachings of Confucianism in the contemporary world. It draws on the whole history of Confucianism, focusing on three thinkers from the classical era and two from the Neo-Confucian era (Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. In addition to laying out the fundamental teachings of Confucianism, it highlights the enduring and strikingly relevant lessons that Confucianism offers contemporary readers. At its core, this book builds a case for modern Confucianism as (...) a practical way to grow toward more harmonious lives together through reflection, ritual, and compassion; it can help us find balance and joy within our complex and too-often frenetic modern lives. Individual chapter explain how and why to be filial, follow rituals, and cultivate our sprouts of morality; as well as exploring Confucian approaches to reading, music-making, reflection, and socio-political engagement. Overall, the book presents a progressive vision of Confucianism that addresses historical shortcomings within the tradition concerning gender and other forms of hierarchy"--. (shrink)

Are there any coherent and defensible alternatives to liberal democracy? The author examines the possibility that a reformed democratic centralism-the principle around which China's current polity is officially organized-might be legitimate, according to both an inside and an outside perspective. The inside perspective builds on contemporary Chinese political theory; the outside perspective critically deploys Rawls's notion ofa "decent society " as its standard. Along the way, the author pays particular attention to the kinds and degree of pluralism a decent society (...) can countenance, and to the specific institutions in China that might enable the realization of a genuine and/or decent democratic centralism. The author argues that by considering both inside and outside perspectives, and the degrees to which they inter-penetrate and critically inform one another, we can engage in a global philosophy that neither pre-judges alternative political traditions nor falls prey to false conceptual barriers. (shrink)

Tian 天 is central to the metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics of the 800-year-long Chinese philosophical tradition we call “Neo-Confucianism,” but there is considerable confusion over what tian means—confusion which is exacerbated by its standard translation into English as “Heaven.” This essay analyzes the meaning of tian in the works of the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi 朱熹, presents a coherent interpretation that unifies the disparate aspects of the term’s meaning, and argues that “cosmos” does an excellent job of capturing this (...) meaning and therefore should be adopted as our translation of tian. (shrink)

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. Yet until now much of the work in this field has not been easily accessible to the student, and was often written at an intimidating level of technicality. In this textbook, however, Dr Levinson has provided a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, (...) speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The complexity of these issues is not disguised, but the exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage - psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines, as well as students of linguistics, will find this a valuable textbook. (shrink)

In this essay, I find much to admire and little to disagree with in Shu-Shan L ee ’s use of James Scott’s “public transcript” framework to excavate a theory of political obligation that applies to common people in premodern China. I offer some ways to further explore the implications of Lee’s analysis, in part by connecting Lee’s essay to related work on the obligations of elites. I then build on Lee’s own suggestions of connections to contemporary empirical attitudes and contemporary (...) normative views, asking in what ways Lee’s account of public obligation might be able to make room for the idea that the people, as political children, might one day be able to grow up. (shrink)

This issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought is devoted to recent mainland Chinese Confucian philosophizing, and especially to arguments about what “Mainland New Confucianism” signifies that were prompted by somewhat dismissive remarks about Mainland New Confucianism by the noted Taiwanese scholar Li Minghui in early 2015. This introduction begins by summarizing some of the challenges Confucianism has encountered in the twentieth century and also the rise of New Confucianism. It next turns to the emergence of Mainland New Confucianism as a distinct (...) and controversial phenomenon, arguing that after an initial stage (characterized here as its “infancy”), Mainland New Confucianism has now entered a somewhat more diverse and mature stage (its “adolescence”) in which Jiang Qing plays less of an important role. After overviews of each of the essays included in this issue and summaries of some of key terms in which the debates are carried out, the introduction concludes by reflecting on the place of Confucianism within contemporary East Asia. (shrink)

This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of ...

The essay begins from Alan Gewirth's influential account of human rights, and specifically with his argument that the human right to political participation can only be fulfilled by competitive, liberal democracy. I show that his argument rests on empirical, rather than conceptual grounds, which opens the possibility that in China, alternative forms of participation may be legitimate or even superior. An examination of the theory and contemporary practice of 'democratic centralism' shows that while it does not now adequately support the (...) right to political participation, a reformed version could. I focus in particular on the roles that could be played by consultative institutions, looking both to recent Chinese proposals and to analogues currently existing in Japan. I conclude that a reformed democratic centralism may well be the objective toward which Chinese people should strive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel ReconsideredStephen N. DunningJon Stewart. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 695. Cloth, $55.00.It is rare to find a scholarly book that treats its topic exhaustively. But Jon Stewart's 658-page Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, despite its author's disclaimers, comes close. It is an impressive attempt to demolish what Stewart calls "the standard view," using a three-part (...) argument: that Hegel exerted a substantial positive influence on the young Kierkegaard; [End Page 500] that Kierkegaard was never the radical critic of Hegel claimed by the "standard view"; and that most Kierkegaard scholars (especially Niels Thulstrup in Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980]) have been led astray on these matters by their ignorance of Kierkegaard's philosophical milieu and their ideological bias.Hegel's positive influence on Kierkegaard is presented in chapters devoted respectively to The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Sickness Unto Death. Stewart employs a contextual method, limiting himself to passages in Kierkegaard's texts that have clearly been influenced by passages in or characteristics of Hegel's works. He easily shows Hegelian influence on the dialectical structure of the argument in The Concept of Irony, on the contrast between the ancient and "modern" Antigones in Part One of Either/Or, on the concepts of mediation and romantic love presented in Part Two, and on the dialectical structure of the section on "The Forms of This Sickness (Despair)" in The Sickness Unto Death.The claim that Kierkegaard was never a strong critic of Hegel turns on Stewart's careful contextual analysis of the major Danish Hegelians and anti-Hegelians contemporary with Kierkegaard. Thanks to Bruce Kirmmse's Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), many scholars will be familiar with Heiberg and Martensen, and also the anti-Hegelian Bishop Mynster, but few will have examined the Hegelianism of Adler and the criticisms of Sibbern and Møller. Stewart argues that the texts of Kierkegaard's "middle period," which appear to attack Hegel directly, are really an attack on the Danish Hegelians—especially Heiberg, Martensen and Adler. He claims that "Hegel" often served as a code name for one of these Hegelians, and that such secret codes were commonly used, just like pseudonyms, to avoid giving offence in the small town of Copenhagen.Stewart's criticism of other scholars is based upon both his analyses of the selected passages in Kierkegaard's works and his discussion of the Danish Hegelians. It is true that many scholars have portrayed Kierkegaard as one-dimensionally anti-Hegelian, and some may have done it for the ideological reasons imputed to them by Stewart. But it is not clear that Thulstrup, for example, deserves to be dismissed as a scholar. He clearly admitted that Kierkegaard had read sections of Hegel's major works "intensively," and he also observed that Kierkegaard was provoked to his anti-Hegelianism by the influence of Hegel on Martensen (whom Thulstrup mentions often, as also Heiberg and Mynster). Stewart implies that Thulstrup had little understanding of Hegel and no interest in the Danish Hegelians, but his discussion of Thulstrup's work is too selective to be persuasive.Stewart also seems to have been a bit hasty in concluding that recent scholarship on the Hegel-Kierkegaard relation blindly follows Thulstrup and the "standard view." In different ways, Robert Perkins, Merold Westphal and I have all written on aspects of Kierkegaard's thought that show Hegelian influences. Stewart lists us in his Bibliography and even cites my book as one of several that investigates Hegelian influences on The Sickness Unto Death, but he never discusses the arguments we present, even though they clearly strengthen his claim about Hegel's positive influence on Kierkegaard. Indeed, the only American book on "Hegel and Kierkegaard" he takes seriously is Mark C. Taylor's Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard (Berkeley, 1980), which is a creative philosophical project that does not attempt to be a study of their historical relationship. Stewart writes that much scholarship suffers from using a "text-immanent" (628) method of analysis that ignores the relevant historical... (shrink)

The book's significance is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy, and it demonstrates the value to Western ...

In June of 2008, the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP) convened its third Constructive Engagement conference, on the theme of “Comparative Philosophy Methodology.” During the opening speeches, Prof. Dunhua ZHAO, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Peking University, challenged the conference’s participants to put forward a minimal definition of “comparative philosophy” and a statement of its methods. Based on the papers from the conference and the extensive discussion that ensued, during my closing reflections at (...) the end of the conference I offered a tentative synthesis of the conference’s conclusions. That summary has already been published on-line as part of the bi-annual ISCWP newsletter (Angle 2008). In this brief essay, I recapitulate the themes of my earlier summary and expand, in my own voice, on some of the key points. (shrink)

It is argued that "quanli" meant something different from the "rights" that it purports to translate in the writings of Liu Shipei (1884-1919). This does not mean that "quanli," as Liu used it, has no overlap with any of the meanings of "rights." But it can be argued that these overlaps are in a crucial sense coincidental, since the notion of "quanli" in Liu's major works represents a growth out of, rather than an imposition on, the Confucian tradition. In general, (...) to make sense of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese political and ethical discourse, we must highlight the degree to which the concepts involved developed out of various strands of native tradition. (shrink)

My goal in this paper 1 is, first, to collect together a number of themes and observations that have usually been kept apart, locked up in their respective disciplines. When these are brought together, some general and far reaching implications become really rather clear. In particular, I want to make a case for the implicit coherence of these themes in the idea that.

By their nature, the most vexing social problems reflect collisions between social and economic interests of parties with highly divergent views and perspectives on the cause and character of what is at issue and the consequences that flow from it. Conflicts around biotechnology applications are good examples of these problems. When considering the potential consequences of proposed biotechnology applications, an enormous range of perspectives arise reflecting the breadth of different and often competing interests with a stake in life's future.This essay (...) starts from an assumption that the traditional tool of cost‐benefit analysis is not adequate for adjudicating competing claims around the introduction of new biotechnology applications. It tends to require implicit simplifying assumptions that reduce or mask true underlying levels of complexity and uncertainty, and the results it produces deliver a definitive and singular answer, as opposed to a multiplicity of outcomes. In this essay, I describe some of the key elements of formal scenario planning to show how CBA could be redeployed as a supporting tool within the broader decision support methodology of formal scenario planning. (shrink)

Ineffability, the degree to which percepts or concepts resist linguistic coding, is a fairly unexplored nook of cognitive science. Although philosophical preoccupations with qualia or nonconceptual content certainly touch upon the area, there has been little systematic thought and hardly any empirical work in recent years on the subject. We argue that ineffability is an important domain for the cognitive sciences. For examining differential ineffability across the senses may be able to tell us important things about how the mind works, (...) how different modalities talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. (shrink)

Classical cognitive science was launched on the premise that the architecture of human cognition is uniform and universal across the species. This premise is biologically impossible and is being actively undermined by, for example, imaging genomics. Anthropology (including archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology) is, in contrast, largely concerned with the diversification of human culture, language, and biology across time and space—it belongs fundamentally to the evolutionary sciences. The new cognitive sciences that will emerge from the interactions with the (...) biological sciences will focus on variation and diversity, opening the door for rapprochement with anthropology. (shrink)

Varieties of Ethical Reflection brings together new cultural and religious perspectives—drawn from non-Western, primarily Asian, philosophical sources—to globalize the contemporary discussion of theoretical and applied ethics.

Translations of Chinese writing on human rights from throughout the twentieth century, with introductions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Communication, and the Relevance of Philosophy to Human Rights:A Response to Randall PeerenboomStephen C. AngleRandy Peerenboom has paid me the enormous compliment of thinking it worthwhile to engage in sustained, critical dialogue with my book. In this response to his review essay, I attempt to return the compliment. I focus on issues surrounding concepts and communication, since that is where Peerenboom puts his emphasis. Near the end, I (...) look at what is at stake in our discussions of Raz, touch on the question of judgments and objectivity, and close with some thoughts about the relevance of history to my goals in the book. [End Page 320]At the heart of Peerenboom's critique of my account of concepts and communication are two concerns. First, he worries that I do not "provide a satisfactory answer to the questions of how to determine whether we are dealing with a single concept or discourse or multiple concepts or discourses." Second, he suggests that my entire discussion of concepts, "while interesting academically, at least for those with a taste for philosophy, diverts attention from the real issues." I will begin with the first. A valuable result of Peerenboom's essay is that it helps me to see where I have not made myself as clear as I would have liked to. At various points in the book, I raise the issue of the normative nature of questions like those Peerenboom has posed (see, e.g., pp. 27 and 32), but this is clearly something that needs more emphasis. Asking what a word means, or whether two people share a concept, or, for that matter, where the boundaries of a discourse lie are never simple, descriptive questions. These are normative questions, which always receive normative answers. By "normative," I mean that the questions and their answers are prescriptive for those in my shared community. When someone says "we mean such-and-such by that word," the "we" is crucial: it is saying that people like us, in some respect, ought to talk this way. Thinking about language in normative terms permeates Brandom's approach. He writes, for example: "When the prosecutor at Oscar Wilde's trial asked him to say under oath whether a particular passage in one of his works did or did not constitute blasphemy, Wilde replied 'Blasphemy is not one of my words.'"1 Wilde recognized, that is, that using the word "blasphemy" brought with it certain commitments that he—and other like-minded individuals—ought to reject, even if he were to deny that a particular passage was blasphemous.So far so good. But Peerenboom sees a tension between what looks like a community-based definition of concepts—perhaps all Chinese ought therefore to share the same commitments?—and my endorsement of a holistic approach to meaning, according to which our individual webs of commitments always vary from one to another. This latter idea leads him to be puzzled about when two people can ever be said to share the same concept. He searches for a criterion for a sufficiently similar concept, wonders whether my talk of "keeping score" can provide such a criterion, and in the end decides that the choice of where to draw these lines is, in many cases, arbitrary. There is indeed a tension, and some arbitrariness, too, although not exactly where Peerenboom sees it. But none of this is problematic, I think, and in any case it emerges from the very complexity of our linguistic practice. Communities do not impose norms on us: we authorize the norms through the ways we speak, act, and react to others. "Authorize" is apt because it combines the ideas of creation and legitimation. Our perpetual roles as authorizers of a community's linguistic (and other) norms give us a certain amount of autonomy with respect to the norms, as well as explaining some variance, as we (consciously or unconsciously) push boundaries in one direction or another. At the same time, no one is a member of only one community. We interact with different groups at different times and in different ways, which puts the notion that we could be bound by the norms of a single... (shrink)

A Reply to F an Ruiping Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11712-010-9189-7 Authors Stephen C. Angle, Department of Philosophy, Wesleyan University, 350 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA Journal Dao Online ISSN 1569-7274 Print ISSN 1540-3009.