In recent years, sequencing technologies have enabled the identification of a wide range of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Unfortunately, annotation and integration of ncRNA data has lagged behind their identification. Given the large quantity of information being obtained in this area, there emerges an urgent need to integrate what is being discovered by a broad range of relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a systematically structured and precisely defined controlled vocabulary for the (...) domain of ncRNAs, thereby facilitating the discovery, curation, analysis, exchange, and reasoning of data about structures of ncRNAs, their molecular and cellular functions, and their impacts upon phenotypes. The goal of NCRO is to serve as a common resource for annotations of diverse research in a way that will significantly enhance integrative and comparative analysis of the myriad resources currently housed in disparate sources. It is our belief that the NCRO ontology can perform an important role in the comprehensive unification of ncRNA biology and, indeed, fill a critical gap in both the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Library and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal. Our initial focus is on the ontological representation of small regulatory ncRNAs, which we see as the first step in providing a resource for the annotation of data about all forms of ncRNAs. (shrink)
In recent years, sequencing technologies have enabled the identification of a wide range of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Unfortunately, annotation and integration of ncRNA data has lagged behind their identification. Given the large quantity of information being obtained in this area, there emerges an urgent need to integrate what is being discovered by a broad range of relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a systematically structured and precisely defined controlled vocabulary for the (...) domain of ncRNAs, thereby facilitating the discovery, curation, analysis, exchange, and reasoning of data about structures of ncRNAs, their molecular and cellular functions, and their impacts upon phenotypes. The goal of NCRO is to serve as a common resource for annotations of diverse research in a way that will significantly enhance integrative and comparative analysis of the myriad resources currently housed in disparate sources. It is our belief that the NCRO ontology can perform an important role in the comprehensive unification of ncRNA biology and, indeed, fill a critical gap in both the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Library and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal. Our initial focus is on the ontological representation of small regulatory ncRNAs, which we see as the first step in providing a resource for the annotation of data about all forms of ncRNAs. The NCRO ontology is free and open to all users. (shrink)
Identification of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) has been significantly improved over the past decade. On the other hand, semantic annotation of ncRNA data is facing critical challenges due to the lack of a comprehensive ontology to serve as common data elements and data exchange standards in the field. We developed the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) to handle this situation. By providing a formally defined ncRNA controlled vocabulary, the NCRO aims to fill a specific and highly needed niche in semantic annotation of (...) large amounts of ncRNA biological and clinical data. (shrink)
Integrity is often conceived as a heroic ideal: the person of integrity sticks to what they believe is right, regardless of the consequences. In this article, I defend a conception of ordinary integrity, for people who either do not desire or are unable to be moral martyrs. Drawing on the writings of seventeenth century thinker Huang Zongxi, I propose refocussing attention away from an abstract ideal of integrity, to instead consider the institutional conditions whereby it is made safe not (...) to be servile. (shrink)
Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how (...) their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)
Huang, Chun-chieh, Konfuzianismus: Kontinuität und Entwicklung: Studien zur chinesischen Geistesgeschichte (Confucianism: Continuity and Development: Studies in Chinese Intellectual History), Edited and translated by Stephan Schmidt Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11712-010-9191-0 Authors Heiner Roetz, Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr University, 44780 Bochum, Germany Journal Dao Online ISSN 1569-7274 Print ISSN 1540-3009 Journal Volume Volume 9 Journal Issue Volume 9, Number 4.
Religious beliefs have often been taken either as absolutely foundational to all others or as ultimately founded on something else. This essay starts with an endorsement of the contemporary critique of foundationalism but sets its task as to search for the foundation of religious belief after foundationalism. In its third and main part, it argues for a Wittgensteinian reflective equilibrium as such a foundation. In this reflective equilibrium, religious beliefs are no more and no less foundational to, or founded by, (...) other beliefs and practices. To appreciate this perspective better, I argue,in the first part, that Kai Neilsen's charge of Wittgenstein as a fideist is not accurate, and, in the second part, that D. Z. Phillips's fideistic contentions are unWittgensteinian. (shrink)
In this postmodern era, God-talk is facing serious challenges. Is it still possible to have a meaningful concept of God after the demise of metaphysical realism? How can we make sense of the idea of absolute transcendence in a secularized world? In what sense can we still believe something as divine revelation when foundationalism is no longer taken for granted? While some believe that we can go about our old theological business as usual, others have entirely given up on the (...) hope of any intelligible theology. It is my hunch, however, that there are ways of doing theology that can take our postmodern conditions into serious account. In this article, I shall argue that, however anachronistic it might seem, Hegel's God-talk, seen through the lens of Heidegger's understanding of Being, provides one such possibility. (shrink)
Agamben’s potentiality, and Chinese dao, entail experiencing movement on being. This article presents our experiments with these movements in the context of pedagogy, putting at stake our mode of existence in thinking. We examine Agamben’s potentiality as an aporetic experience in pedagogy. We find echoes of dao movement in a controversial pedagogical event in China. Interlacing potentiality and dao with our experience of pedagogical thinking, each makes the other intelligible. We show that reasonings of pedagogy in the USA and China (...) repeat the very paradoxes and exclusions they seek to overcome. We also gesture towards a way that, suspending and holding pedagogical reasoning in being empty, welcomes what cannot be learned or taught. This way also offers an example for comparative education. (shrink)
The Chinese tianrenheyi thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes tianrenheyi for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of ‘person/thing,’ ‘environment/nature,’ and ‘relationality’ in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three steps. First, it turns to Yu Ying-Shih’s writing for a historical and ethical picture of tianrenheyi as an ‘Axial breakthrough’ in Confucius' time and with direct relevance to Confucian person-making education. Second, it moves on to Roger Ames’ unpacking of tianrenheyi as (...) hospitalized in a ‘correlative cosmology’ and ‘Confucian relational personhood’ to help us re-understand Confucian ‘person’ as being relational. Finally, it shows how these re-invoked philosophical–ethical–cosmological theses expose a ‘foundational individualism’ which grounds and confines current educational thinking to an anthropocentric ordering. As an alternative, this article calls for a productive symbiotic conjoining between humans and their cultural–natural environs toward nurturing today’s youth into ecologically literate, responsible, and responsive co-beings. (shrink)
Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese educational “wind” (...) texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)
Yong Huang has recently claimed that after the demise of foundationalism, philosophy and theology can turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein's non-foundationalist or coherentist religious epistemology where, it is said, religious beliefs are justified by a 'reflective equilibrium' with other kinds of beliefs, with action, and with different 'forms of life'. I argue that there are very good reasons to reject this reading of Wittgenstein: not only unsupported, it is seriously mistaken. Once the epistemological terms of the debate are properly understood, (...) the evidence indicates that Wittgenstein's view of religious beliefs is a form of foundationalism, not coherentism. (shrink)
In 2001, China’s moral education curriculum reform called for a returning to life as a radical shift from its previous empty sermonic pedagogy, hoping to cultivate its twenty-first century children into ethical humans. Accordingly, a notion of ‘human ecology’ appeared in the post-2001 textbook design, which became ‘co-being with’ in the latest 2016 textbook redesign. This paper picks up this co-being with as a philosophical, ethical, and ecological notion and scrutinizes its relevance to the discursive construction of China’s moral child (...) in two steps. First, it draws upon Heidegger’s thinking and the Chinese Daoist ecological understanding to explicate the philosophical significance of this ‘co-being with’ for moral education. Second, it unpacks the discursive embodiments of this ethical–ecological co-being with in connection with the construction of moral subjects in the post-2001 and 2016 textbooks. Through rigorous textual analysis, this paper finds that the post-2001 textbook discourses embody an instrumental trope and a subject vs object binary style of reasoning, which possibly makes egoistic rather than ethical children. The 2016 textbook discourses, especially those on the theme of co-being with, however, constrain the above instrumentality and envision cultivating ethical children. This paper argues this theorized co-being with provides some implications for moral education in China and the world, meanwhile raising some pedagogical challenges as well. (shrink)
Within educational philosophy and theory there has recently been a re-turn to the concept and practices of studying as an alternative or oppositional educational logic to push back against learning as the predominant mode of educational engagement. While promising, we believe that this research on studying has been limited in a few ways. First, while the ontological aspects of studying have been examined in a thorough manner, the affective dimension of studying has not yet been investigated. Second, while a diverse (...) range of theorists have been called upon to articulate studying, the philosophical resources out of which studying has been shaped have remained trapped within the western canon. We seek to address these limitations in this article by turning to some literature on affect theory, Daoist wind-stories, as well as the Yijing–Daoist Yin–Yang movement. In doing so, not only do we make contributions to research on studying, but we also contribute an educational understanding to affect theory and draw out important affinities between affective study and Daoist windstories. In other words, this paper moves to both articulate the affective dimensions of studying and illuminate a particular pedagogy of affect. More important, we move one step further to re-conceptualize learning and study, figuring them not merely as alternative or oppositional orderings, but as a Daoist Yin–Yang movement wherewith learning and studying, analogous to the Yin–Yang elements, always happen together, mutually informing, confronting, and transforming each other. (shrink)
As an imprint of Confucian culture, China’s education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as ‘talent’, an official translation of the Chinese term ‘rencai’ (literally, human-talent). Whereas the English word ‘talent’ itself denotes ‘[people with] natural aptitude or skill’, ‘talent’ is currently mobilized in China not only as a globalized discourse that speaks to the most aspired educational subjects for the 21st century but also as a re-invoked cultural notion that relates to Confucian wisdom. Drawing upon Foucault’s (...) biopower hypothesis and Confucian thought, this paper leverages upon China’s unique manipulation of ‘talent’ as certain skills and human subjects, both cultivable through education, to problematize China’s talent making and governing in two dimensions. First, it unpacks the various technologies of power entangled in China’s talent making and governing within its ‘state governance’ paradigm. Second, it unpacks Confucian thought as an archaeological prototype for China’s present talent appeal, meanwhile explicating their divergences in defining ‘human’, ‘talent’, and the human-talent interpellation. In so doing, this paper makes two arguments. First, the linguistic notion of ‘talent’ functions as a Foucauldian apparatus of biopower, making (up) new kinds of people and normalizing a certain population as the objective/object of China’s state governance. Second, CPC’s re-invocation of Confucian talent discourses is more of a rhetorical strategy than an authentic cultural renaissance gesture. (shrink)
Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how (...) their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)
Biomedical moral enhancement, or BME for short, aims to improve people’s moral behaviors through augmenting, via biomedical means, their virtuous dispositions such as sympathy, honesty, courage, or generosity. Recently, it has been challenged, on particularist grounds, however, that the manifestations of the virtuous dispositions can be morally wrong. For instance, being generous in terrorist financing is one such case. If so, biomedical moral enhancement, by enhancing people’s virtues, might turn out to be counterproductive in terms of people’s moral behaviors. In (...) this paper, we argue, via a comparison with moral education, that the case for the practice of biomedical moral enhancement is not weakened by the particularists’ stress on the variable moral statuses of the manifestations of our virtues. The real challenge from the particularists, we argue, lies elsewhere. It is that practical wisdom, being essentially context-sensitive, cannot be enhanced via biomedical means. On the basis of this, we further argue that BME ought to be used with great caution, for it may wrongly enhance, for instance, a terrorist financier’s generosity, a robber’s courage, or an undercover detective’s honesty. Finally, we sketch how boundaries can be set on the use of BME, and address some potential objections to our position. (shrink)
This paper approaches Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness from a mereological perspective. Taking as inspiration Bergson’s idea that pure durée is a multiplicity of interpenetration, I will show, from within Husserlian phenomenology, that the absolute flow can indeed be described as a whole of interpenetrating parts. This mereological perspective will inform my re-consideration of the much-discussed issue of Husserl’s self-criticism concerning the schema of content and apprehension. It will also reveal a fundamental similarity between Husserl’s conception of the absolute flow and (...) Sartre’s conception of lived temporality. This paper consists of four sections. Section 2 presents the basic elements of Husserl’s mereology. Section 3 introduces the difficulty encountered by Husserl’s early account of time that makes use of the schema. I will examine Barry Dainton’s criticism of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness against the background of the older debate between Meinong and Stern, a debate that has informed Husserl’s own account. Section 4 distinguishes two common criticisms of the schema from Husserl’s own self-criticism, which is in turn divided into two steps. It is shown how the second step of this self-criticism implies the interpenetration of the absolute flow and responds to Dainton’s criticism. Finally, Sect. 5 concludes with some comparative remarks. I will show how Husserl’s notion of absolute flow, as mereologically interpreted, anticipates Sartre’s conception of consciousness as self-transcendence, as well as how it accommodates the apparently conflicting mereological intuitions of Aristotle and Bergson. (shrink)
It’s not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of thought that would help us reinvigorate the element of air/atmosphere as a foundational component of an educational sphere. Second, we historicize the Chinese notion of wind as (...) a style of reasoning which structures ancient Chinese cosmology, tempo-spatiality, teaching, and governing into a grid of intelligibility. Third, we argue for a bracketing of a trap of philology and a signifier-signified representational logic through reconceptualizing the atmosphere as a thing that blurs the material-figural boundary and that pushes into a new genre of educational life. (shrink)
The supply network becomes more fragile as it becomes more complex, affecting the core firm’s performance. While previous research on supply network complexity existence paradox. Therefore, to study the nature of supply network complexity, this paper divides the supply chain complexity utility into positive and negative valences based on the valence framework and divides supply chain complexity into supply base complexity, customer base complexity, and logistics base complexity. Based on the trustworthiness and transparency characteristics of blockchain technology, this paper investigates (...) how to use blockchain technology to reduce the negative valence of supply chain complexity while adapting to or improving the positive valence to improve enterprise competitiveness and supply chain sustainability. As a result, the focus of this paper is on how to better manage supply chain complexity using blockchain technologies to increase supply chain sustainability and viability. (shrink)
