Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their (...) method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life. (shrink)

This pioneering book delivers a systematic account of agonistic democracy, and a much-needed analysis of the core components of agonism: pluralism, tragedy, and the value of conflict. It also traces the history of these ideas, identifying the connections with republicanism and with Greek antiquity. Mark Wenman presents a critical appraisal of the leading contemporary proponents of agonism and, in a series of well-crafted and comprehensive discussions, brings these thinkers into debate with one another, as well as with the post-structuralist (...) and continental theorists who influence them. Wenman draws extensively on Hannah Arendt, and stresses the creative power of human action as augmentation and revolution. He also reworks Arendt's discussion of reflective judgement to present an alternative style of agonism, one where the democratic contest is linked to the emergence of a militant form of cosmopolitanism, and to prospects for historical change in the context of neoliberal globalisation. (shrink)

We defend a set of acceptance rules that avoids the lottery paradox, that is closed under classical entailment, and that accepts uncertain propositions without ad hoc restrictions. We show that the rules we recommend provide a semantics that validates exactly Adams’ conditional logic and are exactly the rules that preserve a natural, logical structure over probabilistic credal states that we call probalogic. To motivate probalogic, we first expand classical logic to geo-logic, which fills the entire unit cube, and then we (...) project the upper surfaces of the geo-logical cube onto the plane of probabilistic credal states by means of standard, linear perspective, which may be interpreted as an extension of the classical principle of indifference. Finally, we apply the geometrical/logical methods developed in the paper to prove a series of trivialization theorems against question-invariance as a constraint on acceptance rules and against rational monotonicity as an axiom of conditional logic in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

This book analyses and defends the deflationist claim that there is nothing deep about our notion of truth. According to this view, truth is a 'light' and innocent concept, devoid of any essence which could be revealed by scientific inquiry. Cezary Cieśliński considers this claim in light of recent formal results on axiomatic truth theories, which are crucial for understanding and evaluating the philosophical thesis of the innocence of truth. Providing an up-to-date discussion and original perspectives on this central and (...) controversial issue, his book will be important for those with a background in logic who are interested in formal truth theories and in current philosophical debates about the deflationary conception of truth. (shrink)

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and (...) to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition. (shrink)

林毓生是研究近現代中國思想史的著名學者，其英文論著《中國意識的危機》在1980 年代出版中、日、韓譯本，對於東亞地區、台灣和大陸的學界與文化界都有極大的影響，奠定了他在西方和東亞近現代思想史領域的重要地位。從1960 年起在芝加哥大學攻讀博士期間，受海耶克（F. A.Hayek）親自指導和影響，林毓生對自由主義在中國前途的討論提出以往中文世界從未觸碰到的關鍵議題，使海耶克的理論以及西方其他重要思想家的言說獲得真切實際的理解與融合，轉為建設本土憲政民主的有利資源 ，成為重建文化認同的價值基礎。 《現代知識貴族的精神》共收錄34 篇林毓生的代表著作，主要在2000 年以後發表， 按照其學術追求與思想關懷，分別編入「意識危機的探索與回應」、「自由的基礎與理據」、「學思之路與民主建設」及「人文傳統的存續與『創造性轉化』」四個範疇以及附錄。整體來看，這些彼此具有密切關聯的範疇及其所 涵攝的各篇文章，可以說是構成林先生對中國自清末以來尋找現代性出路的一個系統性的論述。讀者可以看到林毓生對「現代性」這個二十世紀中國最迫切的根本問題提出的研究分析，以及他認為解決這一問題的可行路徑。他提 出了憲政民主在中文世界前途的看法與觀點，而數十年來的論述，代表了他以學術思想的言說介入公共議題的巨大努力。.

In this paper, I delineate one tradition of contemporary political thought that has emerged within the more general climate of difference and diversity. This is ‘agonistic pluralism’. The paper evaluates the recent work of three authors, who exemplify this strand of political thinking; William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, and James Tully. Over the past decade, each of these three has developed the notion of agonistic pluralism. The task here is to examine points of comparison between them. I compare the three authors' (...) conceptions of politics and of the dimension of the political. I make the case that their work complements one another, they each endorse broad notions of the political; and they understand politics to be constitutive of social relations. Nevertheless, the forms of politics that they describe differ from one another. It is my contention that these forms of politics are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. However, I maintain that in order for their work to be understood in this way, the political practices described by Connolly and Tully — struggles for self-making and for recognition respectively — must be re-figured as forms of sub-constitutional politics. These forms of politics will make up necessary elements of a viable pluralist society, but they are played out within multiple public spheres made possible by — what we might call — the quasi-republican political constitution elaborated by Mouffe. (shrink)

Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social (...) media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team’s experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as... (shrink)

In this paper, I delineate one tradition of contemporary political thought that has emerged within the more general climate of difference and diversity. This is ‘agonistic pluralism’. The paper evaluates the recent work of three authors, who exemplify this strand of political thinking; William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, and James Tully. Over the past decade, each of these three has developed the notion of agonistic pluralism. The task here is to examine points of comparison between them. I compare the three authors' (...) conceptions of politics and of the dimension of the political. I make the case that their work complements one another, they each endorse broad notions of the political; and they understand politics to be constitutive of social relations. Nevertheless, the forms of politics that they describe differ from one another. It is my contention that these forms of politics are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. However, I maintain that in order for their work to be understood in this way, the political practices described by Connolly and Tully — struggles for self-making and for recognition respectively — must be re-figured as forms of sub-constitutional politics. These forms of politics will make up necessary elements of a viable pluralist society, but they are played out within multiple public spheres made possible by — what we might call — the quasi-republican political constitution elaborated by Mouffe. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to compare the learning effectiveness of peer tutored problem-based learning and conventional teaching of nursing ethics in Taiwan. The study adopted an experimental design. The peer tutored problem-based learning method was applied to an experimental group and the conventional teaching method to a control group. The study sample consisted of 142 senior nursing students who were randomly assigned to the two groups. All the students were tested for their nursing ethical discrimination ability both before (...) and after the educational intervention. A learning satisfaction survey was also administered to both groups at the end of each course. After the intervention, both groups showed a significant increase in ethical discrimination ability. There was a statistically significant difference between the ethical discrimination scores of the two groups (P < 0.05), with the experimental group on average scoring higher than the control group. There were significant differences in satisfaction with self-motivated learning and critical thinking between the groups. Peer tutored problem-based learning and lecture-type conventional teaching were both effective for nursing ethics education, but problem-based learning was shown to be more effective. Peer tutored problem-based learning has the potential to enhance the efficacy of teaching nursing ethics in situations in which there are personnel and resource constraints. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to criticisms of my book Being and Reason recently made by Yitzhak Melamed.

Modern Western medical individualism has had a significant impact on health care in China. This essay demonstrates the ways in which such Western-style individualism has been explicitly endorsed in China’s 2010 directive: The Basic Norms of the Documentation of the Medical Record. The Norms require that the patient himself, rather than a member of his family, sign each informed consent form. This change in clinical practice indicates a shift toward medical individualism in Chinese healthcare legislation. Such individualism, however, is incompatible (...) with the character of Chinese familism that is deeply rooted in the Chinese ethical tradition. It also contradicts family-based patterns of health care in China. Moreover, the requirement for individual informed consent is incompatible with numerous medical regulations promulgated in the past two decades. This essay argues that while Chinese medical legislation should learn from relevant Western ideas, it should not simply copy such practices by importing medical individualism into Chinese health care. Chinese healthcare policy is properly based on Chinese medical familist resources. (shrink)

In its widest sense, public relations is about productively communicating with a broader audience, either directly or indirectly, such as through journalist interviews. Academic writing can be abstruse and lengthy, while media coverage can translate those difficult ideas into ordinary language in a more digestible form. Media articles are much easier to share; even as more paywalls are erected on media sites, they're still typically far cheaper than accessing academic journal articles, if not costless. Some initial groundwork is needed for (...) any media‐relations activities. This is about understanding the “rules of engagement” with the media, including who the right journalists are to approach and how. The chapter focuses on two main activities in media relations that might be relevant for philosophers: working with journalists on stories they're writing, and writing articles or op‐eds to be published in popular media. (shrink)

This essay draws on classical Confucian intellectual resources to argue that the person who emerges from a head transplant would be neither the person who provided the head, nor the person who provided the body, but a new, different person. We construct two types of argument to support this conclusion: one is based on the classical Confucian metaphysics of human life as qi activity; the other is grounded in the Confucian view of personal identity as being inseparable from one’s familial (...) relations. These Confucian ideas provide a reasonable alternative to the currently dominant view that one’s personal identity “follows” one’s head. Together, these arguments imply that head transplantation is ethically inappropriate. (shrink)

The desire-satisfaction theory of welfare says that what is basically good for a subject is the satisfaction of his desires. One challenge to this view is the existence of quirky desires, such as a desire to count blades of grass. It is hard to see why anyone would desire such things, and thus hard to believe that the satisfaction of such desires could be basically good for anyone. This suggests that only some desires are basically good when satisfied, and that (...) desire satisfactionists owe us an account of which desires these are, and why. In "Quirky Desires and Well-Being," Donald Bruckner proposes such an account: a desire is welfare-relevant (i.e., such that its satisfaction would be basically good for its subject) if and only if and because its subject could describe its object in a way that makes it comprehensible what about the object attracts him or appeals to him. We are inclined to view quirky desires as welfare-irrelevant because we assume that their objects cannot be described in such a way. But if there were a quirky desire whose object could be so described by the subject whose desire it is, then this desire would be relevant to that subject's welfare. I will argue that while Bruckner's view delivers plausible verdicts about the cases to which it is meant to apply, its account of what makes a desire welfare-relevant is unmotivated and implausible. Desire satisfactionists can retain what is plausible about his view while endorsing a better explanation of why welfare-relevant desires have that status if they accept the following account instead: a desire is welfare-relevant if and only if and because something about its object attracts, or appeals to, the subject who has the desire. (shrink)

Das Problem des Seinsglaubens in der Phänomenologie Husserls läßt sich zweifelsohne zu deren zentralen Themen wie Wahmehmung, Phantasie und Zeitbewußtsein zählen und steht auch in engem Zusammenhang mit diesen. Das Buch Seinsglaube in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls versucht dieses Problem zu klaren und zu zeigen, wie weit Husserl bei der Lösung dieses Problems gekommen ist und welche Fragen dabei offen blieben, die weiterer Lösungen bedürfen. Zudem werden die Gründe für das Gelingen bzw. Mißlingen bei Husserls Bemühungen herausgearbeitet. Die Einleitung erörtert (...) die verschiedenen Bedeutungen des Begriffs 'Seinsglauben' und zeichnet den Ort des Seinsglaubens im phänomenologischen System Husserls vor. Der erste Teil des Buches stellt sich als Hauptaufgabe die Strukturanalyse des Seinsglaubens aus verschiedenen Aspekten. In den ersten vier Kapiteln wird Husserls Exposition der verschiedenen Richtungen des Seinsglaubens, der Modalitäten, Modifikationen sowie der Eigentlichkeit und der Uneigentlichkeit des Seinsglaubens stufenweise behandelt. Das V. Kapitel, das den zweiten Teil einleitet, bildet den Wendepunkt der Arbeit, da es sich einerseits weiter mit Husserls Darstellung des Seinsglaubens, und zwar hier der verschiedenen Glaubensweisen, beschäftigt, andererseits schon Bezug auf die verschiedenen Weisen der Ausschaltung des Seinsglaubens nimmt, welche im VI. VII. und VIII. Kapitel das Hauptthema bilden: die eidetische Reduktion, Neutralitätsmodifikation und die transzendentale Reduktion. Der Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Arbeit liegt auf den in der Forschungsliteratur bisher wenig beachteten Husserlschen Analysen zur Neutralitätsmodifikation (Kapitel VII) im Zusammenhang mit dem Problem des Seinsglaubens in der Vergegenwärtigung. Da die transzendentale Reduktion, eine andere wichtige Methode der Ausschaltung des Seinsglaubens im Sinne der Neutralitätsmodifikation, in der phänomenologischen Literatur bereits gründlich behandelt ist, wird sie hier nur in dem Maß in Betracht gezogen, insofern sie sich von der Neutralitätsmodifikation deutlich abhebt. Eine rückblickende Zusammenfassung der ganzen Untersuchung beschließt die Arbeit. (shrink)

Material from this paper appears in Chap. 7 of my book Reason and Being, but there is also stuff here that isn't in the book. In particular, it discusses the claims that, for Spinoza, conceiving implies explaining and that existence is identical to or reducible to conceivability. So, if you're interested in those issues, this paper might be worth a read.

Criminalizing unintentional mistakes in medicine as the offence of gross negligence manslaughter has always been a contentious issue. The threshold of prosecution is not well-defined, and even less clear when faced with a situation in which an intern doctor is held liable. This commentary attempts to review the current legal position of holding an intern doctor liable for gross negligence medical manslaughter.

William Connolly has made important interventions in political theory over a period of four decades, and the past few years have seen a surge in recognition of his contribution. Those who are familiar with Connolly’s ideas will know the role that continental theorists—especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze—have played in the development of his thought, and more recently the uses he has made of advances in the natural sciences, for example in complexity theory, in the work of the (...) neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. With reference to these innovations, a consensus has emerged in recent discussions, that there is a basic discontinuity between Connolly’s “postmodern” theory of pluralism and the “old” pluralism of the generation of post-war political scientists. By way of contrast, in this essay I outline the congruity between Connolly’s ideas and earlier iterations of pluralism. I trace the essential continuities between Connolly and the leading post-war writers, especially Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, David Truman, and David Easton, and also his proximity to a tradition of pluralism that flourished in the early part of the twentieth century and was exemplified in the work of Arthur Bentley. Indeed, I make the case that Connolly’s work is best understood as the resumption and enhancement of a distinct canon of pluralism in American political thought. (shrink)

William Connolly has made important interventions in political theory over a period of four decades, and the past few years have seen a surge in recognition of his contribution. Those who are familiar with Connolly’s ideas will know the role that continental theorists—especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze—have played in the development of his thought, and more recently the uses he has made of advances in the natural sciences, for example in complexity theory, in the work of the (...) neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. With reference to these innovations, a consensus has emerged in recent discussions, that there is a basic discontinuity between Connolly’s “postmodern” theory of pluralism and the “old” pluralism of the generation of post-war political scientists. By way of contrast, in this essay I outline the congruity between Connolly’s ideas and earlier iterations of pluralism. I trace the essential continuities between Connolly and the leading post-war writers, especially Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom, David Truman, and David Easton, and also his proximity to a tradition of pluralism that flourished in the early part of the twentieth century and was exemplified in the work of Arthur Bentley. Indeed, I make the case that Connolly’s work is best understood as the resumption and enhancement of a distinct canon of pluralism in American political thought. (shrink)

馬克思《數學手稿》與微積分理論具有何種關係；現代數學的研究物件是純量還是結構；數學是經驗科學還是演繹科學；實踐檢驗數學的真理性是否只有一種真假判斷；非線性科學揭示出自然界存在一類新的、更普遍的、既確定 又隨機的混沌現象，它向決定論自然觀提出哪些挑戰，是否說明世界是非決定論的；等等。對這些問題，作者從數學哲學的角度提出了自己的見解和解決方法。.

Using Hofstede's culture theory (1980, 2001 Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nation. Sage, NewYork), the current study incorporates the moral development (e.g. Thorne, 2000; Thorne and Magnan, 2000; Thorne et al., 2003) and multidimensional ethics scale (e.g. Cohen et al., 1993; Cohen et al., 1996b; Cohen et al., 2001; Flory et al., 1992) approaches to compare the ethical reasoning and decisions of Canadian and Mainland Chinese final year undergraduate accounting students. The results indicate that Canadian accounting (...) students' formulation of an intention to act on a particular ethical dilemma (deliberative reasoning) as measured by the moral development approach (Thorne, 2000) was higher than Mainland Chinese accounting students. The current study proposes that the five factors identified by the multidimensional ethics scale (MES), as being relevant to ethical decision making can be placed into the three levels of ethical reasoning identified by Kohlberg's (1958, The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years Ten to Sixteen. University of Chicago, Doctoral dissertation) theory of cognitive moral development. Canadian accounting students used post-conventional MES factors (moral equity, contractualism, and utilitarianism) more frequently and made more ethical audit decisions than Chinese accounting students. (shrink)