As a comparative study of the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Confucius, this book explores how they each reflect upon human good and virtue out of their respective cultural assumptions, conceptual frameworks, and philosophical perspectives. It does not simply take one side as a framework to understand the other; rather, it takes them as mirrors for each other and seeks to develop new readings and perspectives of both ethics that would be unattainable if each were studied on its own.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 481-509.

Though more connected today than ever before, the Far East and the West are still divided by an issue which first arose more than 400 years ago: the complaint of the West that its ideology has never been fully adopted by China. To provide a useful conceptual framework for a discussion of this intriguing situation, this essay invokes the instructive give-and-take of market exchange on the famed Silk Road in the long ancient past and takes a careful and close look (...) at the analogous enactment of the same principle in the quiet but consequential transplantation of Chinese horticultural and related philosophical ideas to England and continental Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the initially skeptical but eventually appreciative reception of many Western political and technological ideas in China in the last two centuries. (shrink)

This study examines the social impacts of labor-related corporate social responsibility policies or corporate codes of conduct on upholding labor standards through a case study of CSR discourses and codes implementation of Reebok - a leading branded company enjoying a high-profiled image for its human rights achievement - in a large Taiwanese-invested athletic footwear factory located in South China. I find although implementation of Reebok labor-related codes has resulted in a "race to ethical and legal minimum" labor standards when notoriously (...) inhumane and seriously illegal labor rights abuses were curbed, Chinese workers were forced to work harder and faster but, earned less payment and the employee-elected trade union installed through codes implementation operated more like a "company union" rather than an autonomous workers' organization representing worker' interests. In order to explain the paradoxical effects of Reebok labor-related codes on labor standards, I argue the result is determined by both structural forces and agency-related factors embedded in industrial, national and local contexts. To put it shortly, I find the effectiveness of Reebok labor-related codes is constrained not only by unsolved tension between Reebok's impetus for profit maximization and commitment to workers' human rights, but also by hard-nosed competition realities at marketplace, and Chinese government's insufficient protection of labor rights. Despite drawing merely from a single case study, these findings illuminate key determinants inhibiting the effectiveness of labor-related CSR policies or codes in upholding labor standards, and hence two possible way-outs of the deadlock: sharing cost for improving labor standards among key players in global supply chain; and combining regulatory power of voluntary codes and compulsory state legislations. (shrink)

With the development of artificial intelligence technologies, it is possible to use computer to read digital medical images. Because Alzheimer’s disease has the characteristics of high incidence and high disability, it has attracted the attention of many scholars, and its diagnosis and treatment have gradually become a hot topic. In this paper, a multimodal diagnosis method for AD based on three-dimensional shufflenet and principal component analysis network is proposed. First, the data on structural magnetic resonance imaging and functional magnetic resonance (...) imaging are preprocessed to remove the influence resulting from the differences in image size and shape of different individuals, head movement, noise, and so on. Then, the original two-dimensional ShuffleNet is developed three-dimensional, which is more suitable for 3D sMRI data to extract the features. In addition, the PCANet network is applied to the brain function connection analysis, and the features on fMRI data are obtained. Next, kernel canonical correlation analysis is used to fuse the features coming from sMRI and fMRI, respectively. Finally, a good classification effect is obtained through the support vector machines method classifier, which proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

We present a decision procedure for the ∀∃ theory of the lattice of Σ1 sentences of Peano Arithmetic.

Biomedical research using data from participants’ mobile devices borrows heavily from the ethos of the “citizen science” movement, by delegating data collection and transmission to its volunteer subjects. This engagement gives volunteers the opportunity to feel like partners in the research and retain a reassuring sense of control over their participation. These virtues, in turn, give both grass-roots citizen science initiatives and institutionally sponsored mHealth studies appealing features to flag in recruiting participants from the public. But while grass-roots citizen science (...) projects are often community-based, mHealth research ultimately depends on the individuals who own and use mobile devices. This inflects the ethos of mHealth research towards a celebration of individual autonomy and empowerment, at the expense of its implications for the communities or groups to which its individual participants belong. But the prospects of group harms — and benefits — from mHealth research are as vivid as they are in other forms of data-intensive “precision health” research, and will be important to consider in the design of any studies using this approach. (shrink)

At this stage of evolution of our discipline, philosophy of science, there seems no single great theme that has attracted the attention of most practitioners in the field. Rather, scholarly works in the field are quite diffused. Traditional topics, such as reductionism and the unity of science, remain to be carefully examined from various perspectives. The debate over realism versus instrumentalism, although dismissed by some as uninteresting and unproductive, is still taken by many active scholars as vital in our understanding (...) of the nature of scientific theories and in our appraisal of scientific enterprise. Of course, the new spirit of our times has also shown itself, sometimes in the discussion of some major theses in the post-empiricist philosophy of science, such as incommensurability, underdetermination and constructivism, on the basis of detailed examination of scientific materials, other times in the shift of the attention from static aspects of science, such as theory justification and the nature of explanation, to more dynamic aspects, such as negotiations within a scientific community and its function and role in the development of science. Even more to the point in this regard is the great attention paid to the place science has occupied in modernity, the defect of modernist understanding of science and its possible remedy. Not surprisingly, this current state of affairs in our field has also manifested in the essays collected in this volume of contributions to the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. Thus, an inspection of these essays, although it will not provide us with a focus of the discipline, may give us some sense as to what is going on in the field. (shrink)

Because no previous literature discusses the determinants of green product development performance, this study develops an original framework to fill the research gap. This study explores the influences of green dynamic capabilities and green transformational leadership on green product development performance and investigates the mediation role of green creativity. The results demonstrate that green dynamic capabilities and green transformational leadership positively influence green creativity and green product development performance. Besides, this study indicates that the positive relationships between green product development (...) performance and their two antecedents—green dynamic capabilities and green transformational leadership—are partially mediated by green creativity. It means that green dynamic capabilities and green transformational leadership can not only directly affect green product development performance positively but also indirectly affect it positively via green creativity. Hence, companies have to increase their green dynamic capabilities, green transformational leadership, and green creativity to enhance their green product development performance. (shrink)

Dreams were a topic of study even in ancient times, and they are a special spiritual phenomenon. Generations of literati have defined the meaning of dreams in their own way, while Zhu Xi was perhaps the most outstanding one among them. He made profound explanations of dreams from aspects such as the relationship between dreams and the principles li and qi, the relationship between dreams and the state of the heart, and the relationship between dreams and an individual’s moral improvement. (...) He summarized previous generations’ understanding of dreams and infused a new dimension from the School of Principles, pointing out a direction for individuals’ moral cultivation and spiritual pursuit. Zhu Xi also examined the opinions of Zhang Zai, Cheng Yi, Hu Hong and other thinkers on Confucius not dreaming of Duke Zhou in his later years, revealing differences between thinkers in the School of Principles. An analysis of Zhu Xi’s thoughts on dreams will provide deeper insight into the research on the School of Principles. (shrink)

When solving a problem with insight, people suddenly become aware of the solution (Mayer, 1995). Insight is often accompanied by a feeling of pleasure and certainty, known as an “Aha! moment” (Gick...

We prove that the first order theory of the fixed point algebra corresponding to an r.e. consistent theory containing arithmetic is hereditarily undecidable.

The theme of the paper is defined by the relevance and insufficient scientific elaboration of the concept of dental tourism in Russia on the basis of deep, comprehensive and conceptually oriented research. The article presents the analytical review of foreign literature in the field of dental tourism. The authors consider various approaches to the definition of the conceptof dental tourism. Scientific developments which are devoted to the dental tourism have not been conducted in our country yet. Mainly, the scientific developments (...) in the sphere of dental tourism are conducted for advertising purposes. The authors points to the possibility and necessity of this study within the framework of sociology of medicine which has the methodological and operational basis for achieving the planned result. (shrink)

The Code of the Samurai is a four-hundred-year-old explication of the rules and expectations embodied in Bushido, the Japanese way of the warrior. Bushido has played a major role in shaping the behavior of modern Japanese government, corporations, society.

Understanding the factors influencing the aesthetic experience of architectures is an important topic in empirical aesthetics. In this study, we examined the effect of three architectural factors, i.e., ceiling height, openness, and contour, on viewers’ aesthetic appreciation through a series of experiments. In previous studies on architectural aesthetics, participants were usually asked to view an image of an architectural space for a few seconds. The long viewing time allows them to focus on different parts of the architecture and then make (...) an aesthetic judgment. The long viewing time, however, also makes it difficult to obtain viewers’ aesthetic scores for a large number of architectural spaces in a short period. In this study, we shortened the visual presentation time to 200 ms, which allowed the viewers to have only one fixation on the image, and asked the viewers to make an aesthetic judgment. It was found that the experiment with a 200-ms viewing time could establish how the three architectural factors influenced aesthetic judgment as well as previous experiments with a 3,000-ms viewing time, suggesting that aesthetic judgment could be made within one fixation. Additionally, we investigated the impact of color on architectural aesthetic judgment by presenting grayscale images. We found that the three architectural factors influenced aesthetic judgment in similar ways for both color and grayscale images. In summary, we found that color was not a main factor modulating viewers’ architectural aesthetic judgments, and we also presented a way to quickly obtain aesthetic scores for architectural spaces. (shrink)

This study used structural equation modeling to verify the performance of the ethical decision-making models developed by Jones and by Kelley and Elm. A comparison showed that the Kelley and Elm decision model yielded the optimal degree of fit. The investigations conducted in this study indicated that moral intensities are not an objective, existing concept but rather the product of subjective perception influenced by organizational factors. In addition to directly influencing ethical decisions, organizational factors indirectly influence ethical decisions through moral (...) intensities. (shrink)

This book develops a new interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. By exploring the significance of the long ignored distinction between being with regard to categories and being with regard to potentiality and actuality, the author presents that Aristotle's science of being has two distinct aspects: an investigation of the basic constituents of reality in terms of categories, predication, and definition, and an investigation which deals with change, process, and order of the world.

Argues that during the late Imperial period, all three main religious strains in China embraced an ethic that everyone should engage in labor as a crucial component to their personal enlightenment and their duty to society. This is what brings together new Chan (Zen in Japanese) Buddhism; new religious Daoism; and new Confucianism. All three new religions had to overcome traditional elitist biases and moral concerns about working for individual material results. To overcome traditional assumptions and practices, as well as (...) to embrace the priority of working for one's livelihood, required the religious practitioners to resolve tensions within their own minds and often with precepts of earlier forms of their religious traditions. The final section of the book focuses on the changing social status of merchants, their enhanced self-confidence in their identity and profession, and their manifestation of the new work ethics in their mercantile activities, especially from 1500 to 1820. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.

Organizational members are likely to harbor different allegiances, values, and identifications that can affect how they respond to their organization’s stigmatization. Drawing on the empirical case of a public broadcaster in South Korea initially stigmatized for its association with an authoritarian government, we focus on the responses of different intra-organizational groups to stigma and their interactions with each other and with external audiences. We find that faced with stigma, groups in the organization were divided about how to respond, with those (...) defying the stigma and advocating a close relationship with the government competing with those who shared the values of stigmatizing audiences. Both groups sought control over journalism work, the organizational attribute for which the broadcaster was stigmatized, allying with external audiences that shared their respective visions. The dominance of the group that defied the stigma led to increased stigmatization of the organization by existing audiences and additionally prompted the participation of initially passive audiences in its denigration, eventually leading to organizational decline. We contribute to the literature on stigma by promoting an understanding of heterogeneity among members in stigmatized organizations and its implications for the consequences of stigma. We also contribute to theorizing stigmatization as a relational process by demonstrating how the heterogeneity of organizational members’ experience of stigma interacted with audience heterogeneity and highlighting the relative roles played by active and passive audiences in bringing about the decline of a stigmatized organization. (shrink)

The analysis of works of visual art illustrates typical groups of elements and interrelations, which form semiotic systems of these works. Specific systems of connotations and their relations with semantic structures, paradigmatics, and typical signal structures are described. Like in linguistic texts, different levels are formed in complex images. The following basic level types are distinguished: sems and other units of semantic level; signs subdivided into: icons of represented objects and connotative sign formations; representamens of basic signs as interpreted by (...) Charles Peirce, including those of connotations, and signals referred to as basic perceptive integer units forming an individual level. (shrink)

Previous studies have noted that personality traits are important predictors of well-being, but how big five personality influences social well-being is still unknown. This study aims to examine the link between big five personality and five dimensions of social well-being in the Chinese cultural context and whether social support can play the mediating effect in the process. This study included 1,658 participants from different communities in China, and regression analyses were conducted. Results revealed that five personality traits were significantly related (...) to overall social well-being; extraversion was significantly related to social integration; agreeableness was positively related to all five dimensions of social well-being; conscientiousness was positively related to social actualization, social coherence, and social contribution; neuroticism was negatively related to social integration, social acceptance, social actualization, and social coherence; openness was positively related to social integration, social acceptance, social coherence, and social contribution. Social support plays mediating roles in the relationships between extraversion/agreeableness/conscientiousness/neuroticism/openness and social well-being, respectively. (shrink)