The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 693-694, August 2012.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 404, June 2012.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 405, June 2012.

Donald J. Zeyl begins the historical section of the book by tracing divine causation throughout classical Greek philosophy. Some of the Pre-Socratics held to a single god as the source of rational order or change. These views suggested that the cosmos may be explained teleologically. Plato takes up that suggested promise in his Phaedo and finds it wanting. Instead, he looks to Forms as (formal) causes of natural processes. This direction of inquiry leads him to postulate, in the Republic, (...) the Form of the Good as the “unhypothetical (causal) first principle.” In Plato’s later writings, most notably in the Timaeus, Plato presents a full-blown teleological account of both the universe at large and the varieties of living things that inhabit the earth. The agent that brings about the conformity of the world to the Forms is the divine Demiurge. -/- Aristotle inherits from Plato the belief that processes in the natural world are to be understood teleologically. These processes are explained by the nature (or form) of the organism itself. Aristotle’s world has no beginning and thus has no place for an original efficient cause to get the world started. Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” plays no causal role in the processes of the natural world, all of which are exhaustively explained in terms of Aristotle’s well-known theory of the “four causes.” Nevertheless, the Unmoved Mover is a final cause. -/- After Aristotle, only the Stoics offered an account of divine causal agency. As pantheists, the Stoics identified the world with a divine rational principle they named the Logos. All events, natural and social, are completely determined by Reason, so the Stoics were strict determinists, both in their natural philosophy and in their social and ethical thought. (shrink)

The almost 300 articles contain not only historical accounts but also some indication of the state of present day study in classical philosophy.

Fifteen essays addressing conceptions of individualism and holism as they emerged in Chinese literature and philosophy from the time of Confucius and Chuang-tzu to the present.

What is unique about China is the agreement on all sides that men are naturally equal. This is the second of our two central themes. ...

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design.

The network approach to psychopathology posits that mental disorders can be conceptualized and studied as causal systems of mutually reinforcing symptoms. This approach, first posited in 2008, has grown substantially over the past decade and is now a full-fledged area of psychiatric research. In this article, we provide an overview and critical analysis of 363 articles produced in the first decade of this research program, with a focus on key theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. In addition, we turn our attention (...) to the next decade of the network approach and propose critical avenues for future research in each of these domains. We argue that this program of research will be best served by working toward two overarching aims: (a) the identification of robust empirical phenomena and (b) the development of formal theories that can explain those phenomena. We recommend specific steps forward within this broad framework and argue that these steps are necessary if the network approach is to develop into a progressive program of research capable of producing a cumulative body of knowledge about how specific mental disorders operate as causal systems. (shrink)

The generation of evidence is integral to the work of public health and health service providers. Traditionally, ethics has been addressed differently in research projects, compared with other forms of evidence generation, such as quality improvement, program evaluation, and surveillance, with review of non-research activities falling outside the purview of the research ethics board. However, the boundaries between research and these other evaluative activities are not distinct. Efforts to delineate a boundary – whether on grounds of primary purpose, temporality, underlying (...) legal authority, departure from usual practice, or direct benefits to participants – have been unsatisfactory. (shrink)

American politicians often claim a moral imperative to ensure quality affordable health care to all Americans, but as Donald Munro points out, leaders rarely outline the content of this moral standard and whether it can be applied to all societies. Munro turns to recent research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to identify the ethical principles that help humans succeed as individuals and as cooperative groups. He then applies these principles to two practical problems affecting contemporary China: the moral (...) complexity of responding to global warming and the lack of consistency within the Chinese legal system. (shrink)

In this volume Donald Munro, author of important studies on early and contemporary China, provides a critical analysis of the doctrines of the Sung Neo-Confucian philosopher Chu Hsi (1130-1200). For nearly six centuries Confucian orthodoxy was based on Chu Hsi's commentaries on Confucian classics. These commentaries were the core of the curriculum studied by candidates for the civil service in China until 1905 and provided guidelines both for personal behavior and for official policy. Munro finds the key to the (...) complexities of Chu Hsi's thought in his mode of discourse: the structural images of family, stream of water, mirror, body, plant, and ruler. Furthermore, he discloses the basic framework of Chu Hsi's ethics and the theory of human nature that is provided by these illustrative images. As revealed by Munro, Chu Hsi's thought is polarized between family duty and a broader altruism and between obedience to external authority and self-discovery of moral truth. To understand these tensions moves us toward clarifying the meaning of each idea in the sets. The interplay of these ideas, selectively emphasized over time by later Confucians, is a background for explaining modern Chinese thought. In it, among other things, Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism co-exist. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A study of the road to modern problem solving in China, winding between a traditional Confucian style of inquiry and one associated with science.