My basic contention in this essay is that the proper characterization of Confucian ethics is not role-based ethics, rule-based ethics, or virtue ethics, but an ethics of the self or a self-based ethics. In essence, Confucian ethics is about how to realize a self in line with inner sagehood and outer kinghood ; it is about how to realize a self as fully self-conscious being-for-itself of definite character, substance, and personality. Confucian ethics does not start with the assumption that there (...) is a given self that should be made virtuous, rule-abiding, or dutiful, but starts from the assumption that a self needs to be created, developed, and realized in the ethical life while the potentiality of building a self is given. (shrink)

This paper explores the Confucian value of authenticity. Taking as the starting point of the Confucian concept of becoming authentic persons of bo, da, jing, and shen, the paper first demonstrates that a high–far–firm zhixiang, creativity, an examined life, and sincerity are four necessary conditions for a self to be an authentic one of bo, da, jing, and shen. It then demonstrates that Confucian ethics operates with a metaphysical concept of a substantive self and Confucian self-cultivation implies authenticating such a (...) substantive self. Finally, it demonstrates that in Confucian ethics, cultivating a person’s self and cultivating the person’s humanity are not separable and entail one another. (shrink)

This essay explores the traditional Chinese philosophical insights into tolerance and demonstrates how those Chinese insights are consistent with and can be illuminating to our epochal spirit. It s...

This book offers a conceptual map of Habermas’ philosophy and a systematic introduction to his work. It does so by systematically examining six defining themes—modernity, discourse ethics, truth and justice, public law and constitutional democracy, cosmopolitanism, and toleration—of Habermas' philosophy as well as their inner logic. The text distinguishes itself in content and perspective by offering a very clear conceptual map and by providing a new interpretation of Habermas’ views in light of his overarching system. In terms of scope, the (...) book touches upon Habermas’ broad range of works. As for method, the text illustrates key concepts in his philosophy making it a useful reference aid. It appeals to students and scholars in the field looking for a current introductory text or supplementary reading on Habermas. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the Confucian theory of mind. Doing so, it first examines the early Confucian concept of the human mind as a substance that has both moral and cognitive functions and a universal nature. It then explores the neo-Confucian concept of the human mind, the original mind, and the relationships between the human mind and human nature, as well as between the human mind and the human body. Finally, it explores the Confucian concept of cultivation of the mind.

This essay investigates the Confucian cosmopolitan aspiration. First, it examines the nature of cosmopolitanism and its distinction from universalism. It demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is a phil...

Kant bequeaths to the present discourse of cosmopolitanism the question of how a constitutionalized global order without a world state is possible. At the core of the matter is what a legitimate public authority as the necessary enactor of the cosmopolitan sovereignty is. Habermas’s answer that this is a three-tiered, networked realm of public authority is a plausible one. The key to Habermas’s answer is the concept of a political constitution for a pluralist world. If such a constitution is possible, (...) I believe that we need a new concept of constitution as a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties; on this point, we should take the UK constitution as the paradigm and recognize that since the end of World War II, such a body politic of norms, statute laws, common laws, legal precedents, and international treaties of the global human community has been emerging. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the philosophical insights of Zhu Xi, Wang YangMing, Kant, and Husserl and therefore proposes a new epistemic constructivism. It demonstrates that a knowing mind is a co...

Engaging in present debates on happiness, this essay shows that a good, happy life and an authentic life entail one another. Doing so, the essay first explores the Confucian approach to the relationships between happiness and authenticity, and between authenticity and value. It then presents the Heideggeran approach. Therefore, it demonstrates how authenticity, happiness, and value are inseparable in a person’s being; the so called fact-value dichotomy, even if it is applicable to non-human beings, has no magic touch in human (...) existence. (shrink)

Countering the general reading of Confucian ethics as a form of virtue ethics or humanistic ethics, this essay reads Confucian ethics as a form of ethical personalism. Doing so, it examines the ethical orientations in the Confucian classics, The Analects, Da Xue, and others, pointing out that the touchstone concept of Confucian ethics taught in these classics is the person, recalling the Confucian motto of ethical cultivation, ?inner sagehood and outer kinghood?. It demonstrates that only the name of personalism describes (...) well the substance of Confucian ethics and captures its essence. It indicates that Confucian personalism is characterized by its starting not from the concept of the person or personhood as a divinely or naturally given, something akin to the Hindu Atman, but from the concept of the person or personhood that must be substantialized in ethical cultivation, e.g., cultivating a personhood after the image of the sage. (shrink)

Engaging in present debates on happiness, this essay shows that a good, happy life and an authentic life entail one another. Doing so, the essay first explores the Confucian approach to the relationships between happiness and authenticity, and between authenticity and value. It then presents the Heideggeran approach. Therefore, it demonstrates how authenticity, happiness, and value are inseparable in a person’s being; the so called fact-value dichotomy, even if it is applicable to non-human beings, has no magic touch in human (...) existence. (shrink)

This book inaugurates a new phenomenology of humanity wherein a conception of humans as a unique category of beings is developed, and new solutions to problems that are preoccupied in present existentialism are also developed.

This essay argues that a person's fate is defined by the interaction of necessity and contingency, indicating that a person's existential competence consists of his or her ability to dance well with both necessity and contingency, not merely with either of them. As a result, it rejects the traditional association of fate with fatalism and fatality on the one hand and resists the present current to define individual fate and identity merely in terms of contingency and as contingency on the (...) other hand. Meanwhile, it defines necessity that shapes a person's fate in terms of laws of nature and human existence, not as some predetermined scheme or design. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of fate, exploring the causal-normative constraint problem in the existential phenomenology of humanity in _A Dream of Red Mansions_. It studies the structure, content, and origin of the consciousness and experience of fate, as it is illustrated in the phenomenology in the novel, exploring the causal and normative challenges that fate poses to the reality, value, authenticity, happiness, and freedom of a person. Doing so, the essay also demonstrates both the difference and affinity between the (...) Chinese concept of fate and Hindu concept of _karma_, as well as existentialist (Heideggeran) concepts of 'thrownness' and 'existentiality.'. (shrink)

This book explores the mind of our epoch, defined as the period since the Nuremberg Trial and the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. It focuses on four central philosophical ideas of our time: global justice, cosmopolitanism, crimes against humanity, and cultural toleration.

This essay explores the contractual dimension in Confucianism. It demonstrates that essential to Confucianism is the concept of three contracts: the contract of mind with oneself, the cultural contract with society and community; and the moral contract with humanity and the universe at large. Confucianism may not be labelled as contractualism. Nonetheless one would not have an adequate understanding of Confucianism without a view of the contractual dimension of Confucianism. Confucianism may not be labelled as realism. However, essential to Confucianism (...) is the idea of the total unity of the self, society, and the world, and the total harmony of heaven, earth, and humankind. (shrink)

Justice, Humanity and Social Toleration makes a novel statement of justice as setting human affairs right in accordance with the principles of human rights, human goods and human bonds; it explores the timely embodiments of this family of justice in our age including social toleration, and democracy.

Countering the present trend in the discourse on justice wherein human reason is perceived and marginalized as an embarrassment to justice and the trend to reject the concept of formal justice, this paper argues that there is formal justice and the essence of justice is setting things right and setting righteousness to stand straight. By this token, justice means the rule of reason, not the rule of power and desire, and the ethics of justice differs fundamentally from the ethics of (...) care/benevolence. The popular assumption that justice as the rule of reason is incompatible with the idea of justice as accommodating diversity is unjustified. The paper joins the present discourse on justice from a historical perspective. It examines the historical Confucian and neo-Confucian concept of justice in a way of its dialogues with other Western concepts of justice such as Plato's concept of justice. (shrink)

This paper explores the subject-matter of the relationship between law and humanity, filling a significant lacuna in philosophy of law in the West today. Doing so, the paper starts with recasting the traditional Chinese conflict—in particular, the conflict between legalism and Confucianism—over law in a new light of the contemporary call for stopping crimes against humanity. It then explores Habermas’ insight into and illusion of law. Finally, it examines the internal relationship between law and humanity, contending that law must always (...) treat humanity as a purpose, not as a tool to other ends, functioning to build a community of humanity; while a distinction exists between justice and benevolence, law must not be inhumane. (shrink)

This essay explores the Confucian concept of the space of the mind and the Confucian view on cultivation of the space of mind. It then argues that the distinction between the mind as a mental substance and the body as a material substance is that the mind can be infinitely extended while the body can only extended to a certain limit.

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from the non-dynamical and time-dependent (...) character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

The Great Divide in metaphysical debates about laws of nature is between Humeans, who think that laws merely describe the distribution of matter, and non-Humeans, who think that laws govern it. The metaphysics can place demands on the proper formulations of physical theories. It is sometimes assumed that the governing view requires a fundamental / intrinsic direction of time: to govern, laws must be dynamical, producing later states of the world from earlier ones, in accord with the fundamental direction of (...) time in the universe. In this paper, we propose a minimal primitivism about laws of nature (MinP) according to which there is no such requirement. On our view, laws govern by constraining the physical possibilities. Our view captures the essence of the governing view without taking on extraneous commitments about the direction of time or dynamic production. Moreover, as a version of primitivism, our view requires no reduction / analysis of laws in terms of universals, powers, or dispositions. Our view accommodates several potential candidates for fundamental laws, including the principle of least action, the Past Hypothesis, the Einstein equation of general relativity, and even controversial examples found in the Wheeler-Feynman theory of electrodynamics and retrocausal theories of quantum mechanics. By understanding governing as constraining, non-Humeans who accept MinP have the same freedom to contemplate a wide variety of candidate fundamental laws as Humeans do. (shrink)

In this paper, I characterize and elaborate on the “Wentaculus” theory, a new approach to time’s arrow in a quantum universe that offers a unified solution to the problems of what gives rise to the arrow of time and what the ontology of quantum mechanics is.

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’. 1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous,... (shrink)

Di 1 bian. Kongzi si xiang ji lun yu -- di 2 bian. Mengzi si xiang ji Meng Xun tong yi -- di 3 bian. Gaozi si xiang -- di 4 bian. Ming li -- di 5 bian. Jiao yu xiu yang Wen hua.

Drawing on the core values of western civilization, the author refines the counterparts in Chinese civilization, summarized as four core principles: duty before freedom, obedience before rights, community before individual, and harmony before conflict. Focusing on guoxue or Sinology as the basis of his approach, the author provides detailed explanations of traditional Chinese values. Recent scholars have addressed the concept of guoxue since the modern age, sorting through it and piecing it together, which has produced an extremely abundant range of (...) information. However, given that the concepts and theories involved have been left largely unanalyzed, this book develops a theoretical treatment of them in several important respects. First, it analyzes the mindset of guoxue, examining the dominant ideas and values of the era from which the term "guoxue" arose, focusing on its connection to early changes and trends in society and culture, and distinguishing three key phases of development. Past scholars mainly had in mind the range of objects studied in guoxue when defining it, and what this book underscores is the meaning of guoxue as a modern body of research. Secondly, it assesses several phases in the modern evolution of the body of guoxue research from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, id est, ending with the later phase of the National Heritage movement. Third and lastly, the book explores the various main modes of modern guoxue, which correspond step by step with the evolutionary phases of guoxue research. (shrink)

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments (...) about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task. (shrink)

In the contemporary epistemological literature, peer disagreement is often taken to be an instance of a more general phenomenon of “higher-order evidence.” Correspondingly, its epistemic significance is often thought to turn on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence in general. This chapter attempts to evaluate this claim, and in doing so to clarify some points of unclarity in the current literature – both about what it is for evidence to be “higher-order,” and about the relationship between disagreement and higher-order evidence. (...) We will begin by considering some candidate definitions of “higher-order evidence,” and offering our own definition that attempts to capture the phenomenon of interest. We will then consider, in light of this definition, whether disagreement and its epistemic significance are best-understood as a kind of higher-order evidence. We’ll argue that although peer disagreement can be epistemically significant qua higher-order evidence, this role doesn’t exhaust its significance, and that it can also serve as straightforward first-order evidence. Finally, we’ll suggest that inattention to this latter point has made broadly conciliatory views about peer disagreement seem somewhat easier to resist than they in fact are. (shrink)

If a benevolent and all-powerful God exists, how can there be so much suffering? Could God have created a better world? Or is evil the price we pay for freedom of the will?

Weyl's tile argument purports to show that there are no natural distance functions in atomistic space that approximate Euclidean geometry. I advance a response to this argument that relies on a new account of distance in atomistic space, called "the mixed account," according to which local distances are primitive and other distances are derived from them. Under this account, atomistic space can approximate Euclidean space (and continuous space in general) very well. To motivate this account as a genuine solution to (...) Weyl's tile argument, I argue that this account is no less natural than the standard account of distance in continuous space. I also argue that the mixed account has distinctive advantages over Forrest's (1995) account in response to Weyl's tile argument, which can be considered as a restricted version of the mixed account. (shrink)

In The Humanist Spirit of Daoism, Chen Guying presents a concise overview of his understanding of the meaning and significance of Daoist philosophy. Chen is a leading contemporary Chinese thinker and spokesperson for a new Daoist approach to existential and socio-political issues. He was born in mainland China in 1935, but after having resettled to Taiwan, he received his education there and was a student activist in the 1960s. He became famous in the Chinese-speaking world with his writings (...) on Nietzsche, Laozi and Zhuangzi. At present he is a Professor at Peking University. This volume collects representative essays from the past 25 years which not only outline Chen's interpretation of Daoism as a deeply humanist way of thinking and living, but also show how he employs this philosophy in a critique of totalitarianism and neo-imperialism. (shrink)

China is currently afflicted by enormous environmental problems. This book, drawing on ancient and modern Chinese environmental thinking, considers what it is that makes an environment a desirable place for living. The book emphasises ideas of beauty, and discusses how these ideas can be applied in natural, agricultural and urban environments in order to produce desirable environments. The book argues that environment is both a product of nature and of human beings, and as such is potentially alterable by culture. The (...) book explores the three aspects of environmental beauty whereby such alteration might be beneficially made: integrated and holistic; ecological and man-made; and authentic and everyday. (shrink)