Online research in philosophy

This article investigates the development of research in the field of CSR in China. The justification for this is that (i) there is evidence that CSR is emerging as a management practice and management field internationally; (ii) there is a general interest in the distinctiveness or comparability of management and management research in Asia and China; (iii) there is evidence that CSR is growing as a management issue in China; and (iv) yet, the mainsprings of this are very different from (...) those in Western business systems. This article adopts a methodology used in wider analysis of CSR in management research (Lockett et al., Journal of Management Studies 43 , 2006 , 115) to bring forth comparisons over the salience, focus and nature of CSR in China research. It finds a rapidly growing salience of CSR in China research, albeit from a low base. It parallels Lockett et al.’s ( 2006 ) finding of a ‘thickening’ of CSR research focus from early concerns with Ethical issues only to greater attention to Social, Environmental and Stakeholder concerns. It also generally parallels Lockett et al.’s ( 2006 ) findings on the balance of research methodologies deployed. The significance of the findings for future CSR research in China is considered both for the notion of a CSR field of research and for our understanding of the development of CSR in China. (shrink)

desire. It is misleading to say that shu concerns the nature of desire in the ordinary sense, for it has more to do with the manner of satisfaction than ...

To many, recent allegations of accounting fraud (or earnings management; EM) at Enron, coupled with similar ones at many other corporations, are a strong indication of a serious decay in business ethics. In academics, this raises the concern between EM and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Since it has neither been documented, nor globally tested whether CSR mitigates or increases the extent of EM, three kinds of EM are studied: earnings smoothing, earnings aggressiveness, and earnings losses and decreases avoidance. The extents (...) to which financial characteristics and institutional variables have an impact on the extent to which companies conduct EM are also tested. Our study investigates whether the CSR-related features of 1,653 corporations in 46 countries had a positive or negative effect on the quality of their publicly released financial information during the 1993-2002 period. There is no question that with a greater commitment to CSR, the extent of earnings smoothing is mitigated, that of earnings losses and decreases avoidance is reduced, but the extent of earnings aggressiveness is increased. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firms’ financial performance (CSR-effect). Two competing hypotheses, social impact hypothesis and shift of focus hypothesis, are proposed to investigate this issue, where the former suggests that CSR has a positive relation with performance and the latter are opposite. In order to ensure the CSR-effect is not contaminated by other factors or samples are randomly drawn, we employ four matching methods, Nearest, Caliper, Mahala and Mahala Caliper to match (...) the samples of CSR (CSR-firms) and without CSR (NonCSR-firms) with similar characteristics. Although four methods yield slightly different results, firms engaging in CSR activities tend to obtain significantly higher values on pretax income to net sales and profit margin, and adopting CSR at the very least not deteriorate the performance of firms, making our conclusion favors the social impact hypothesis and against shift of focus hypothesis in Taiwan. Thus, ambition and conscience are not conflicting with each other. (shrink)

This paper studies the relation between modern democracy and Chinese cultural patterns. It introducing the concept of 'Multiple Others' to explain how the classical concept of harmony can help integrating cultural and social differences within a social body, thus allowing social cohesion to integrate diversity. The main classical concepts of ren, li, and yi are analyzed in both Confucianism and Daoism, and compared to the concepts of recognition and dialogue developed by modern political theorists like Ch. Taylor and J. Habermas.

This paper argues that all discoveries, if they can be viewed as autonomous learning from the environment, share a common process. This is the process of model abstraction involving four steps: act, predict, surprise, and refine, all built on top of the discoverer's innate actions, percepts, and mental constructors. The evidence for this process is based on observations on various discoveries, ranging from children playing to animal discoveries of tools, from human problem solving to scientific discovery. Details of this process (...) can be studied with computer simulations of discovery in simulated environments. (shrink)

Combating the identity problem is crucial and urgent as false identity has become a common denominator of many serious crimes, including mafia trafficking and terrorism. Without correct identification, it is very difficult for law enforcement authority to intervene, or even trace terrorists’ activities. Amongst several identity attributes, personal names are commonly, and effortlessly, falsified or aliased by most criminals. Typical approaches to detecting the use of false identity rely on the similarity measure of textual and other content-based characteristics, which are (...) usually not applicable in the case of highly deceptive, erroneous and unknown descriptions. This barrier can be overcome through analysis of link information displayed by the individual in communication behaviours, financial interactions and social networks. In particular, this paper presents a novel link-based approach that improves existing techniques by integrating multiple link properties in the process of similarity evaluation. It is utilised in a hybrid model that proficiently combines both text-based and link-based measures of examined names to refine the justification of their similarity. This approach is experimentally evaluated against other link-based and text-based techniques, over a terrorist-related dataset, with further generalization to a similar problem occurring in publication databases. The empirical study demonstrates the great potential of this work towards developing an effective identity verification system. (shrink)

In three experiments, participants' visual span was measured in a comparative visual search task in which they had to detect a local match or mismatch between two displays presented side by side. Experiment 1 manipulated the dif®culty of the comparative visual search task by contrasting a mismatch detection task with a substantially more dif®cult match detection task. In Experiment 2, participants were tested in a single-task condition involving only the visual task and a dual-task condition in which they concurrently performed (...) an auditory task. Finally, in Experiment 3, participants performed two dual-task conditions, which differed in the dif®culty of the concurrent auditory task. Both the comparative search task dif®culty (Experiment 1) and the divided attention manipulation (Experiments 2 and 3) produced strong effects on visual span size. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The present study employed the gaze-contingent window paradigm to investigate parafoveal and peripheral cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity in a triple-conjunction visual search task. In the cueing conditions, the information shown outside the gaze-contingent window was restricted to the feature or feature pair shared between the target and a particular distractor type. In the masking conditions, no stimulus features were shown outside the window. Significant cueing and masking effects on saccadic selectivity were observed for saccades directed at items (...) within the window, where all features were visible across experimental conditions. Cueing a particular feature or feature pair biased saccadic selectivity towards this feature or feature pair, while masking generally reduced saccadic selectivity. These findings support the concept of visual guidance being a preattentive process that operates in parallel across the display. © 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. (shrink)

Background: Adherence to ethical principles in clinical research and practice is becoming topical issue inChina, where the prevalence of mental illness is rising, but treatment facilities remainunderdeveloped. This paper reports on a study aiming to understand the ethical knowledgeand attitudes of Chinese mental health professionals in relation to the process of diagnosisand treatment, informed consent, and privacy protection in clinical trials. Methods: A self-administered survey was completed by 1110 medical staff recruited from Shanghai's22 psychiatric hospitals. Simple random selection methods were (...) used to identify targetindividuals from the computerized registry of staff. Results: The final sample for analysis consisted 1094 medical staff (including 523 doctors, 542nurses, 8 pharmacologists and 21 other staff). The majority reported that their medicalinstitutions had not established an Ethics Committee (87.8%) and agreed that EthicsCommittees should be set up in their institutions (72.9%). Approximately half (52%) had notreceived systematic education in ethics, and almost all (89.1%) of the staff thought it wasnecessary. Nearly all participants (90.0%) knew the Shanghai Mental Health Regulationswhich was the first local regulations relating to mental health in China, but only 11% and16.6% respectively knew of the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki. About half(51.8%) thought that the guardian should make the decision as to whether the patientparticipated in clinical trials or not. Conclusions: The study indicates that most psychiatric hospitals in Shanghai have no Medical EthicsCommittee. More than half the medical staff had not received systematic education andtraining in medical ethics and they have insufficient knowledge of the ethical issues related toclinical practice and trials. Training in ethics is recommended for medical staff during theirtraining and as ongoing professional development. (shrink)

Abstract The purpose of this study is to explore the differences and similarities in values held by early adolescents in Mainland China and Taiwan. Samples of seventh graders (N = 707) were drawn from two cities in Mainland China and as many cities in Taiwan. The instruments for this study included the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) and the Chinese Value Survey (CVS). Many significant differences were found between adolescents in Mainland China and Taiwan, and between boys and girls. Early adolescents (...) in Mainland China tend to prefer values that are related to competence and personal effectiveness. In contrast, their counterparts in Taiwan are more people?orientated and value interpersonal relationships more. The two groups also emphasise different aspects of collectivism. The subjects in Mainland China prefer more task?orientated values which aim toward service to society and country. The subjects in Taiwan, on the other hand, focus more on family?related values. Significant differences between the sexes are also found. Girls demonstrate more concern for relationships than do boys. Similarities in value preferences are also found. Adolescents in both Mainland China and Taiwan show concern for the world, country, family, friends and virtues related to interpersonal relationships. They are also similar in showing little concern for some traditional Chinese values such as reputation and respect for tradition. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to the existing literature. (shrink)

Information has usually been defined as one of the properties of substance and a reflection of the substance world. A new perspective is introduced in this paper concerning the nature of information and its role in the cosmos. The five characteristics of information are discussed in the first part of this paper. While the passivity allows information to be transferred, copied, recorded, and displayed, the other four characteristics of information (i.e. initiative, independent, expressive, and holographic) make it the fundamental element (...) of the cosmos, which generates the cosmos, life, consciousness and human culture. Based on the findings of physics and astrophysics, this view is explored more by defining information as a pattern of orders throughout the cosmos, with series of parameters, functions and programs. It is argued that, the cosmos is the existence of process instead of things; the information is reality itself instead of a property of substance; and the substance is one of the forms in which information expresses itself during its evolution. An original framework named “Information Order N” (N is any integer between 0 and 7) is described in the second part of this paper. This scale of information evolution starts from initial information, which is an intrinsic pattern that inhered from maternal universes. The seven orders after that are dimension and superstring, substance and energy, life, consciousness, system of the earth (with a combination of eco-system and human culture), system of the Milky Way Galaxy, system of the cosmos. This “Information Order N” scale unifies substance,life, consciousness, human culture, and everything in the cosmos into one system of information evolution. In another word, the cosmos is information itself. (shrink)

Planning with incomplete knowledge becomes a very active research area since late 1990s. Many logical formalisms introduce sensing actions and conditional plans to address the problem. The action language $\mathcal{A}_{K}$ invented by Son and Baral is a well-known framework for this purpose. In this paper, we propose so-called cautious and weakly cautious semantics for $\mathcal{A}_{K}$ , in order to allow an agent to generate and execute reliable plans in safety-critical environments. Intuitively speaking, cautious and weakly cautious semantics enable the agent (...) to know exactly what happens after the execution of an action. Computational complexity analysis shows that cautious semantics reduces the reasoning complexity of $\mathcal{A}_{K}$ , it is also worth to point out that many useful domains could still be expressed with this setting. Another important contribution of our work is the development of Hoare style proof systems. These proof systems are served as inference mechanisms for the verification of conditional plans, and proved to be sound and complete. In addition, they could also be used for plan generation, in the sense that constructing a derivation is indeed a procedure to finding a plan. We point out that the proof systems posses a nice property for off-line planning, that is, the agent could generate and store short proofs in her spare time, and perform quick plan query by easily constructing a long proof from the stored shorter ones (under the assumption that sufficient proofs are stored). (shrink)

It is no doubt that philosophy is the important way of discourse of modernity and modernity is the contemporary context of philosophy. By examining the relationship between philosophy and modernity, we will discover that philosophy enables the complete establishment of modernity, and philosophy is theimportant driving force of the gradual evolution of modernity; Contemporary philosophy is the outcome of the crisis of modernity; The important mission of the contemporary Chinese philosophy is to answer the question that how it is possible (...) to adopt modernity in China. (shrink)

Feizi 韓非子 in terms of the concept of shi 勢 (circumstantial advantage, power, or authority). This argument is based on the A Critique of Circumstantial Advantage (Nanshi 難勢) chapter of the Hanfeizi, where Han Feizi advances his own idea of shi after criticizing both Shen Dao and an anonymous Confucian. However, there are other primary sources to contain Shen Dao’s thought, namely, seven incomplete Shenzi 慎子 chapters of the Essentials on Government from the Assemblage of Books (Qunshu zhi (...) yao 群書治要) and other fragments preserved in other Chinese texts. This article examines the Shenzi fragments in order to ask whether Shen Dao stresses the concept of shi. (shrink)

Summary The first Chinese congress for hermeneutics demonstrated the vast and intimate knowledge of the Chinese researchers of the German hermeneutic debate. It opened fruitful perspectives for further exchange of views between eastern and western scholars in the field of the humanities.