分析哲学作为一场哲学运动,涉及的问题相当广泛,包括语言、逻辑、科学方法、精神哲学以及价值哲学等问题。与传统哲学不同的是,传统哲学妄图建立一个关于宇宙与人生包罗万象的思辨体系,认为哲学是对自然、社会和人 类思维的最高概括;分析哲学则认为,对于世界本身的认识乃属于各门科学的事情,哲学则对这些科学命题和人类日常生活中所用的普通命题进行语言的逻辑分析,澄清命题的意义,划分有意义的命题与无意义的命题.

本书通过费希特的一生,表现了费希特在德意志民族文化意识发展过程中的地位,从而历史地重现了费希特的观念。.

本書首先介紹了斯賓諾莎的時代、生平和著作考釋，然後從形而上學、認識論和倫理學三方面對斯賓諾莎哲學體系進行分析和解釋，作者力圖從當代哲學認識成果出發，對斯賓諾莎哲學進行全面而系統的評價。書後並附有詳盡的 斯賓諾莎哲學參考文獻，以便讀者作更深一層的研究。.

Studying the psychology behind the purchase of eco-friendly products and second-hand items can offer valuable insights to promote sustainable consumer behavior. This paper examines factors influencing Italian consumers’ willingness to pay regarding bio-based clothing and second-hand items. Drawing from data collected from 402 Italian participants, we examine how motivations and socio-demographic factors are associated with willingness to pay in the context of sustainable fashion. Our findings reveal that motivations related to environmental concerns are positively associated with consumers’ willingness to pay (...) higher premiums for bio-based clothing. Higher income and education levels are also associated with the willingness to pay higher premiums. Meanwhile, motivation related to vintage appeal is associated with lower desired discounts for second-hand items, particularly among older consumers. Gender differences also influence discount preferences, with men seeking larger discounts on second-hand clothing compared to women. By providing insights into Italian consumers’ sustainable fashion choices, this study offers implications for businesses, policymakers, and researchers aiming to promote eco-conscious consumption and sustainability in the fashion industry. (shrink)

Flipped learning could improve the learning effectiveness of students. However, some studies have pointed out the limitations related to flipped classrooms because the content of the flipped course does not vary according to the needs of the students. On the other hand, adaptive teaching, which customizes the learning mode according to the individual needs of students, can make up for some of the shortcomings of flipped teaching. This study combines adaptive teaching with flipped teaching and applies it to face-to-face classroom (...) activities. The purpose of this research is to explore whether the implementation of flipping and adaptive learning in a computer programming course can improve the learning effectiveness of students. The experimental subjects of this study are the sophomore students in the Department of Information Management. The flipped classroom with adaptive instruction has been realized in the limited course time. This study uses questionnaires to collect pre- and post-test data on the “learning motivation” of students. The learning effectiveness was evaluated based on the students' previous programming course and the semester scores of this course. Research results show that the post-test “learning motivation” has improved overall compared with the pre-test, and the learning effect is significant. The results of this research not only prove the effectiveness of modern teaching theories in programming courses but also lay the foundation for future teaching design. (shrink)

This paper addresses the practice of business ethics in China. It begins with a literature review. Using a traditional cultural framework it then analyses the role of the state in China. A comparison is made between the evolution of Chinese social and political forms and those of the West, and the consequences of those differences for the question of auto‐organisation in China are described. After commenting on the reality of business ethics in China, the paper concludes that the practice of (...) business ethics in China needs the guiding ‘parental’ hand of government. (shrink)

At the centre of controversy over human rights policy in China is the disagreement on the relationship between two sets of human rights: civil and political rights on the one hand, and social and economic rights on the other. Much of the debate, however, has been undertaken on theoretical and normative levels. Empirical evidence is needed to advance this debate. Drawing data from a multination survey, this research explores whether Chinese and Westerners differ in their human rights policy preferences. The (...) findings suggest that while social and economic rights have a much broader support base in China than in Western nations, political and civil rights are also important concerns to the Chinese public. Sources and implications of the findings are also discussed. (shrink)

At the centre of controversy over human rights policy in China is the disagreement on the relationship between two sets of human rights: civil and political rights on the one hand, and social and economic rights on the other. Much of the debate, however, has been undertaken on theoretical and normative levels. Empirical evidence is needed to advance this debate. Drawing data from a multination survey, this research explores whether Chinese and Westerners differ in their human rights policy preferences. The (...) findings suggest that while social and economic rights have a much broader support base in China than in Western nations, political and civil rights are also important concerns to the Chinese public. Sources and implications of the findings are also discussed. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 2–5 To begin with, as we understand from a remote place like Seoul, there have been two different conceptions of materiality in the Western experimental ?lm history: materiality of cinema and of ?lm. The former has been represented by the practitioners of the so-called the “Expanded Cinema” and the latter by the tradition of the “Hand-made” ?lm. Whereas for the Expanded Cinema, the materiality or the “medium-speci?city” includes not only the ?lm material but also the entire condition (...) and environment in which the cinematic experience is situated (i.e.: screen, projector, audience and theatre); for the Hand-made ?lm, it is the whole ?lmic process prior to the screening in front of the audience (i.e.: hand-processing and optical-printing). The two practices share in the materialist turn that opens up the radical possibilities of aesthetic (and even political) interventions into a process previously considered seamless and transparent. What can be called to attention through the materialist turn includes the aesthetic-institutional process in the projection-spectator relation and the (non-) representational process in ?lm-making. Moreover, these interventions bring their own temporalities back to those processes, and this returning emancipates the temporalities from their subordination to the cinema-as-commodity. Hangjun Lee is a ?lm-based artist whose practice is concerned with Hand-made Film and Experimental Cinema. Given these interests, Lee questions the linkage between materiality and temporality. This was his preoccupation around 2006, the time at which he started to collaborate with Chulki Hong, the noise improviser. The improvisational nature of their audio-visual performances opened means of detouring from the conventional editing techniques. Their collaboration also afforded critical investigations into the performativity of the practices in both the darkroom and the screening room, as well as in the private recording/practicing studio, and public performance spaces for the improvising musician. In fact, it was a kind of common interest shared by both us from the outset. In our collaboration, we avoid sacri?cing/concealing/minimizing one form of performativity (the performative nature and temporality of compositional process) for the sake of the other (i.e. those in improvisational and executional process). In the ?eld of experimental music and sound, this kind of approach has been comprehensively called “cracking” or “hacking”. The concepts are ?nely formulated in the coinage of “Cracked Everyday Electronics” (by Voice Crack) or more generally “Handmade Electronic Music” (by Nicolas Collins). 1 And this was a pure but perhaps necessary coincidence. the original title of the work of our collaboration and, retrospectively, of the set of our working principles at the same time, “The Cracked Share” was named by Lee after Georges Bataille’s masterwork, The Accursed Share , with the substitution of the adjective with “Cracked” as a synonym for ‘reticulated’ in the photographic image. We think the ascetic and subtractive aesthetic turn of the contemporary non-idiomatic improvised (and even somewhat non-improvised) music 2 pushed us further towards more radical dissociation with the empty temporality of commodi?ed audio-visual experience. It can be called the aesthetics of “without,” and exemplars include Yoshihide Otomo’s Turntable Without Records , Sachiko M’s Sampler without Samples . There are also other radical experiments even with the (non-)improvised music without noise and sounds that neatly meet the rules and idioms of the existing/established experimental music. For us, this thread among the experimental music currents weighs in its emphasis on subtractive and dissociational power unique to improvisational action. Surely, the tradition of the Cracked and Handmade improvised music teaches us the crucial lesson that “[m]edia and mediation are never transparent” and that “[m]ediation actively transforms data from one form to another and is never passive.” 3 We couldn’t agree to this statement more. However, without the removal and withdrawal power of improvisation that poses and keeps both subjects (performer and audience) and objects (projector and instrument) in “inferiority,” 4 generalized cracking and hacking practices—or simply “glitch”—in music and visuals would be either sublimated into the mystical and ritualistic forms of “Film Alchemy” and “Noise Music” (to which both of us still strongly feel a belonging but also, more or less, ambivalent sentiments), or else assimilated into the logic of the commodi?ed audio-visual communication. Today in music, this principle of improvisational performativity should be formulated as the dis-organization of sound against the associational de?nition of (electronic) music and it needs to be translated into audio-visual experiences. In other words, cracking practices of free improvisation need not be limited in artistic creativity, in a darkroom, in a studio, or on the stage; the principle of the dis-organization of sound should be the principle of dis-organization (or cracked organization) of audio-visual performance space itself. NOTES 1) Norbert Möslang, “How Does a Bicycle Light Sound?: Cracked Everyday Electronics,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004): 83; Nicolas Collins, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Rutledge, 2006). 2) We refer this not to the historical style or genre but rather the idea and practice that ?free improvisation? stands for. On the distinction between idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation, see Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1993). On radically politico-histrorical interpretations of free improvisation and noise music from various present viewpoints, see Noise and Capitalism , (eds.) Mattin & Anthony Iles (Arteleku Audiolab, 2009). 3) Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 29. 4) I borrow the term from my long-time collaborator, Choi Joonyong. See Ryu Hankil, Hong Chulki & Choi Joonyong, Inferior Sounds (Balloon and Needle, CD, 2011). (shrink)

Stages on Life's Way, the sequel to Either/Or, is an intensely poetic example of Kierkegaard's vision of the three stages, or spheres, of existence: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. With characteristic love for mystification, he presents the work as a bundle of documents fallen by chance into the hands of "Hilarius Bookbinder," who prepared them for printing. The book begins with a banquet scene patterned on Plato's Symposium. Next is a discourse by "Judge William" in praise of marriage (...) "in answer to objections." The remainder of the volume, almost two-thirds of the whole, is the diary of a young man, discovered by "Frater Taciturnus," who was deeply in love but felt compelled to break his engagement. The work closes with a letter to the reader from Taciturnus on the three "existence-spheres" represented by the three parts of the book.Stages on Life's Way not only repeats themes, characters, and pseudonymous authors of the earlier works but also goes beyond them and points to further development of central ideas in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (shrink)

Human flesh search engine can be a double-edged sword, bringing convenience on the one hand and leading to infringement of personal privacy on the other hand. This paper discusses the ethical problems brought about by the human flesh search engine, as well as possible solutions.

Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? The City of Kitakyushu, Japan has actively implemented eco-friendly policies since 1967 and recently inspired the pursuit of sustainable development around the world, especially in the Global South region. However, empirical studies on the effects of green growth policies are still lacking. This study explores the relationship between road infrastructure development and average industrial firm size with air pollution in the city through the Environmental (...) Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Non-linear Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) methods were applied on nearly 50-years’ time series data, from 1967 to 2015. The results show that the shape of the EKC of industrial growth, measured by average firm size, depends on the type of air pollution: inverted N-shaped relationships with NO2 and CO, and the U-shaped relationships with falling dust particle and Ox. Regarding infrastructure development, on the one hand, our analysis shows a positive effect of road construction on alleviating the amount of falling dust and CO concentration. On the other hand, the emissions of NO2 and Ox are shown to rise when plotted against road construction. The decline of CO emission, when plotted against both industrial growth and road development, indicates that the ruthlessness of the local government in pursuing green growth policies has been effective in this case. However, the story is not straightforward when it comes to other air pollutants, which hints at the limits of the current policies. The case of Kitakyushu illustrates the complex dynamics of the interaction among policy, industry, infrastructure, and air pollution. It can serve as an important reference point for other cities in the Global South when policies are formed, and progress is measured in the pursuit of a green economy. Finally, as an OECD SDGs pilot city and the leading Asian green-growth city, policymakers in Kitakyushu city are recommended to revise the data policy to enhance the findability and interoperability of data, as well as to invest in the application of big data. (shrink)

Can green growth policies help protect the environment while keeping the industry growing and infrastructure expanding? The City of Kitakyushu, Japan, has actively implemented eco-friendly policies since 1967 and recently inspired the pursuit of sustainable development around the world, especially in the Global South region. However, empirical studies on the effects of green growth policies are still lacking. This study explores the relationship between road infrastructure development and average industrial firm size with air pollution in the city through the Environmental (...) Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Non-linear Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) methods were applied on nearly 50-years’ time series data, from 1967 to 2015. The results show that the shape of the EKC of industrial growth, measured by average firm size, depends on the type of air pollution: inverted N-shaped relationships with NO2 and CO, and the U-shaped relationships with falling dust particle and Ox. Regarding infrastructure development, on the one hand, our analysis shows a positive effect of road construction on alleviating the amount of falling dust and CO concentration. On the other hand, the emissions of NO2 and Ox are shown to rise when plotted against road construction. The decline of CO emission, when plotted against both industrial growth and road development, indicates that the ruthlessness of the local government in pursuing green growth policies is effective in this case. However, the story is not straightforward when it comes to other air pollutants, which hint at limits in the current policies. The case of Kitakyushu illustrates the complex dynamics of the interaction among policy, industry, infrastructure, and air pollution. It can serve as an important reference point for other cities in the Global South when policies are formed, and progress is measured in the pursuit of a green economy. Finally, as an OECD SDGs pilot city and the leading Asian green-growth city, policymakers in Kitakyushu city are recommended to revise the data policy to enhance the findability and interoperability of data as well as to invest in the application of big data. (shrink)

Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a (...) rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

The whale optimization algorithm is a powerful swarm intelligence method which has been widely used in various fields such as parameter identification of solar cells and PV modules. In order to better balance the exploration and exploitation of WOA, we propose a novel modified WOA in which both the mutation strategy based on Levy flight and a local search mechanism of pattern search are introduced. On the one hand, Levy flight can make the algorithm get rid of the local optimum (...) and avoid stagnation; thus, it is able to prevent the algorithm from losing diversity and to increase the global search capability. On the other hand, pattern search, a direct search method, has not only high convergence rate but also good stability, which can boost the local optimization ability of the WOA. Therefore, the combination of these two mechanisms can greatly improve the capability of WOA to obtain the best solution. In addition, MWOA may be employed to estimate parameters in single diode model, double diode model, and PV modules and to identify unknown parameters of two different types of PV modules under diverse light irradiance and temperature conditions. The analytical results demonstrate the validity and the practicality of MWOA for estimating parameters of solar cells and PV modules. (shrink)

This paper examines the practice of informed consent in Hong Kong by drawing on structured interviews conducted with eleven physicians, three patients, and four family members primarily at a well-established public hospital in Hong Kong. The findings of this study show that the Hong Kong approach to medical decision-making lies somewhere between that of America on the one hand, and mainland China on the other. It is argued that the practice of medical decision-making in Hong Kong (...) can be modeled by a moderate familism that is directed towards achieving the best interests of the patient (1) as understood by the physician, (2) in consultation with the family, (3) under the prima facie presumption that consent is not required for disclosure of information to the family, (4) while aiming at an eventual albeit frequently partial and vague disclosure to the patient. (shrink)

This paper is to inform the recent situations of work by the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong through the lens of Covid-19. Through the interviews with seven informants — two employers and five FDWs, stories describing the changes in their working conditions, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment related to the impacts of Covid-19 were collected. They were analysed through three theoretical tools — visibility/invisibility, mobility/immobility, and work boundary. The findings show that under the Covid-19 crisis, (...) the FDWs experienced more hardships and struggles in both the home country and host country. The paradoxes of visibility/invisibility and mobility/immobility together with blurred work boundary were found in their experience of work, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment. On one hand, the employers’ power of controlling FDWs has increased, but the agency to resist by the FDWs has decreased making them to turn to more passive means of resistance which could harm the FDWs’ physical and mental health and wellbeing. (shrink)

This paper attempts to examine how the concepts of power, transparency and control are perceived in the life of ordinary Hong Kong people, and how the latter have been adapting to their perceptions and evaluations. The 2008 global financial tsunami and its aftermath will likely have a serious impact on their values. Hong Kong people’s experiences may in some ways represent those of modern men, especially those in East Asia. Democracy is premised on the ideal that life is (...) meaningful through political participation. For most Hong Kong people, this is too demanding an ideal and they instead opt for economic power at the micro-level to secure an optimal measure of control over the socio-economic aspects of their own life. But even this objective has proven extremely difficult to fulfil because of the asymmetry in power between the individual on one hand, and authoritarian regimes, big businesses, organized interest groups, etc. on the other. Very often exit is not a viable option. There may be a tendency to seek satisfaction from religious pursuits, voluntary work, or other external agencies. (shrink)

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach, brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two pronged analysis. I first use Barker’s behavior setting theory to describe the publically accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatio-temporal structure (...) with several interdependent behavior-milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting’s standing pattern of behavior. (shrink)

Healthcare systems in Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China are strikingly distinct from those in the West. Economically speaking, each of the aforementioned Eastern systems relies in great measure on private expenditures supplemented by savings accounts. Western nations, on the other hand, typically exhibit government funding and wariness about healthcare savings accounts. This essay argues that these and other differences between Pacific Rim healthcare systems and Western systems should be assessed in light of background Confucian commitments operating in the (...) former. In the Confucian context, bioethics and healthcare policy have a unique content, texture, and set of implications that often affront Western assumptions about the appropriate individual autonomy of patients and the appropriate character of social safety nets for healthcare. (shrink)

On one hand, Chinese consumers are well known for conspicuous consumption and the adoption of luxury products and named brands. On the other hand, they also have a bad reputation for buying counterfeit products. Their simultaneous preferences for two contrasting types of product present a paradox that has not been addressed in the literature. This study attempts to present an explanation of this paradox by examining the effects of traditional Chinese cultural values and consumer values on consumers’ deontological judgment of (...) pirated CDs and the amount of social benefits they perceive they gain from them. We interviewed 300 Hong Kong Chinese consumers, and found that face consciousness increased materialism and risk aversion, thereby producing a favorable deontological judgment of pirated CDs. Face consciousness also has a direct effect on the amount of social benefits perceived in pirated CDs. Both favorable deontological judgment and perceived social benefits contributed to a strong intention to buy pirated CDs. The results are discussed in a cultural perspective. (shrink)

BackgroundThe time that children and young people spend in nature and outdoor spaces has decreased significantly over the past 30 years. This was exacerbated with a further 60% decline post-COVID-19. Research demonstrating that natural environments have a positive impact on health and wellbeing has led to prescription of nature-based health interventions and green prescribing, although evidence for its use is predominantly limited to adults. Growing evidence also shows the impact of arts on all aspects of health and wellbeing. However, what (...) has received scant attention in literature is the interconnection between the two: arts and nature.AimsThis review synthesizes the literature surrounding the interconnectedness between arts and nature, and their impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people.MethodsEight major electronic databases were systematically searched, while hand-searching included 20 journals, six books, and contact with experts. The review was conducted using the Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews, PRISMA guidelines and TIDieR template. All stages were conducted independently by two researchers and the protocol was published on PROSPERO.ResultsAlthough 9,314 records were identified, only 11 records were included as most studies focused either on arts or nature, but not both. Studies were conducted in United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong, in a range of spaces such as forests, woodlands, beaches, parks, fields, gardens, and school playgrounds. The review encompasses data from 602 participants in total.DiscussionArts-in-nature offered an inclusive medium to engage all children and young people, especially those who might otherwise remain disinterested about environmental issues and disengaged with educational programs. Further, arts-in-nature provided stimuli to increase nature connectivity, understand environmental issues and explore ways to prevent environmental disasters. This led to higher environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviors, and potential decrease in eco-anxiety.ConclusionAlthough the quality of qualitative studies was high, the quality of quantitative studies was low or unclear, thus quantitative evidence is still at its infancy. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed, such as methods and activities to strengthen future interventions. Scaling-up existing interventions may lead to wider recognition and inclusion of arts-in-nature in future health guidelines, including green prescribing. (shrink)

In comparative studies, Confucian teaching and learning have multiple meanings. On the one hand, they refer to contemporary educational practices and contexts in Asian countries and regions such as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Comparative researchers contend that Confucian heritage Culture, a mixed and blended cultural tradition of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, has heavily influenced these countries and regions.1 As a result, their educational practices and contexts are different from those in Western countries.2 One (...) indication of this point is that, although teachers in Confucian teaching and learning environments conduct lectures, the learning tasks are... (shrink)

The cement industry is one of the most energy-intensive industries and among the largest CO2 emitters. Cement industry emissions in China have attracted particular attention, due to the country’s rapid growth. Yet few local Chinese cement companies have corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, and even fewer have environmentally related CSR programs. This paper studies the environmentally related CSR practices in mainland China of two companies: Lafarge, a multinational cement company, and Shui On, a Hong Kong-based construction company and developer. (...) We are interested in examining if there are differences in their environmentally related CSR practices, especially those related to emissions, in industrialized countries and Hong Kong on the one hand andin mainland China on the other—given that environmental regulations on the mainland are lax and an awareness of global climate change is largely nonexistent. Our intention is to investigate the influence of the CSR practices of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on the local Chinese cement industry, because they could be regarded as an effective vehicle to improve CSR awareness and practice in the Chinese cement industry and to help alleviate the industry’s impact on global climate change. We found that beneficial knowledge transfer from MNEs to local companies has not gone beyond improving production technology and management methods to the point of influencing CO2 emissions. Lafarge China and Shui On Cement announced a joint venture partnership during the course of our case study, and we examine whether this venture may have an impact on emission-related CSR practices in the Chinese cement industry. (shrink)

The teaching of an `imperialist' language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective makes inadequate, on the one hand, the pedalinguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages. Another category needs to be recognized, (...) to which the author gives the acronym TUE (Teaching Unbroken English). For the purposes of analysis, the author focuses on his experience teaching English in Hong Kong before and after 1997, during the end of the colonial and the beginning of the postcolonial era. (shrink)

Stephen Palmquist is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University. We invited him to answer the question "What norms or values define excellent philosophy of religion? as part of our "Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion" series. If we regard this as a philosophical (not a scientific) question, then the first step to answering it is to determine what norms or values define excellent philosophy, in general. Once that is established, we can inquire whether the (...) nature of religion brings with it any special features that make the task of doing excellent philosophy of religion unique. Unlike scientific explanations, excellent philosophical explanations must be multi-perspectival. A question that has only one right answer is not philosophical; instead, it is likely to be about facts. While we philosophers should care (deeply!) about any facts relevant to our inquiries, our peculiar way of interpreting facts means that answering a philosophical question cannot be done in one absolutely "right" way. This does not mean there are no right answers to philosophical questions; rather, there are many. But this does not make any answer equally good; for there would then be no such thing as excellent philosophy. The essentially perspectival nature of all genuinely philosophical questions means that the correctness of each purportedly "right" answer must be assessed in terms of its aptness for the perspective the questioner adopts when posing the question. A single question, such as "Does God exist?" can have many good answers, depending on whether the questioner assumes science, morality, aesthetics, or something else as the context. Each different type of inquiry has different boundary-conditions, so a good answer within each context is bound to differ from those in other contexts. Bad philosophy typically lacks depth: like a cyclops, its approach to answering questions is mono-perspectival. But if good philosophy acknowledges perspectives, what makes philosophy excellent? Good philosophy achieves excellence when it approaches a completeness whereby we begin to understand the range of relevant perspectives from which a given question can be asked, and the distinct boundary-conditions for answering it properly from each relevant perspective. Before applying this definition of excellent philosophy to the specific case at hand, we must pause to consider whether anything distinctive characterizes the range of philosophical topics and questions that typically come under the umbrella of philosophy of religion. In particular, does religion have features that make it especially difficult (or for that matter, easy) to think about philosophically, compared to other philosophical topics? Yes and no. (shrink)

Research on self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of the internalization of motivation as a crucial factor for determining the quality of motivation. Hence, intrinsic motivation is deemed as an important predictor of learning. Research on epistemic beliefs, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of knowledge, and learning with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs associated with more adaptive outcomes. While learning and achievement are multiply determined, a more comprehensive theoretical model that takes into account both motivational quality and epistemic beliefs (...) is needed. Hence, this study aims to examine the role of intrinsic and instrumental motivation alongside epistemic beliefs in predicting students’ achievement in science. Data were drawn from the PISA 2015 survey. We focused on four of the top-performing societies. Two were Eastern societies – Singapore and Hong Kong, and the other two were Western societies: Canada and Finland. We found both common and specific patterns among the four societies. Regarding the common patterns, we found that intrinsic motivation and epistemic beliefs had direct positive effects on science achievement. As for the regionally-specific findings, instrumental motivation positively predicted achievement only in Western societies, but not in Eastern societies. The interaction effect between motivation and epistemic beliefs also demonstrated different patterns across the four societies. Implications for the role of motivation and epistemic beliefs in optimizing student learning and achievement are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Unmasking the Maxim: An Ancient Genre And Why It Matters Now W. ROBERT CONNOR We live surrounded by maxims, often without even noticing them. They are easily dismissed as platitudes, banalities or harmless clichés, but even in an age of big data and number crunching we put them to work almost every day. A Silicon Valley whiz kid says, Move Fast and Break Things. Investors try to Buy (...) Low and Sell High. Investigative reporters Follow the Money. Others Follow their Bliss. The lavish host thinks, The More the Merrier, while the Modernist architect is sure that Less is More. Captains of Industry whisper to themselves, Me First; captains of sinking ships shout, Women and Children First. Be Prepared was the Boy Scouts’ marching song, while the Proud Boys Stand Down and Stand By, awaiting their marching orders. Maxims are perhaps the smallest members in a large family of speech acts, which among the Greeks included proverbs, oracles, riddles, blessings, curses and lamentations. Not all of these continue in use, but maxims have found companions—mottos, mantras, advertising tag lines and jingles, slogans, political rallying cries, hashtags, three- or four-letter acronyms and 280 character tweets from the goddess Twitter. Familiarity, however, can breed contempt, or at least inattentiveness to the full range of their influence. Sometimes what sounds at first like empty verbiage turns into action. Bruce Lee adapted an old Taoist saying when he said, Be Water, and thereby provided what was for a while a surprisingly effective strategy for protesters in Hong Kong. arion 28.3 winter 2021 6 unmasking the maxim Maxims empower, for good or ill. In the hands of bigots or ideologues, they can turn deadly. Sic Semper Tyrannis shouted John Wilkes Booth after shooting Abraham Lincoln. A manufacturer of assault rifles urged potential customers to Earn Your Man Card. How better to earn it than to obey 8chan, a web site favored by white nationalists, with its own maxim, Embrace Infamy. A devotee of the site did just that, perpetrating a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Maxims, then, should not be lightly dismissed. Since the ancient Greeks so relished maxims, they should surely be interrogated to help us better understand the power of these often underestimated speech acts. Before turning to the Greeks, however, the English word maxim needs a closer look. english “maxim” english borrowed maxim from a Latin phrase and boiled it down for everyday use. In Latin writings about logic, the expression maxima propositio, biggest proposition, denoted a statement that did not need to be proved, but could provide the basis for proof of other, lesser propositions. This phraseology goes back at least to Boethius in the sixth century of our era. It’s the equivalent of the generalizations that serve as the major premises in syllogistic logic. If this makes maxims sound like the axioms of geometry, that is historically right. The starting points of plane geometry are propositions that deserve to be accepted; even without proof that they are worthy of belief. That’s the meaning of the term axiōma. No one needs to prove that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Think about it; after a while it seems self-evident. It is worthy of assent. We might equally well call such an axiom a maxim; indeed, the earliest (1426) attested use of maxim in English is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an axiom; a self-evident proposition assumed as a premise in mathematical, or dialectical reasoning.” W. Robert Connor 7 This usage is now obsolete, but Thomas Jefferson understood the idea behind it, since he believed that there were such truths, waiting to be put to work in building a society where all people were equal and possess certain inalienable rights. He did not feel he had to prove these propositions; they were in his view self-evident. In using these ideas in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he was, in effect, transferring to politics what Euclid had done in geometry. It was a swift, strategic stroke on his part, for, since self-evident truths require no argument or explanation, they focus discussion not on... (shrink)

In this volume, phenomenologists from the West join hands with specialists from mainland China and Hong Kong to discuss the heritage of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Readers will learn of the early reception of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in China and understand how Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality of consciousness has paved the way to a novel phenomenological explication of religious experience.

The qualitative nature of co-deployed or “associated” metaphorical source domains in discourse has been extensively researched, often in terms of whether they share common conceptual roots. There are however few empirical studies on the strength of these associations and their implications. In mental healthcare activities like psychological interviews and counseling, for example, strongly associated sources may suggest unique “conceptual assemblages” that highlight underexplored (dis)similarities between clients or client groups, beyond the typical focus on isolated sources and frequencies. Our case study (...) compares source domain associations produced by two interviewee groups – one meeting the diagnostic threshold for acute stress disorder (ASD), the other not – relating their first-hand experiences of traumatic events during the 2019 Hong Kong social unrest. The machine learning method of association rule mining is used to extract and quantify the top association rules in both groups. Results show i) a shared rule suggesting a highly schematic construal of trauma that nevertheless varies in instantiating details, and ii) several distinct rules that corroborates and lends further insight into the “agentive vs. non-agentive” characteristics exhibited by ASD vs. non-ASD individuals. Implications and future directions, including potential extensions to other discourse contexts, are discussed. (shrink)

In 2000, Mark Palmer, one of the National Endowment for Democracy’s founders and Vice Chairman of Freedom House—an organization funded entirely by the U.S. Congress—founded a new government-supported group, Friends of Falun Gong. By perusing FoFG’s annual tax filings, one discovers that FoFG has contributed funds to Sounds of Hope Radio, New Tang Dynasty TV, and the Epoch Times—all Falun Gong media outlets. FoFG has also contributed to Dragon Springs and to Shen Yun, as well as to Falun Gong’s PR (...) arm. In order to contextualize the U.S. government’s funding of Falun Gong, it will also be helpful to examine a handful of additional U.S. agency activities, such as the NED’s funding of Liu Xiaobo, the Hong Kong protests, and other China-related and Tibet-related groups. (shrink)

In September 2014, students and Hong Kong citizens took to the streets demanding universal suffrage. Cell phones and video cameras in hand, amateur student filmmakers were some of the first to capture the police tear-gassing young people that brought the city to its feet. Young people were positioning themselves as storytellers and knowledge producers on the streets. How has this restructured hierarchy of knowledge production often found in university education in Hong Kong? How too has being active participants (...) and/or passive observers of the events of the Umbrella Movement translated into a pedagogy of experience in student’s daily lives, and how has this knowledge returned to the classroom? Specifically, I am interested in ways that young women who are not Cantonese first-language speakers understand their role in the movement and the kinds of knowledge they produced. Through interviews with these diverse students, and visual data from the footage they shot during the protests, we gain a rare g... (shrink)

In September 2014, students and Hong Kong citizens took to the streets demanding universal suffrage. Cell phones and video cameras in hand, amateur student filmmakers were some of the first to capture the police tear-gassing young people that brought the city to its feet. Young people were positioning themselves as storytellers and knowledge producers on the streets. How has this restructured hierarchy of knowledge production often found in university education in Hong Kong? How too has being active participants (...) and/or passive observers of the events of the Umbrella Movement translated into a pedagogy of experience in student’s daily lives, and how has this knowledge returned to the classroom? Specifically, I am interested in ways that young women who are not Cantonese first-language speakers understand their role in the movement and the kinds of knowledge they produced. Through interviews with these diverse students, and visual data from the footage they shot during the protests, we gain a rare glimpse into the multicultural world gathered beneath the umbrella of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and how a new generation of young female filmmakers are using video to share their changing perspectives on democratic reform, education, and everyday life. (shrink)

With the increasing popularity of the Internet, email marketing has become a convenient and dynamic mode of communication that enables business organizations and personal sellers to promote their products or services at a much lower cost and with a potentially more global reach. This article aims to examine the impact of new media on the encoding of persuasive messages in sales emails as a channel of direct marketing, and the extent to which the use of new media influences the overall (...) interactional or social strategy of credibility enhancement and persuasion in the context of sales promotion. A genre analysis based on a modified move scheme proposed in this study was conducted on 160 sales letters randomly selected from a database of 10,972 sales letters collected from 36 categories of recipients in Hong Kong over a six-month period. Similarities and differences in discourse structures were found across the two corpora, and discussions were made with reference to a conceptual framework titled the Lingual-Belief Interaction Model proposed by the author. The model addresses the role of text, context, and interface in sales email study on the one hand, and the interplay of belief, interaction, and language in persuasive communication on the other. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 specialist and corporate informants in the field of sales promotion communication to verify the results of analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Karen An-hwei Lee 741 Karen An-hwei Lee On New-Wave Asian Feminist Mermaids On a new wave, the old white shark fixates on everything with a slit— jade cheomsang or qipau slit on the left side, a mailbox in Hong Kong, a can opener about to spill sardines from the South China Sea, split female consciousness of folklore mermaids sashaying on (...) knives, all-or-nothing vice or virtue lost to a bedrock of lost razor blades of dialogical aqua hearts of a bronze-scaled woman folding her new legs— crossing a split— spit without the l- slit without a pThe Final Words of Madame Mao Mao, the man whom I despaired of meeting, exploded out of the revolution in a nailed crate delivered to my door. I rose to stardom, not elite by birth— call me Jiang Qing or Lan Ping. Chairman’s hands: a bouquet of mudan-hua, odorous peonies. I am, after all, Madame Mao. 742 Karen An-hwei Lee A mail carrier shakes her head. Mail-order groom? I must report you to Zhou Enlai. This is counterrevolutionary. I never ordered a husband in a Mao outfit. Is Mao a four-stroke ideogram brushed in my room while my mother wept as my father beat her with a garden spade? My real name is Mao as in Maoism. This man breathed fire in a thousand miles of revolution, one man to one woman. Please do not say my last words were propaganda— Chairman! I love you! Your comrade and your student is coming to see you!... (shrink)

This paper concerns work I have done on the China-Burma border between 2001 and 2007, with background of work with Shan both in Burma and in North Western Thailand. It will be about the place of the Shan and their Buddhism in the network of ethnic and trade relations on this border. It will raise questions about Shan Monastic traditions. On the one hand I have worked on the nature of Wa (Pirok) Theravada Buddhism and the history of the Wa (...) ‘kingdom’ of Ban Hong, and the Shan have played a central role as source of knowledge about Buddhism and of kingship, providing models of both for these Wa. A number of interesting questions arise about the Shan sources of models of Buddhist monastic organisation here; and it is quite clear that Wa ‘kingship’ was based upon the Shan notion of a Caofa or Cao Mang. The second focus (during most of 2003, mostly at Ruili/Meng Mao) has been the cross-border, inter-ethnic trade system chiefly in gemstones and jade. In this context the Shan have played a central role as what anthropologists have called ‘cultural brokers’. The Shan uniquely have been in a position to mediate between conflicting Burmese, Chinese and Thai conceptions about precious stones, making this trade network work smoothly. Since the Shan on these borders know how to ‘be Chinese’ (as Tai Noe), to ‘be Burmese’ (as Tai Mao and/or Tai Tay), and even to ‘be within the Thai cultural ambience’. (shrink)

These are the final three volumes of the seven volume work which the Hongs have been working on since 1960. The first volumes appeared in 1967 and subsequent volumes in 1976. The original intent of the editors was to produce five volumes, the first four of which would be arranged according to topics discussed in the Papirer. Under each topic relevant passages were arranged in chronological order to suggest the development of each idea in the mind of Kierkegaard. Originally the (...) fifth volume was to contain autobiographical material plus an index with crossreferences to aid English readers whose only first-hand acquaintance with the Papirer heretofore has been in the translations of Dru and Smith. But now the projected fifth volume has become actually three: Volume 5 contains chronological entries from the years 1829 to 1848, volume 6 contains entries from 1848 to 1855, and volume 7 contains the index and composite collation. Some of the entries will be recognized at once by those familiar with Kierkegaard’s own writings and with writings about him. For example, entry 6332 where he mentions how he disguised his authorship of Either Or by going to the theater every evening for ten minutes so that he might lead local gossips into believing he could not possibly be the author of Either Or because he was too busy playing the dandy and so that Regine Olsen would believe that he really was the trifler and philanderer he made himself out to be. These autobiographical volumes offer more insight into his relation with Regine because his correspondence with Emil Boesen, his confidant in the matter, is reproduced in more detail than usual and the number of times he returns to the subject of Regine right up until the year 1854 brings into focus how painful it was for him to make the break with her and yet how important it was for him to make the break. One of the best summaries of why he closed off the engagement is found in entry 6163. This passage by itself would not be as convincing as it is unless we had read already in passage after passage the complete despondency with which he often lived. Strangely enough, there is almost nothing in these autobiographical entries before the event itself to indicate that he was going to break off the relationship. (shrink)

As software piracy continues to be a threat to the growth of national and global economies, understanding why people continue to use pirated software and learning how to discourage the use of pirated software are urgent and important issues. In addition to applying the theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective to capture behavioral intention to use pirated software, this paper considers perceived risk as a salient belief influencing attitude and intention toward using pirated software. Four perceived risk components related to (...) the use of pirated software (performance, social, prosecution and psychological risks) have been identified, measured and tested. Data were collected through an online survey of 305 participants. The results indicate that perceived prosecution risk has an impact on intention to use pirated software, and perceived psychological risk is a strong predictor of attitude toward using pirated software. In addition, attitude and perceived behavior control contribute significantly to the intended use of pirated software. However, the proposed direct relationship between subjective norm and intention to use pirated software is not supported. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Attempting to determine solutions for unethical practices in the field, this research was designed to assess the effectiveness of public relations firms’ ethics statements in decreasing the incidence of malpractice. This study revealed an encouraging finding that practitioners working in firms with ethical parameters were significantly more likely to engage in ethical practices. Moreover, educating public relations practitioners about the content of ethics statement could positively influence their ethical practices. At the same time, this study’s findings suggest further questions for (...) consideration in future scholarship and in the application of ethics statements to practice within the field. (shrink)