As a pair of important categories in traditional Chinese culture, "ming 命 (destiny or decrees)" and "tian ming 天命 (heavenly ordinances)" mainly refer to the constraints placed on human beings. Both originated from "ling 令 (decrees)," which evolved from "wang ling 王令 (royal decrees)" into "tian ling 天令 (heavenly decrees)," and then became "ming" from a throne because of the decisive role of "heavenly decrees" over a throne. "Ming" and "tian ming" have different definitions: "Ming" represented the limits Heaven placed (...) on the natural lives of human beings and was an objective force that men could not direct, but was embodied in human beings as their "destiny"; "Tian ming" reflected the moral ideals of human beings in their self-identification; It originated in man but had to be verified by Heaven, and it was therefore the true ordinance that Heaven placed on human beings. "Ming" and "tian ming" are two perspectives on the traditional relationship between Heaven and human beings, and at the same time Confucians and Daoists placed different emphasis on them. /// 摘要 "命" 与 "天命" 是传统文化中的-对重要范畴，主要指人所受到的限制。 二者都起源 "令", 由 "王令" "而" 天令又因 "天令" 对王权的决定作用从 而成为王权之 "命" 。"命" 与 "天命" 有不同规定 "命" 体现着天对人之自然 生命的限制，表现的是人所无法驾驭的客观力量，但落实于人并表现为人之 "命" ; "天命" 体现的则是人之自我确认的道德理想，其虽然出于人却又必须证之于天， 所以是天之真正的命于人者。命与天命，既体现了传统天人关系的双重视角，同时 也是儒道两家不同探索侧重的一个基本分野。. (shrink)

As a great synthesist for the School of Principles of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties, Zhu Xi’s influence over the School of Principles was demonstrated not only through his positive theoretical creation, but also through his choice and critical awareness. Zhu’s relationship with Confucianism and Buddhism is a typical case; and his activities, ranging from his research of Buddhism (the Chan School) in his early days to his farewell to the Chan School as a student of Li Dong from (...) Yanping and then to his critical awareness of the Chan School, developed in his association with Wang Yingchen, set the entire course of his relationship with Confucianism and Buddhism. It fostered his antagonistic attitude towards the Chan School, which lasted his entire life. Zhu approached the Chan School mainly as an objective social and cultural phenomenon; his discrimination between Confucianism and Buddhism was from an epistemological point of view; and his refutation of the Chan School was mainly from the point of view of language and methodology, an antagonistic attitude of how to face learning. Therefore, his opposition to the Chan School not only directly fostered an awareness of the Confucians of the Ming dynasty against Buddhism, who simply viewed the latter as an external and objective existence, but to a certain extent resulted in the disappearance of the transcendence of the School of Principles, and caused a total change in academic direction during the Ming and Qing dynasties and the formation of the Qianjia Hanxue . What is more, such an opposition to Buddhism continues to influence people’s understanding of the School of Principles. (shrink)

Both jianxing 践形 (taking on proper appearance) and jianxing 践行 (putting into practice) were concepts coined by Confucians before the Qin Dynasty. They largely referred to similar things. But because the Daxue 大学 ( Great Learning ) was listed as one of the Sishu 四书 (The Four Books) during the Song Dynasty, different explanations and trends in terms of the Great Learning resulted in taking on proper appearance and putting into practice becoming two different systems of efforts. The former formed (...) a vertical kind of representation and a complete system of practice by developing the sincerity of intentions inside and taking on proper appearance and looks outside in shendu æ Žç‹¬ (self-discipline when alone) and chengyi 诚意 (developing the sincerity of intentions), and the latter developed into a horizontal system of practice through the interdependency of zhi 知 (knowing or knowledge) and xing 行 (doing or practice). The interdependence between knowledge and practice promoted by the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi represented the vertical practice of moral understanding, while the integration of knowing and doing advocated by Wang Yangming represented using the way in developing the sincerity of intentions to adjust and transform the representation of the relationship between knowledge and practice. The ideas that were frequently stressed, such as the same effort and naturally being so, were all from developing the sincerity of intentions and taking on proper appearance, and they were all the representation of really making intentions sincere. In fact, the confusion over the integration of knowing and doing reflected the tension between two different systems and inconsistency in their thoughts. (shrink)

As a pair of important categories in traditional Chinese culture, “ ming 命 (destiny or decrees)” and “ tian ming 天命 (heavenly ordinances)” mainly refer to the constraints placed on human beings. Both originated from “ ling 令 (decrees),” which evolved from “ wang ling 王令 (royal decrees)” into “ tian ling 天令 (heavenly decrees),” and then became “ ming ” from a throne because of the decisive role of “heavenly decrees” over a throne. “ Ming ” and “ tian (...) ming ” have different definitions: “ Ming ” represented the limits Heaven placed on the natural lives of human beings and was an objective force that men could not direct, but was embodied in human beings as their “destiny”; “ Tian ming ” reflected the moral ideals of human beings in their self-identification; It originated in man but had to be verified by Heaven, and it was therefore the true ordinance that Heaven placed on human beings. “ Ming ” and “ tian ming ” are two perspectives on the traditional relationship between Heaven and human beings, and at the same time Confucians and Daoists placed different emphasis on them. (shrink)

To have enough financial literacy, an investor must be able to make intelligent investment choices, and on the other hand, the heuristic bias, the framing effect, cognitive illusions, and herd mentality are all variables that contribute to the formation of behavioral biases, also known as illogical conduct, in the decision-making process. The current research looks specifically at behavioral biases and financial literacy influence investment choices, particularly on stock market investment. For the research, a representative sample of 450 individual investors was (...) evaluated. A structured questionnaire was designed using the Likert’s scale method to elicit the research variables, and the data acquired were analyzed using the SEM method. According to the findings, there was a statistically significant link between heuristic bias and the development of behavioral bias in decision-making. Nevertheless, cognitive illusions, the herd mentality, and the framing effect all have a deleterious impact on behavioral biases. In addition, investors often adhere to heuristic biases rather than other irrational strategies when making investment judgments. Therefore, individual investors’ financial literacy level greatly influences the choices made about investments in the stock market. (shrink)

Moderate pragmatic invariantism (MPI) is a proposal to explain why our intuitions about the truth-value of knowledge claims vary with stakes and salient error-possibilities. The basic idea is that this variation is due to a variation not in the propositions expressed (as epistemic contextualists would have it) but in the propositions conversationally implicated. I will argue that MPI is mistaken: I will distinguish two kinds of implicature, namely, additive and substitutional implicatures. I will then argue, first, that the proponent of (...) MPI cannot appeal to additive implicatures because they don’t affect truth-value intuitions in the required way. Second, I will argue that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to substitutional implicatures either because, even though they may have the required effects on truth-value intuitions, they don’t feature in the relevant cases. It follows that MPI is mistaken because whether the proponent of MPI appeals to additive or substitutional implicatures, at least one of the claims that make up her view is false. Along the way, I will suggest principles about implicatures that should be relevant not only to MPI, but to pragmatic accounts of seemingly semantic intuitions in general. (shrink)

This article brings together two sets of data that are rarely discussed in concert; namely, disagreement and testimony data. I will argue that relativism yields a much more elegant account of these data than its major rival, contextualism. The basic idea will be that contextualists can account for disagreement data only by adopting principles that preclude a simple account of testimony data. I will conclude that, other things being equal, we should prefer relativism to contextualism. In making this comparative point, (...) I will also defend self-standing relativist accounts of disagreement and testimony data. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Kantian Subjectivity and Post‐Marxian Anthropological Ontology Relations to the Thought of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Foucault The Future of Philosophy Aesthetics “The Fourth Outline of Human Subjectivity” Conclusion.

This book presents twelve of the author’s selected essays on subjects related to contemporary Chinese thought and examines other significant works on the history of Chinese philosophy. By combing the basic political discourse on Confucianism, it highlights the significance of Confucian Socialism in the present day and explains the author’s reflections on the philosophy and modernization of Chinese thought. This book is a valuable resource for experts and scholars as well as for general readers who have an understanding of contemporary (...) Chinese philosophy, offering deep insights into current Chinese thought and Confucian modernization. (shrink)

This paper connects the following four topics: a class of generalized graphs whose relations do not have fixed arities called hypergraphs, a family of non-normal modal logics rejecting the aggregative axiom, an epistemic framework fighting logical omniscience, and the classical group knowledge modality of ‘someone knows’. Through neighborhood frames as their meeting point, we show that, among many completeness results obtained in this paper, the limit of a family of weakly aggregative logics is both exactly the modal logic of hypergraphs (...) and also the epistemic logic of local reasoning with veracity and positive introspection, and upon adding a single combinatorial axiom, it is also the logic of ‘someone knows’ for a fixed finite number of positively introspective agents. At the core of all these completeness results is a new canonical neighborhood model construction for monotone modal logics that is capable of dealing with all these diverse cases. We also provide an axiomatization for the logic of all non-n-colorable hypergraphs based on a filtration argument that also shows the decidability of the logics of hypergraphs we study. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of Chinese firms on the formation of cross-border alliances with partners in developed countries. We use signaling theory and the co-evolutionary perspective as bases in proposing that the signaling effects of CSR performance on cross-border alliance formation are subject to the influences of subnational, national, and cross-national institutions. By using a longitudinal data set, we find that the signaling effects of CSR performance on cross-border alliance formation emerged only after (...) a national system of CSR-related institutions had been established. Once this framework was set up, the effectiveness of CSR as a signal was subject to subnational (intra-country) and cross-national (inter-countries) institutional differences. We conclude that combining signaling theory with the co-evolutionary perspective contributes to CSR research in emerging markets. (shrink)

This book explores how one can bring about changes in the brain through meditation, both through attention-focus training and through compassion training. Recent findings in the natural sciences have confirmed that it is possible for humans to achieve these structural and functional changes through various life-style practices. It is argued that meditation enables us to influence some aspects of our biological make-up and, for example, could boost our cognitive flexibility as well as our ability to act compassionate. Such changes are (...) likely to facilitate the instilling of a number of epistemic virtues which have great bearing on our quality of life. This book offers the reader an accessible introduction to a set of neuro-enhancement methods, with a special focus on meditation techniques, and explores how such practices could contribute to make us better decision-makers and improve our moral virtues. The book is suitable for anyone looking for a text discussing the effects of neuro-enhancement from a secular ethics perspective. (shrink)

This book shows how pressing issues in bioethics – e.g. the ownership of biological material and human cognitive enhancement – successfully can be discussed with in a virtue ethics framework. This is not intended as a complete or exegetic account of virtue ethics. Rather, the aim here is to discuss how some key ideas in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, when interpreted pragmatically, can be a productive way to approach some hot issues in bioethics. In spite of being a very promising theoretical (...) perspective virtue ethics has so far been underdeveloped both in bioethics and neuroethics and most discussions have been conducted in consequentialist and/or deontological terms. ​. (shrink)

Based on the assumption that the long-term value of a venture capital satisfies the algebraic Brownian motion, we develop a continuous-time exit model of venture capital under different exit modes, namely, initial public offering and mergers and acquisitions. The employee incentive problem is analyzed jointly with the exit decision of the firm in terms of the exit timing and the exit mode. Further, the problem of capital exit is considered from two perspectives, namely, optimal venture capital and social welfare maximization, (...) and the differences between these exit decisions are compared. Our model predicts that the timing of an IPO, the purpose of which is to maximize the utility of the capitalists, lags behind the exit timing, whose purpose is to maximize social welfare. Using a numerical analysis, this paper also proves that increasing the production efficiency, lowering the interest rates, and improving risk management can make the exit decision of venture capitalists converge with that of maximizing social welfare. (shrink)

Introduction. The enimatic case of the Zhongshuo -- Part One. Assessing textual authority -- The transmission history of the Zhongshuo, seventh through eleventh centuries -- Features, problems, and puzzles in the received Zhongshuo -- Part Two. Interpreting cultural authority -- Appropriations of the Master's legacy.

Communication can be risky. Like other kinds of actions, it comes with potential costs. For instance, an utterance can be embarrassing, offensive, or downright illegal. In the face of such risks, speakers tend to act strategically and seek ‘plausible deniability’. In this paper, we propose an account of the notion of deniability at issue. On our account, deniability is an epistemic phenomenon. A speaker has deniability if she can make it epistemically irrational for her audience to reason in certain ways. (...) To avoid predictable confusion, we distinguish deniability from a practical correlate we call ‘untouchability’. Roughly, a speaker has untouchability if she can make it practically irrational for her audience to act in certain ways. These accounts shed light on the nature of strategic speech and suggest countermeasures against strategic speech. (shrink)

Business moral values are defined as the personal moral values held by individuals who are engaged in business interactions. Direct supervisors may play an important role in shaping the business moral values of their subordinates. Using 264 supervisor— subordinate dyadic data from Taiwanese organizations, the study investigated the relationships among supervisor business moral values, subordinate business moral values, subordinate organizational commitment, job performance, and attendance. The results indicated that supervisor business moral values were positively associated with subordinate business moral values, (...) and that the latter mediated the relationship between the former and subordinate outcomes. Implications for business moral values research are discussed. (shrink)

We investigate diagonal actions of Polish groups and the related intersection operator on closed subgroups of the acting group. The Borelness of the diagonal orbit equivalence relation is characterized and is shown to be connected with the Borelness of the intersection operator. We also consider relatively tame Polish groups and give a characterization of them in the class of countable products of countable abelian groups. Finally an example of a logic action is considered and its complexity in the Borel reducbility (...) hierarchy determined. (shrink)

EDITOR’S ABSTRACTThe popular Chinese portrayal of the victory of Confucianism, or in Chinese terms “dismiss the hundred schools of thought and revere only the Confucian arts,” has been challenged by some scholars in the past decades. Ding’s essay illustrates not only how it has been challenged but also how the catch phrase influences the scholarly discussion. As he indicates, recent Chinese studies that attempt to subvert the traditional theory share the same “flow.” They fail to note that the expression (...) “dismiss the hundred schools of thought and revere only the Confucian arts” has had very negative connotations since it was invoked by Yi Baisha 易白沙 to harshly denounce Confucianism for being responsible for the centuries-long Chinese autocracy. (shrink)

EDITOR’S ABSTRACTThis article argues that the early Laozi text underwent three stages: The first had section divisions on the basis of the meaning. The second stage was the formative period of the Laozi text influenced by cosmological numerology; the Silk Manuscript version A is its testimony. The third stage finalized the text through the canonization of the Classic by Emperor Jing; it is represented by the Peking University Han Bamboo Slips, Yan Zun, and Liu Xiang versions and became the received (...) edition. From the Han Bamboo Slips to the Liu Xiang version, the Laozi’s two parts and section numbering became increasingly balanced and symmetric. Ding urges scholars to pay attention to all these developments when studying the Laozi text. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, was extremely prolific in various fields of philosophy, such as metaphysics, mathematical logic and mathematical philosophy, linguistic philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and social and political philosophy, but left little legacy in aesthetics. Some scholars regretted that “If the 20th-century had seen any polymath, Russell is the one. The only branch of philosophy he did not write on is aesthetics.” Although Russell did not write a book or article specifically on aesthetics, discussions on the subject can be (...) found in his various writings, for example, the most prominent proposal of “the beauty of mathematics.” In addition, he also talked about how agnostics explain the beauty and harmony of nature from the perspective of epistemology. Views on aesthetics are scattered in Russell's writings, and no consistent views have been formed; some fragmented ideas about aesthetics are scattered in different philosophical writings. Compared with his profound contribution to other fields of philosophy, Russell did not deal with aesthetic issues systematically, nor did he attempt to answer the basic questions of aesthetics. In addition to personal qualities, there were certain constraints of the greater social environment. One of the main reasons is that in the English world of the 20th century, the analytical philosophy of language occupied the central stage, so that the space reserved for ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy was quite limited. Furthermore, aesthetics was indeed not a popular philosophical topic culturally acceptable at the time. (shrink)

It has been argued that affordances are not meaningful and are thus not useful to be applied in contexts where specifically meaningfulness of experience is at stake (e.g. clinical contexts or discussions of autonomous agency). This paper aims to reconceptualize affordances such as to make them relevant and applicable in such contexts. It starts by investigating the ‘ambiguity’ of (possibilities for) action. In both philosophy of action and affordance research, this ambiguity is typically resolved by adhering to the agents intentions (...) and concerns. I discuss some recent accounts of affordances that highlight these concerns but argue that they tend to adopt an ‘atomistic’ approach where there is no acknowledgement of how these concerns are embedded in the agents wider concerns, values, projects and commitments. An holistic approach that does acknowledge this can be found in psychological research on agents having a sense of what they’re doing. I will discuss this research in the second part of the paper and argue that agents can analogously have a sense of what is afforded. This is deemed the entry point for understanding the meaningfulness of affordances. In the final part of the paper I apply this analysis to recent attempts which seek to make sense of authentic and autonomous agency in terms of affordances. (shrink)

Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment. Recent research on affordances holds that there are differences in how people experience such possibilities for action. However, these differences have not been properly investigated. In this paper I start by briefly scrutinizing the existing literature on this issue, and then argue for two claims. First, that whether an affordance solicits action or not depends on its relevance to the agent’s concerns. Second, that the experiential character of how an affordance solicits (...) action depends on the character of the concern to which it is relevant. Concerns are conceived of as bodily forms of responsiveness, and solicitations are experienced through this responsiveness. The main aim of this paper is to make clear that an understanding of experiential differences in solicitations has to be based on a phenomenological appreciation of how one experiences one’s responsiveness to those solicitations. In the remainder of the paper I show how such a phenomenological appreciation reveals several characteristics of our responsiveness and I briefly explore three of them: valence, force and mineness. In the final section I discuss the self-referentiality of affordances in light of the current proposal, and argue that this self-referentiality is broader than is typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Orthodoxy in the contemporary debate on knowledge ascriptions holds that the truth‐value of knowledge ascriptions is purely a matter of truth‐relevant factors. One familiar challenge to orthodoxy comes from intuitive practical factor effects . But practical factor effects turn out to be hard to confirm in experimental studies, and where they have been confirmed, they may seem easy to explain away. We suggest a novel experimental paradigm to show that practical factor effects exist. It trades on the idea that people (...) retract knowledge attributions when practical factors shift. We also explain why the resulting data raise a serious challenge to orthodoxy. (shrink)

The article provides a conceptualization of self(-illness) ambiguity and investigates to what extent self(-illness) ambiguity is ‘special’. First, we draw on empirical findings to argue that self-ambiguity is a ubiquitous phenomenon. We suggest that these findings are best explained by a multidimensional account, according to which selves consist of various dimensions that mutually affect each other. On such an account, any change to any particular self-aspect may change other self-aspects and thereby alter the overall structural pattern of self-aspects, potentially leading (...) to self-ambiguity. Second, we propose that self-ambiguity comes in degrees and should be understood as a spectrum (as opposed to there being qualitative differences among instances of self-ambiguity). Third, we argue that complexity is the most useful dimension to organize cases of self-ambiguity, with mundane instances of self-ambiguity on the one end and self-illness ambiguity on the other end of the spectrum. Fourth, we address the promises and perils of narrativity with regard to self-ambiguity. Finally, we link our deflationary account of self(-illness) ambiguity to pattern theories of self. (shrink)