This article examines how Muslim religious scholars find space within political and legal discourses to deal with thorny issues such as rebellion. It takes as its case study a treatise by Ibn al-Jawzī regarding the permissibility to curse the second Umayyad caliph Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya. Although written to address the cursing of Yazīd, the treatise also speaks to questions regarding rulership and rebellion. Overall, the article argues that Ibn al-Jawzī adopted a juristically prudent approach to rebellion against an unjust and (...) sinful ruler which synthesizes various elements of the Sunni caliphate discourse and the Islamic legal discourse on the treatment of rebels. This allowed him to shift the debate from one on the permissibility of rebellion to one on the question of legitimacy, thus enabling him to justify actions against Yazīd without overtly condoning the act of rebellion. (shrink)

Physicians play a substantial role in facilitating communication regarding life-supporting treatment decision-making including do-not-resuscitate in the intensive care units. Physician-related fact...

In order to usurp the Party, seize power and restore capitalism, the Wang-Chang-Chiang-Yao anti-Party clique has turned out counterrevolutionary opinions in the ideological realm. They have tried in every way to distort and revise history and have fabricated the "struggle between the Confucianists and the Legalists" in history. They have confounded different social contradictions and have replaced the class struggle with the "struggle between the Confucianists and the Legalists" and the antagonism within the landlord class with the "line struggle." To (...) them, Legalists were always "progressive" and "innovative" while Confucianists always "represented the forces of restoration." They have tried their best to glorify emperors, kings, generals and ministers in history, to praise Legalists as "saviors," to cover up the Legalists' nature as an exploiting class, to call for metaphysics and the idealist viewpoint of history, and to turn out revisionist fallacies. Because important changes took place in the Confucian and Legalist schools during the periods of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties, the "Gang of Four" and the writers in its service have showed a great interest in histories of the dynasties and have published a series of articles on the so-called "struggle between the Confucianists and the Legalists." In the current struggle against the "Gang of Four," it is of great practical significance to review the changes in the Confucian and Legalist schools and their roles and class nature during the Han dynasties, to criticize and expose the criminal clique's counterrevolutionary political intrigues and plots, and to clarify the historical facts confused by the "Gang of Four.". (shrink)

Some of the authors of the essays on Chinese philosophers prefer the pin yin system of romanization for Chinese names and words, while others prefer the Wade‐Giles system. Given that both systems are in wide use today, important names and words are given in both their pin yin and Wade‐Giles formulations. The author's preference is printed first, followed by the alternative romanization within brackets.

Aristotle defines growing as a process in which an individual living being persists as it accumulates new matter. This definition raises the question of what enables an individual to persist as its material composition continuously changes over time. This paper provides a systematic account of Pietro Pomponazzi’s answer to this question. In his De nutritione et augmentatione, Pomponazzi argues that individuals persist in virtue of their forms. Forms are individuated in part by their material, causal, and temporal origins, which commits (...) Pomponazzi to the view that individuals necessarily have the material, causal, and temporal origins they do. I provide an account of why Pomponazzi held this view. While his opponents remain unnamed, I argue that his arguments for this view are best read as addressing, among others, Paul of Venice and Gregory of Rimini. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper studies Antoine Le Grand's account of organic identity over time in human bodies. In response to Aristotelian critics who argued that the Cartesian rejection of the Aristotelian ontology of matter and form had put in jeopardy the diachronic identity of material substances in general and of living bodies in particular, Le Grand argued that the identity over time of the human body could be accounted for without the traditional notions of matter and form. The paper shows how he (...) drew on both the Cartesian metaphysics of mind and body and contemporary views on human anatomy and organic generation to develop a unique account of bodily identity over time in human animals. (shrink)

Robert Desgabets has been described as a ‘radical Cartesian’. Drawing conclusions from Descartes's thought that Descartes himself had failed to see, Desgabets treated Cartesianism as a work in progress that awaited further enrichment and development. But, as scholars have recognized, Desgabets's writings also betray a significant indebtedness to scholastic tradition. In presenting his philosophy, Desgabets often appeals to traditional notions, breathing new life into scholastic concepts and ideas. This paper investigates what we are to make of the scholastic vestiges in (...) Desgabets's thought. It argues that Desgabets's relation to scholastic tradition is more complicated than Desgabets himself wants us to believe, or than his modern commentators have recognized. Scholastic echoes in Desgabets cannot be taken at face value. Sometimes, they reflect basic points of agreement with scholastic theories. But just as often, scholastic formulae in Desgabets are vehicles for expressing philosophical views.. (shrink)

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary and probabilistic theories of grammaticality. These judgements are gradient in nature, and so cannot be directly accommodated in a binary formal grammar. However, it is also not possible to simply reduce (...) acceptability to probability. The acceptability of a sentence is not the same as the likelihood of its occurrence, which is, in part, determined by factors like sentence length and lexical frequency. In this paper, we present the results of a set of large-scale experiments using crowd-sourced acceptability judgments that demonstrate gradience to be a pervasive feature in acceptability judgments. We then show how one can predict acceptability judgments on the basis of probability by augmenting probabilistic language models with an acceptability measure. This is a function that normalizes probability values to eliminate the confounding factors of length and lexical frequency. We describe a sequence of modeling experiments with unsupervised language models drawn from state-of-the-art machine learning methods in natural language processing. Several of these models achieve very encouraging levels of accuracy in the acceptability prediction task, as measured by the correlation between the acceptability measure scores and mean human acceptability values. We consider the relevance of these results to the debate on the nature of grammatical competence, and we argue that they support the view that linguistic knowledge can be intrinsically probabilistic. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper identifies two central paradoxes threatening the notion of amor fati [love of fate]: it requires us to love a potentially repellent object (as fate entails significant negativity for us) and this, in the knowledge that our love will not modify our fate. Thus such love may seem impossible or pointless. I analyse the distinction between two different sorts of love (eros and agape) and the type of valuation they involve (in the first case, the object is loved (...) because we value it; in the second, we value the object because we love it). I use this as a lens to interpret Nietzsche's cryptic pronouncements on amor fati and show that while an erotic reading is, up to a point, plausible, an agapic interpretation is preferable both for its own sake and because it allows for a resolution of the paradoxes initially identified. In doing so, I clarify the relation of amor fati to the eternal return on the one hand, and to Nietzsche's autobiographical remarks about suffering on the other. Finally, I examine a set of objections pertaining both to the sustainability and limits of amor fati, and to its status as an ideal. (shrink)

In this book Han Thomas Adriaenssen offers the first comparative exploration of the sceptical reception of representationalism in medieval and early modern philosophy. Descartes is traditionally credited with inaugurating a new kind of scepticism by saying that the direct objects of perception are images in the mind, not external objects, but Adriaenssen shows that as early as the thirteenth century, critics had already found similar problems in Aquinas's theory of representation. He charts the attempts of philosophers in both periods to (...) grapple with these problems, and shows how in order to address the challenges of scepticism and representation, modern philosophers in the wake of Descartes often breathed new life into old ideas, remoulding them in ways that we are just beginning to understand. His book will be valuable for historians interested in the medieval background to early modern thought, and to medievalists looking at continuity with the early modern period. -/- . (shrink)

Plakias has recently argued that there is nothing wrong with publishing defences of philosophical claims which we don't believe and also nothing wrong with concealing our lack of belief, because an author's lack of belief is irrelevant to the merit of a published work. Fleisher has refined this account by limiting the permissibility of publishing without belief to what he calls ‘advocacy role cases’. I argue that such lack of belief is irrelevant only if it is the result of an (...) inexplicable incredulity or the result of a metaphilosophical or epistemic stance that is unrelated to the specific claim. However, in many real-life cases, including Fleisher's advocacy role cases, our doubts regarding the claims we defend arise from reasons that have something to do with the insufficiency of the philosophical evidence supporting the claim, and publishing an unconditional defence of a claim without revealing our doubts is impermissible as it involves withholding philosophically relevant reasons. Plakias has also argued that discouraging philosophers from publishing claims they don't believe would be unfair to junior philosophers with unsettled views. I propose that we should change our academic practices that pressure philosophers to publish articles that pretend to be defences of settled views. (shrink)

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

activity” has been considered to play a major role in the short-term maintenance of memories. Many studies since then have provided support for this view and greatly advanced our knowledge of the effects of stimulus type and modality on delay activity and its temporal dynamics. In humans, working memory has also been a subject of intense investigation using scalp and intracranial electroencephalography as well as magnetoencephalography, which provide estimates of local population activity. The published findings include reports of systematic changes (...) in signal amplitude during working memory in the theta, alpha, beta. (shrink)

In this paper, findings from research in neuroscience of morality will be reviewed to consider the purposes of moral education. Particularly, I will focus on two main themes in neuroscience, novel neuroimaging and experimental investigations, and Bayesian learning mechanism. First, I will examine how neuroimaging and experimental studies contributed to our understanding of psychological mechanisms associated with moral functioning while addressing methodological concerns. Second, Bayesian learning mechanism will be introduced to acquire insights about how moral learning occurs in human brains. (...) Based on the reviewed neuroscientific research on morality, I will examine how evidence can support the model of moral education proposed by virtue ethics, Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular. Particularly, two main aims of virtue ethics-based moral education, the habituation of virtues and the cultivation of phronesis, will be discussed as the important purposes of moral education based on neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical and scientific achievements of Sir Kenelm Digby, a successful English diplomat, privateer and natural philosopher of the mid-1600s. Not widely remembered today, Digby is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of early modern philosophers. Among scholars, he is known for his attempt to reconcile what perhaps seem to be irreconcilable philosophical frameworks: Aristotelianism and early modern mechanism. This contributed volume offers the first full-length treatment of Digby’s work and of the unique position (...) he occupied in early modern intellectual history. It explores key aspects of Digby’s metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical method, and offers a new appraisal of his contributions to early modern natural philosophy and mathematics. A dozen contributors offer their expert insight into such topics as Body, quantity, and measures in Digby's natural philosophy Ecumenism and common notions in Digby Aristotelianism and accidents in Digby's philosophy Digby on body and soul Digby on method and experiments This book volume will be of benefit to a broad audience of scholars, educators, and students of the history of early modern science and philosophy. (shrink)

The present study aimed to develop effective moral educational interventions based on social psychology by using stories of moral exemplars. We tested whether motivation to engage in voluntary service as a form of moral behavior was better promoted by attainable and relevant exemplars or by unattainable and irrelevant exemplars. First, experiment 1, conducted in a lab, showed that stories of attainable exemplars more effectively promoted voluntary service activity engagement among undergraduate students compared with stories of unattainable exemplars and non-moral stories. (...) Second, experiment 2, a middle school classroom-level experiment with a quasi-experimental design, demonstrated that peer exemplars, who are perceived to be attainable and relevant to students, better promoted service engagement compared with historic figures in moral education classes. (shrink)

Perhaps the year 1996 will be entered in history as an important year in Sino-American relations.

In this paper, I examined whether evidence from the neuroscience of morality supports the standard models of phronesis, i.e., Jubilee and Aretai Centre Models. The standard models explain phronesis as a multifaceted construct based on interaction and coordination among functional components. I reviewed recent neuroscience studies focusing on brain networks associated with morality and their connectivity to examine the validity of the models. Simultaneously, I discussed whether the evidence helps the models address challenges, particularly those from the phronesis eliminativism. Neuroscientific (...) evidence supported the importance of brain networks, i.e., the default mode, salience, and central executive functioning networks, in moral functioning in general. The findings favorably supported the multifaceted and integrative nature of phronesis proposed by the standard models. Finally, I considered how the two models could explain the mechanisms of phronesis more integratively based on neuroscientific findings. At the end of this paper, with the evidence, I proposed several practical ideas to promote the cultivation of phronesis, e.g., the consideration of coordination among components for moral functioning and the use of moral exemplars. (shrink)

The notion that we should educate the whole child is a familiar one. This paper begins with a cautionary liberal view of the notion and considers the extent to which this caution is justified in education. It does so by extending the possible meaning of ‘wholeness’ as this applies to the child to include not only the senses of integration and coherence but also continuity and adequacy as well. With reference to four positions on how children should be treated and (...) educated, these additional senses are advanced in order to show that ‘educating the whole child’ can indeed be justified. (shrink)

本书重点讲述老子的“为学日益,为道日损”,让老子的“道中之道”回到我们的日常生活中,并由此及彼,触类旁通。.

本书包括:中国古代的和文化意识探源、铜石并用时代与夏商周三代人文之和、人和与天和、中国古代的和文化观念的意识形态结构等五章内容。.

I explored the association between components constituting the basis for moral and optimal human functioning, i.e., moral reasoning, moral identity, empathy, and purpose, via network analysis. I employed factor scores instead of composite scores that most previous studies used for better accuracy in score estimation in this study. Then, I estimated the network structure among collected variables and centrality indicators. For additional information, the structure and indicators were compared between two groups, participants who engaged in civic activities highly versus lowly. (...) The results demonstrated significant intra- and inter-scale associations in the network. The network structure was invariant across the two groups. Despite the network invariance, I found that the global connectivity between and centrality indicators of examined factors were higher among the high civic engagement group in general. I discussed the implications of the findings in research on moral functioning based on moral psychology and virtue ethics. (shrink)

Actually, I am not a person who likes to badmouth the United States. I like the Americans' frankness, I like Hemingway's works, and I prefer flying in a Boeing to flying in a Tupolev.

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as (...) well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. (shrink)

This study compares the neural substrate of moral decision making processes between Korean and American participants. By comparison with Americans, Korean participants showed increased activity in the right putamen associated with socio-intuitive processes and right superior frontal gyrus associated with cognitive control processes under a moral-personal condition, and in the right postcentral sulcus associated with mental calculation in familiar contexts under a moral-impersonal condition. On the other hand, American participants showed a significantly higher degree of activity in the bilateral anterior (...) cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with conflict resolution under the moral-personal condition, and in the right medial frontal gyrus (MFG) associated with simple cognitive branching in non-familiar contexts under the moral-impersonal condition when a more lenient threshold was applied, than Korean participants. These findings support the ideas of the interactions between the cultural background, education, and brain development, proposed in the field of cultural psychology and educational psychology. The study introduces educational implications relevant to moral psychologists and educators. (shrink)

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the cortical midline structures (CMS), which have been regarded to be associated with selfhood, and moral decision making processes at the neural level. Traditional moral psychological studies have suggested the role of moral self as the moderator of moral cognition, so activity of moral self would present at the neural level. The present study examined the interaction between the CMS and other moral-related regions by conducting psycho-physiological interaction analysis of functional images (...) acquired while 16 subjects were solving moral dilemmas. Furthermore, we performed Granger causality analysis to demonstrate the direction of influences between activities in the regions in moral decision-making. We first demonstrate there are significant positive interactions between two central CMS seed regions—i.e., the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)—and brain regions associated with moral functioning including the cerebellum, brainstem, midbrain, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula (AI); on the other hand, the posterior insula (PI) showed significant negative interaction with the seed regions. Second, several significant Granger causality was found from CMS to insula regions particularly under the moral-personal condition. Furthermore, significant dominant influence from the AI to PI was reported. Moral psychological implications of these findings are discussed. The present study demonstrated the significant interaction and influence between the CMS and morality-related regions while subject were solving moral dilemmas. Given that, activity in the CMS is significantly involved in human moral functioning. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine why moral exemplars are useful and even necessary in moral education despite several critiques from researchers and educators. To support my point, I review recent AI research demonstrating that exemplar-based learning is superior to rule-based learning in model performance in training neural networks, such as large language models. I particularly focus on why education aiming at promoting the development of multifaceted moral functioning can be done effectively by using exemplars, which is similar to exemplar-based learning (...) in AI model training. Furthermore, I discuss the potential limitations and issues related to exemplar-applied moral education with findings from recent studies in AI research raising concerns about model biases and toxic outcomes. I attempt to propose ways to address the concerns regarding employing moral exemplars as well. As remedies, I suggest that autonomy-supporting deliberative and reflective learning processes should be utilized. Furthermore, based on the discussion, I examine how macroscopic socio-cultural aspects influence the effectiveness of exemplar-applied moral education. Suggestions for moral educators and future directions for research in moral education are briefly discussed. (shrink)

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault’s work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental. Given Foucault’s constant focus on the (Kantian) question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be (...) understood as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism (a de-historicized, subject-centered perspective exemplified for Foucault by Husserlian phenomenology) or of materialism (which would amount to interpreting these conditions as ideological and thus as the effect of economic determination by the infrastructure). The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault’s work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided (such as the e;piste;mè, the historical a priori, the regimes of truth, the games of truth, and problematizations) manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the “anthropological sleep”—various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault’s work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them. (shrink)

When it comes to Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics, even sympathetic admirers are cowed into submission by the many criticisms of influential authors in that field. They say something to the effect that Wittgenstein does not know enough about or have enough respect for mathematics, to take him as a serious philosopher of mathematics. They claim to catch Wittgenstein pooh-poohing the modern set-theoretic extensional conception of a real number. This article, however, will show that Wittgenstein's criticism is well grounded. A real (...) number, as an 'extension', is a homeless fiction; 'homeless' in that it neither is supported by anything nor supports anything. The picture of a real number as an 'extension' is not supported by actual practice in calculus; calculus has nothing to do with 'extensions'. The extensional, set-theoretic conception of a real number does not give a foundation for real analysis, either. The so-called complete theory of real numbers, which is essentially an extensional approach, does not define (in any sense of the word) the set of real numbers so as to justify their completeness, despite the common belief to the contrary. The only correct foundation of real analysis consists in its being 'existential axiomatics'. And in real analysis, as existential axiomatics, a point on the real line need not be an 'extension'. (shrink)