Virtue ethics is regarded as the key in search of moral excellence among corporations. Yet, there are limited works to empirically investigate what virtuous character morally good corporations is expected to exhibit in the course of business from the perspective of customers. To fill this gap, we argue that customers are to evaluate firm’s virtuous character using Confucian cardinal virtues (ren, yi, and li) and perceived virtuousness determines customer loyalty. We test this argument using a sample of 276 Hong Kong (...) Chinese. The result suggests that a corporation not only has to offer a good value and high quality to customers but also needs to develop and acquire virtuous character in retaining customer loyalty. Firm has to embrace ren, yi, and li as the primary business goal. In fact, they are not the means but the end in themselves. The continuous pursuit of these cardinal virtues at the firm level not only establishes proper corporate values but also enables a firm to act morally in the course of business. Such kind of firm is known as junzi corporation. (shrink)

This book explains the general intellectual climate of the early Ch'ing period, and the political and cultural characteristics of the Ch'ing regime at the time. Professor Huang brings to life the book's central characters, Li Fu and the three great emperors - K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng, and Chien-lung - whom he served. Although the author's main concern is to explain the contributions of Li Fu to the Lu-Wang school of Confucianism, he also gives a clearly written account of the Lu-Wang and Ch'eng-Chu (...) schools from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. In a clear, succinct style, Huang explains the historical differences between the Ch'eng-Chu and Lu-Wang schools without sacrificing the subtleties of either. The book culminates in a discussion of the hero-emperor K'ang-hsi's appropriation of the 'Tradition of the Way' from his intellectual officials, which denied them their traditional role as moral censors and critics of the emperor's exercise of authority. (shrink)

Resumo: Paul Lengrand escreveu extensivamente sobre a filosofia da educação física, ao longo de sua vida. Esses trabalhos foram meticulosamente coletados, categorizados e sintetizados. De acordo com um estudo perceptivo, a postura vitalícia de Paul Lengrand sobre a filosofia da educação física foi significativamente influenciada por seu histórico singular, demandas sociais e interações interpessoais. Além disso, foi revelado que sua visão sobre a filosofia da educação física era uma extensão de seu profundo compromisso com a filosofia da educação, no decorrer (...) da vida, ao mesmo tempo que a aprimorava e refinava. A educação física e o esporte são conteúdos importantes da educação física, ao longo da vida. O esporte não deve ser visto como uma atividade muscular, mas deve ser combinado com a situação atual, moral e arte, e o período deve ser integrado com a educação, durante a vida. Centrada inequivocamente em torno de abraçar o exercício físico em todos os momentos da existência humana, a educação física foi considerada como uma dimensão indispensável da vida que exemplifica a durabilidade, a progressão gradual e a abrangência da filosofia da educação física, ao longo da vida. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Ricoeur and the ethics of care’ is not a standard editorial. It provides not only an explanation of the central questions and a first impression of the articles, but also a critical discussion of them by an expert in the field of care ethics, Joan Tronto. After explaining the reasons to bring Ricoeur into dialogue with the ethics of care, and analyzing how the four articles of this special issue shape this dialogue, the (...) authors give the floor to Tronto. She focuses on the central issue at stake: what may be the value of a more abstract, conceptual approach for the ethics of care as a radically practice-oriented way of thinking? She argues that the four contributions too easily frame this value in terms of Ricoeur’s relational anthropology. Instead she points out that if the ethics of care is a kind of practice, it makes sense to think of such practices as necessarily building upon one another, expanding constantly the context and relationships upon which practices are built. In the final section the authors respond to Tronto’s framing of ‘practices all the way up’ by arguing that this approach need not be at odds with one inspired by Ricoeur’s conceptual thinking. Rather the two can be seen as different movements—upwards and downwards—that both contribute constructively to the shaping of the important intermediary zone between the practices and the abstract ideals. (shrink)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

AbstractHume is perhaps the most skeptical of all the great philosophers; and so it might reasonably have been assumed that he would have doubted the existence of a standard of taste in an area of human activity, the arts, where very many people, not ordinarily considered of a skeptical turn of mind, have doubted the existence of any standard according to his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste.

Alan Turing advocated a kind of functionalism: A machine M is a thinker provided that it responds in certain ways to certain inputs. Davidson argues that Turing’s functionalism is inconsistent with a cer-tain kind of epistemic externalism, and is therefore false. In Davidson’s view, concepts consist of causal liasons of a certain kind between subject and object. Turing’s machine doesn’t have the right kinds of causal li-asons to its environment. Therefore it doesn’t have concepts. Therefore it doesn’t think. I argue (...) that this reasoning is entirely fallacious. It is true that, in some cases, a causal liason between subject and object is part of one’s concept of that object. Consequently, to grasp certain propositions, one must have certain kids of causal ties to one’s environment. But this means that we must rethink some old views on what rationality is. It does not mean, pace Davidson, that a precondition for being rational is being causally embedded in one’s environment in a certain way. If Tur-ing’s machine isn’t capable of thinking (I leave it open whether it is or is not), that has nothing to do with its lacking certain kinds of causal con-nections to the environment. The larger significance of our discussion is this: rationality consists either in one’s ability to see the bearing of purely existential propositions on one another or rationality is simply not to be understood as the ability see the bearing that propositions have on one another. (shrink)

This article provides an overview and discusses the history of research on Laestadianism in Norway over the last 60 years. Research history earlier than 1960 and doctoral theses are discussed in this issue of Approaching Religion by Roald E. Kristiansen and Bengt-Ove Andreassen. It gives an impression of the nuances in approach between different academic disciplines and also different insider perspectives on Norwegian Laestadianism. The article shows that there is a need for comparative research on Laestadianism in Norway between different (...) geographic regions and academic disciplines. (shrink)

Each of us bears a unique name given to us at birth. When people use your name, they typically refer to you. But what is the linkage that ties a name to a person and hence allows it to refer? Li's book approaches this question of reference empirically through the medium of referential intuitions. Building on the literature on philosophical and linguistic intuitions, she proposes a linguistic-competence-based account of referential intuitions. Subsequently, using a series of novel experiments, she investigates the (...) variation of referential intuitions across different cultures, as well as the developmental trajectory and the underlying causes of the observed cultural differences. What she finds is that the cultural patterns of referential intuitions are already in place around age seven, and the differences are largely attributable to the distinct perspective taking strategies favoured by easterners and westerners, rather than the moral valence of actions involved in the experimental materials. These results are taken to better support referential pluralism (in particular, the ambiguous view) than referential monism. By undertaking this fascinating research, Li's book provides new insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's referential usage of names. It will be valuable to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy of language and experimental philosophy, and in particular, to those who research into semantic intuitions and theories of reference. (shrink)

ObjectivesResearch has linked mindfulness to improved mental health, yet the mechanisms underlying this relationship are not well understood. This study explored the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies and sleep in the relationship between mindfulness and symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsAs detailed in this study’s pre-registration, a cross-sectional research design was used to investigate the impact of mindfulness on mental health and the mediating role of emotion regulation strategies and insomnia. A total of 493 (...) participants from the general population answered an online survey and were included in the final analysis. The online survey consisted of the short form of the Five-Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire, the Impact of Event Scale-revised, the Generalised Anxiety Disorder Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, the short form of the Rumination Response Scale, and the Insomnia Severity Index.ResultsStructural equation modelling revealed that mindfulness was related to lower symptoms of depression, anxiety and psychological distress, both directly and indirectly. Mindfulness was negatively associated with rumination and insomnia. As hypothesised, models revealed that the associations between mindfulness and depression, anxiety and psychological distress were significantly mediated by its negative associations with rumination and insomnia. Our findings also demonstrated that rumination was related to increased insomnia symptoms, which in turn was associated with increased mental health problems, indicating a mediated mediation. Mindfulness was also positively associated with cognitive reappraisal and negatively associated with suppression, which were, respectively, negatively and positively associated with depressive symptoms, and thus functioned as specific mediators of the association between mindfulness and depression.ConclusionOur findings suggest that rumination and insomnia operate transdiagnostically as interrelated mediators of the effects of mindfulness on mental health, whereas cognitive reappraisal and suppression function as specific mediators for depression. These insights emphasise the importance of targeting emotion regulation and sleep in mindfulness interventions for improving mental health. Limitations and implications for practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper provides a model on repairing re-establishing stakeholder relationships after a firm engages in a moral indiscretion. Depending upon their nature, indiscretions can be classified as mistakes, misconduct, or improprieties. After committing an indiscretion, firms can attempt to reestablish positive stakeholder relationships by strengthening their technical competency (for mistakes), improving their reputation (for misconduct), and enhancing their goodwill with relevant stakeholders (for improprieties). However, a firm’s cultural orientation may result in the misapplication of the stakeholder repair mechanism (competency, reputation, (...) and goodwill) with the applicable indiscretion (mistakes, misconduct, and improprieties). (shrink)

We apply a paraconsistent strategy to reasoning about fractions.

Literature provides us with otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life. It is particularly valuable because it deepens our comprehension of the mutual relations between emotional response and ethical judgment. These are the central claims of Hogan's study, which carefully examines a range of highly esteemed literary works in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological and other empirical research. In this work, he explains the value of literary study for a (...) cognitive science of emotion and outlines the emotional organization of the human mind. He explores the emotions of romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion and pity - in each case drawing on one work by Shakespeare and one or more works by writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds, such as the eleventh-century Chinese poet Li Ch'ing-Chao and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka. (shrink)