In this article Quine's program for reducing ontology to the semantic level is compared to Aquinas' metaphysical ontology. Some internal inconsistencies of Quine's quantificational account of existence are discussed. Aquinas' account of existence is explicated in response to Quine' mischaracterization of Scholastic ontology. The general nature of an amended logical account of existence incorporating Aquinas' ontological categories is indicated. Finally, recent attempts to harmonize Thomism and analytic philosophy are criticized for failing to note that the quantificational account of existence is (...) motivated by analytic philosophy's rejection of metaphysical ontology. Nothing short of a logical account of existence within the broader framework of the philosophy of being can legitimate the efforts of analytical Thomists. (shrink)

This article identifies and formalizes the logical features of analogous terms that justify their use in deduction. After a survey of doctrines in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Cajetan, the criteria of “analogy of proper proportionality” are symbolized in first-order predicate logic. A common genus justifies use of a common term, but does not provide the inferential link required for deduction. Rather, the respective differentiae foster this link through their identical proportion. A natural-language argument by analogy is formalized so as to exhibit (...) these criteria, thereby showing the validity of analogical deduction. (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 research investigates 266 business students' panel data across 4 time periods and tests a theoretical model involving intrinsic religiosity, the love of money, Machiavellianism, and propensity to engage in unethical behaviors. There was a short ethics intervention between Times 3 and 4. We identified good apples and bad apples using the PUB measure collected at Time 4. From Time 3 to Time 4, good apples became more ethical, whereas bad apples became less ethical after the ethics intervention. Moreover, for (...) the whole sample, intrinsic religiosity deterred unethical intentions not only directly but also indirectly through the absence of Machiavellianism. Before the ethics intervention, intrinsic religiosity curbed unethical intention directly for good apples but indirectly for bad apples. After the intervention, only the indirect effect was significant for bad apples. Intrinsic religiosity offers us hope to open the hearts of the lost sheep and bring them home. Research results were discussed in light of this study's theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions; Judeo-Christian ethics and values; challenging roles of educators and executives in educating Gen-Yers; creating a sea change of the ethical social norm in schools, organizations, and society, or ethical community building, and promoting ethical behavior; and future directions for research. (shrink)

Adults apply ownership not only to objects but also to ideas. But do people come to apply principles of ownership to ideas because of being taught about intellectual property and copyrights? Here, we investigate whether children apply rules from physical property ownership to ideas. Studies 1a and 1b show that children (6–8 years old) determine ownership of both objects and ideas based on who first establishes possession of the object or idea. Study 2 shows that children use another principle of (...) object ownership, control of permission—an ability to restrict others’ access to the entity in question—to determine idea ownership. In Study 3, we replicate these findings with different idea types. In Study 4, we determine that children will not apply ownership to every entity, demonstrating that they do not apply ownership to a common word. Taken together, these results suggest that, like adults, children as young as 6 years old apply rules from ownership not only to objects but to ideas as well. (shrink)

From 1979 to 1999, a heated dispute over the science or pseudoscience of extraordinary power or extrasensory perception took place in China. During these two decades, many so-called “grandmasters” of ESP and Qigong emerged, and millions of people across the country studied with them; this was known as “Qigong Fever” or “ESP Fever.” The supporters of ESP argued that ESP existed, people could cultivate ESP through specific Qigong training, and ESP was a science; whereas the opponents of ESP denied all (...) of these. Both sides of the dispute had many supporters. With the onset of Qigong Fever in China, some Qigong and ESP masters developed their Qigong organizations into Chinese-style religions. Qigong Fever ended when the religions were banned by the Chinese government. The rise of Qigong Fever demonstrated that basic questions about the boundaries between science and pseudoscience were not easy to answer. Different theoretical and practical consequences resulted from different answers to these questions. (shrink)

This essay introduces the philosophy of harmony in Classical Confucianism. In the first part of the essay the author summarizes the concept of harmony as it was developed in various Confucian classics. In the second part, the author offers an account of the Confucian program of harmony, ranging from internal harmony in the person, to harmony in the family, the state, the international world, and finally to harmony in the entire universe.

The existing literature provides conflicting results on the association between firm performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. This paper empirically examines the effect of firm performance on CSR disclosure in terms of disclosure frequency and quality among Chinese listed firms and the possible mediating effect of corporate ownership on the relationship between firm performance and CSR disclosure. Our findings show that better-performing firms are more likely than worse-performing ones to disclose CSR information and to produce higher quality CSR reports. (...) In addition, the link between firm performance and CSR disclosure is found to be weaker among state-owned enterprises compared with non-state-owned ones. (shrink)

The existing literature provides conflicting results on the association between firm performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. This paper empirically examines the effect of firm performance on CSR disclosure in terms of disclosure frequency and quality among Chinese listed firms and the possible mediating effect of corporate ownership on the relationship between firm performance and CSR disclosure. Our findings show that better‐performing firms are more likely than worse‐performing ones to disclose CSR information and to produce higher quality CSR reports. (...) In addition, the link between firm performance and CSR disclosure is found to be weaker among state‐owned enterprises compared with non‐state‐owned ones. (shrink)

In this study, we develop a new theoretical framework of Coping Intelligence which examines relationships between coping strategies and organizational commitment among boundary spanning employees. We collected data from 452 boundary spanning salespeople using multiple sources. Results demonstrate that a formative model of Coping Intelligence is superior to a reflective model and that problem-focused coping contributes to CI which, in turn, is related to affective and normative commitment. Further, our more parsimonious formative model illustrates that positive problem-focused coping and negative (...) emotion-focused coping contribute to both affective and normative commitment. After controlling for gender and salespeople’s commission in separate analyses, results remain significant. We provide additional insights: Females are likely to use emotion-focused coping than males, but gender is not related to organizational commitment. Salespeople’s commission is positively related to both affective and normative commitment but unrelated to coping strategies. We shed new lights on boundary spanning employees’ Coping Intelligence and organizational commitment and offer theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to coping strategies and business ethics. (shrink)

It was shown that finite P-recovery holds for partial meet package contraction in Furhmann and Hansson (1994). However, it is not known if recovery holds for partial meet package contraction in the infinite case. In this paper, I show that recovery does not hold for partial meet package contraction in the infinite case.

Misbehaviour and malpractices of Chinese journalists in recent years have brought media corruption under the spotlight. The lack of professionalism and scarcity of fully established ethics in media organisations have made the case worse. However, while Chinese media and academics concentrate narrowly on paid-for news or gag fee by prompting the enforcement of disciplinary restraints and ‘thought education’, this hot issue has been largely ignored by western scholars and has only been occasionally reported by some western media. Based mainly on (...) prominent cases and document studies, this article classifies three major types of media corruption in the Chinese context: (1) individual red-envelope taking, (2) institutional profit seeking and (3) personal businesses benefiting from the identity of a reporter. It then explores two major endogenous causes of media corruption: media’s unique role in China’s political power structure and their monopoly in information collection and delivery. Two current countermeasures undertaken against this phenomenon in China are finally analysed. (shrink)

The renormalization group has been characterized as merely a coarse-graining procedure that does not illuminate the microscopic content of quantum field theory but merely gets us from that content, as given by axiomatic QFT, to macroscopic predictions. I argue that in the constructive field theory tradition, RG techniques do illuminate the microscopic dynamics of a QFT, which are not automatically given by axiomatic QFT. RG techniques in constructive field theory are also rigorous, so one cannot object to their foundational import (...) on grounds of lack of rigor. (shrink)

This article offers a study of the early formation and development of the ideal of harmony in ancient Chinese philosophy and ancient Greek philosophy. It shows that, unlike the Pythagorean notion of harmony, which is primarily based on a linear progressive model with a pre-set order, the ancient Chinese concept of harmony is best understood as a comprehensive process of harmonization. It encompasses spatial as well as temporal dimensions, metaphysical as well as moral and aesthetical dimensions. It is a fundamentally (...) open notion in the sense that it does not aim to conform to any pre-set order. This broader, richer, and more liberal understanding of harmony has had a profound influence on Chinese culture as whole in its long history. (shrink)

Since it was first published in Chinese in 1981, The Path of Beauty has been read widely and translated into several languages, becoming a classic in the study of Chinese aesthetics. The author, a noted philosopher and aesthetician, draws on examples of sculpture, painting, calligraphy, and poetry, among other sources, from throughout China's history to build a cogent and engaging argument concerning the nature of Chinese artistic values. While providing an historical overview of Chinese art from antiquity to modern times, (...) he examines as well the evolution of the sociological, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual underpinnings of Chinese culture. (shrink)

In Beck, focus intervention is used as an argument for reducing Hamblin’s semantics for questions to Rooth’s focus semantics. Drawing on novel empirical evidence from Mandarin and English, we argue that this reduction is unwarranted. Maintaining both Hamblin’s original semantics and Rooth’s focus semantics not only allows for a more adequate account for focus intervention in questions, but also correctly predicts that focus intervention is a very general phenomenon caused by interaction of alternatives in different dimensions.

Text-based plagiarism, or textual copying, typically in the form of replicating or patchwriting sentences in a row from sources, seems to be an issue of growing concern among scientific journal editors. Editors have emphasized that senior authors (typically supervisors of science students) should take the responsibility for educating novices against text-based plagiarism. To address a research gap in the literature as to how scientist supervisors perceive the issue of textual copying and what they do in educating their students, this paper (...) reports an interview study with 14 supervisors at a research-oriented Chinese university. The study throws light on the potentiality of senior authors mentoring novices in English as an Additional Language (EAL) contexts and has implications for the efforts that can be made in the wider scientific community to support scientists in writing against text-based plagiarism. (shrink)

In this paper, the single-machine scheduling problem is studied by simultaneously considering due-date assignment and group technology. The objective is to determine the optimal sequence of groups and jobs within groups and optimal due-date assignment to minimize the weighted sum of the absolute value in lateness and due-date assignment cost, where the weights are position dependent. For the common due-date assignment, slack due-date assignment, and different due-date assignment, an O n log n time algorithm is proposed, respectively, to solve the (...) problem, where n is the number of jobs. (shrink)

This essay explores a seeming mystery in the philosophy of Xunzi (荀子310-238 BCE), namely how goodness could have emerged in a world of people with only a bad human nature. I will examine existing interpretations and present a new reading of Xunzi. My purpose is to reconstruct a coherent view in Xunzi‟s philosophy as presented in the book of the Xunzi rather than defend the truth of his claims regarding human history.

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysemes and homophones either as direct competitors to pictures, or as indirect-competitors to pictures. Polysemes elicited equal numbers of intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions whether (...) primed as direct competitors or as indirect-competitors. This contrasted with the finding that homophones elicited more intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions when primed as direct competitors than when primed as indirect-competitors. These results suggest that polysemes, unlike homophones, are stored and retrieved as unified lexical representations. (shrink)

One challenge to creating realistic cognitive models of memory is the inability to account for the vast common–sense knowledge of human participants. Large computational knowledge bases such as WordNet and DBpedia may offer a solution to this problem but may pose other challenges. This paper explores some of these difficulties through a semantic network spreading activation model of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory task. In three experiments, we show that these knowledge bases only capture a subset of human associations, while irrelevant (...) information introduces noise and makes efficient modeling difficult. We conclude that the contents of these knowledge bases must be augmented and, more important, that the algorithms must be refined and optimized, before large knowledge bases can be widely used for cognitive modeling. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 81-107.