This article critically investigates the potential confrontation that exists between mixed reality in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) artworks that are, respectively, based on the concepts of phenomenology and Chinese Qi. My proposal is exemplified by the Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan’s Flow of Qi (2007), which uses ultra wide band technology that instantly transforms the data of a pair of participants’ real-time breath into the replication of calligraphy masterworks projected onto the floor in front of the participants. To explore how (...) efficiency of breath constitutes mixed reality in Flow of Qi, I draw a parallel between Qi, which is embodied as breath, and agency whereby, as discussed by Murray and Hansen, the notion of the perception-action relationship is emphasized. However, compared to agency, Qi is characterized as evoking ‘the unity of the cosmos with humanity’ (t’ien-jen ho-yi) because the participants are involved in a process wherein the masters used their brushstrokes to grasp the respiration of the cosmos. Therefore, employing the concepts of Chinese Qi draws out an anthropocosmic vision of mixed reality that links participants with the cosmos and manifests a Qi world-view through digital media. (shrink)

Having enjoyed remarkable economic success, China’s natural environment is being increasingly degraded, and with it, the quality of life. Researchers and environmentalists have responded by...

In this article, the author examines the work of the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhou Dunyi , particularly his seminal essay, "Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate" , as a key articulation of the anthropocosmic vision that underlies the traditional Chinese practice of taijiquan. Although often associated with Daoism, the art of taiji actually draws on cosmological principles widely shared by followers of all Chinese schools of thought. Through a careful reading of Zhou's essay, it becomes apparent that (...) Zhou is deeply versed in this very ancient pan-Chinese cosmic vision, giving his essay a decidedly mystical air. However, Zhou also takes pains to give his essay a distinctive Confucian flavor by stressing the necessity of human moral action in establishing proper cosmic balance. This marriage of the more mystical and practical/ moral suggests that Zhou himself may have been a practitioner of some form of taijiquan, as that are functions by combining both aspects of Chinese philosophy. Whether this suggestion is true or not, however, Zhou's "Explanation" stands as perhaps the best articulation of the "essence" of taiji found in traditional sources. (shrink)

The ideal Chinese thinker is a scholar‐official who is informed by a profound historical consciousness, well seasoned in the fine arts of poetry, lute and calligraphy, and deeply immersed in the daily routine of government. If philosophy is loosely defined as disciplined reflection on insights, Chinese philosophy is distinguished in its commitment to and observation of the human condition. It is a disciplined engaged reflection with insights derived primarily from practical living. The Chinese thinker, unlike the Greek philosopher, the Hebrew (...) prophet, the Indian guru, the Christian priest, or the Buddhist monk, is engaged in society, involved in politics, and dedicated to the spiritual transformation of the world from within. (shrink)

Weiming, as a leading spokesman for contemporary New Confucianism, has been reinterpreting the Confucian tradition in the face of the challenges of modernity. Tu takes selfhood as his starting point, emphasizing the importance of cultivating the human mind-and-heart as a deepening and broadening process to realize the anthropocosmic dao. He highlights the concept of a fiduciary community and advocates that, because of it, Confucianism remains a dynamic inclusive humanism. Tu’s mode of thinking tallies well with Wilfred C. Smith’s (...) class='Hi'>vision of religion, specifically the latter’s exposition of faith as a universal human quality and proposal of corporate critical self-consciousness. This article details the theories of both scholars, highlights their similarities, and contrasts their differences. It argues that Smith’s world theology provides a heuristic framework through which one understands how Tu has advanced his Confucian humanism from a Chinese philosophical or cultural tradition to the midst of world religions. (shrink)

In this book Gerald Vision argues for a new causal theory, one that engages provocatively with direct realism and makes no use of a now discredited subjectivism.

In Veritas, Gerald Vision defends the correspondence theory of truth -- the theory that truth has a direct relationship to reality -- against recent attacks, and critically examines its most influential alternatives. The correspondence theory, if successful, explains one way in which we are cognitively connected to the world; thus, it is claimed, truth -- while relevant to semantics, epistemology, and other studies -- also has significant metaphysical consequences. Although the correspondence theory is widely held today, Vision points (...) to an emerging orthodoxy in philosophy that claims that truth as such carries no significant weight in philosophical explanations. He devotes much of the book to a criticism of that outlook and to a less vulnerable formulation of the correspondence theory.Vision defends the correspondence theory by both presenting evidence for correspondence and examining the claims made by such alternative theories as deflationism, minimalism, and pluralism. The techniques of the argument are thoroughly analytic, but the problem confronted is broadly humanistic. The question examined -- how we, as thinking beings, are connected to and manage to cope in a world that was not designed for our comfort or convenience -- is more likely to be raised by continentalists, but is approached here with the tools of clarity and precision more highly prized in analytic philosophy. The book seeks to avoid both the obscurantism that infects much continental thought and the overly technical concerns and methodology that limit the interest of much work in analytic philosophy. It thus provides a rigorous but largely nontechnical treatment of the topic that will be of interest not only to readers familiar with philosophy but also to those with a background in literary theory and linguistics. (shrink)

The evidence of blindsight is occasionally used to argue that we can see things, and thus have perceptual belief, without the distinctive visual awareness accompanying normal sight; thereby displacing phenomenality as a component of the concept of vision. I maintain that arguments to this end typically rely on misconceptions about blindsight and almost always ignore associated visual (or visuomotor) pathologies relevant to the lessons of such cases. More specifically, I conclude, first, that the phenomena very likely do not result (...) from dissociations within a single system, but from the interaction of evolutionarily distinct, if interacting, systems; second, that a closer study of spared motor abilities indicates that verbal responses of patients result not from degraded vision but from proprioception; and, finally, above chance verbal responses, being forced guesses, are not tentative beliefs and cannot become beliefs just by training patients to have more confidence in their responses. (shrink)

In virtue of its form [‘I am here’] must be true on any occasion on which [it is] asserted, and yet the proposition it expresses on each occasion [is] contingent. Intuitively, [‘I am here now’] is deeply, and in some sense universally, true. One need only understand the meaning of [it] to know that it cannot be uttered falsely. The sentence ‘I am here’ has the peculiar property that whenever I utter it, it is bound to be true. Even if (...) I am lost and do not know where I am, I can bravely say ‘I am here’, and know that I am expressing a truth. (shrink)

In " Re-Emergence" he explores the question of conscious properties arising from brute, unthinking matter, making the case that there is no equally plausible non-emergent alternative.

Parmenides didn't mention reference as such, but if he had he would have undoubtedly agreed with the philosophers who nowadays hold what is called "the axiom of existence": that one can only refer to what exists. The sources of possible support for this view are examined and rejected. Primary support for the axiom is given by two sorts of argument; one concerning quantification, the other summarizing a standard Parmenidean puzzle. Weaknesses in both are exposed. Finally, the relations between the axiom (...) and connected claims about predication and truth are probed, and an attempt is made to determine the limits of the mutual support these claims give one another. (shrink)

Under the title of ‘the axiom of existence’, hereafter, John R. Searle has reduced to compact dictum a view to which many philosophers subscribe: ‘Whatever is referred to must exist’. In this paper I shall offer two major arguments against adopting, at least on certain assumptions. There have been a number of defenses of, among them those arguing that it is fundamental to any systematic philosophy of language or logic. With the exception of discussing some of Searle's remarks in part (...) Ill of this paper I shall not comment on any of these defenses. (shrink)

Parmenides didn't mention reference as such, but if he had he would have undoubtedly agreed with the philosophers who nowadays hold what is called "the axiom of existence": that one can only refer to what exists. The sources of possible support for this view are examined and rejected. Primary support for the axiom is given by two sorts of argument; one concerning quantification, the other summarizing a standard Parmenidean puzzle. Weaknesses in both are exposed. Finally, the relations between the axiom (...) and connected claims about predication and truth are probed, and an attempt is made to determine the limits of the mutual support these claims give one another. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that the doctrine that individuals have (nominal) essences is supported by arguments designed to show that proper names have senses. Three such arguments are extracted from recent pieces of philosophy: one from the absurdity of bare particulars, A second from the necessary conditions for identifying bearers of proper names, And a third from the ability to replace proper names in discourse with the help of sortal terms. All three arguments are rejected upon examination. The bearing this rejection (...) has for our conception of how we identify particulars through time is briefly discussed. Finally, An attempt to revive this sort of essentialism vis-A-Vis semantic categories is criticized. (shrink)

Standard physicalism is repudiated by Susan Schneider on the grounds that the science of physics at physicalism's foundation is individuated by mathematics, revealing that science is abstract rather than concrete. She seeks to remedy the situation for physics, though not for physicalism, with a panprotopsychist variant of panpyschism. Her approach is clever and well-developed, but I believe it suffers from at least two flaws. First, with few exceptions individuation is the wrong tool for the discovery of a thing's nature; second, (...) panpsychism and its proto variant have problems no less worrisome than those attributed to standard physicalism. Moreover, once developed it is questionable whether a surviving panpsychism is distinct from a less troubled emergentism. (shrink)

I INTRODUCTION - THE TOPIC EXPLAINED 1 GENERAL DIFFERENCES From its inception to the present, philosophy may be viewed as a series of struggles between ...

A broad, though not unanimous, consensus among commentators is that the later Wittgenstein subscribes to a redundancy conception of truth. I reject that interpretation. No doubt much depends on what is meant by a redundancy theory. But once even mildly plausible versions of that view are isolated a review of the relevant texts shows that the evidence for that interpretation collapses. Moreover, the redundancy interpretation is at odds with guiding prescriptions in the post‐1932 corpus. Wittgenstein doesn’t hold that truth can (...) be defined or characterized thinly, as redundancy theorists propose, but that it isn’t susceptible to any such generic treatment. (shrink)

From the popular view that the property of truth adds nothing not already inherent in its bearers it has been inferred that classical theories of truth are thereby refuted. Taking as representative a version of deflationism based on a certain way of interpreting the Tarskian schema convention T–and popularly called "disquotational"–I argue that the view is beset by fatal difficulties. These include: an unavoidable awkwardness in handling indexicals; an inability to accept anything more than a too anemic notion of a (...) truth condition, leaving it defenseless against clearly inadequate alternatives; and an incapacity to show that its characteristic biconditional can support any acceptable dependency claims (made evident by replacing the biconditional with 'because'). Finally, were there no predicate on the order of 'is true', this would not annihilate the property of being true or the current grounds for philosophical inquiries about it. This is an important clue to why deflationary approaches in general are dead ends. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 90, Issue 2, Page 402-405, June 2012.

In specifying the sensory evidence for perceptual belief, thinkers have either chosen a common perceptual idiom or have invented one of their own as a starting-point for their enquiries. It is becoming clearer that the choice harbours crucial, often disputable, assumptions. I compare two sorts of constructions, a variety of propositional ones and an objectual one, and I argue that the objectual idiom is indispensable in order to explain how a perceptual belief can arise out of what is not already (...) a belief. This has implications not only for the question of how belief is generated from perceptual evidence, but also for various other controversies. I discuss two of these implications: the character of inferences from evidence, and basic belief. (shrink)

Although a number of truth theorists have claimed that a deflationary theory of ‘is true’ needs nothing more than the uniform implication of instances of the theorem ‘the proposition that p is true if and only if p ’, reflection shows that this is inadequate. If deflationists can’t support the instances when replacing the biconditional with ‘because’, then their view is in peril. Deflationists sometimes acknowledge this by addressing, occasionally attempting to deflate, ‘because’ and ‘in virtue of’ formulas and their (...) close relatives. I examine what I take to be the most promising deflationist moves in this direction and argue that they fail. (shrink)

Has Fodor demonstrated conceptual atomism?