This article examines the operation of “skilled feelings” in metaphors for the heart-mind (xin 心) as ruler of the body. It focuses on three Chinese philosophical texts in contexts outside of the “Confucian” texts that have dominated the emerging field of comparative virtue ethics—the Zhuangzi 莊子, Sunzi Bingfa 孫子兵法 (Sunzi’s Art of War), and Huangdi Neijing 黃帝內經 (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine)—and briefly contrasts the Chinese accounts to influential Greek metaphors of the mind as ruler of the body (...) and passions. (shrink)

Knowing Words will be welcomed by sinologists, classicists, and scholars of comparative philosophy and literature.

This paper considers the relation between body and mind as described in the Guodian corpus, especially the Xing zi ming chu 性自命出, with particular interest in problems of mind-body dualism and holism. It argues that the Xing zi ming chu presents a weak mind-body dualism, in contrast to such texts as Wuxing 五行 and Ziyi 緇衣.

: The semantic fields and root metaphors of "fate" in Classical Greece and pre-Buddhist China are surveyed here. The Chinese material focuses on the Warring States, the Han, and the reinvention of the earlier lexicon in contemporary Chinese terms for such concepts as risk, randomness, and (statistical) chance. The Greek study focuses on Homer, Parmenides, the problem of fate and necessity, Platonic daimons, and the "On Fate" topos in Hellenistic Greece. The study ends with a brief comparative metaphorology of metaphors (...) for the action of fate including command, division or allotment, and wheel or cycles of change. (shrink)

This paper addresses the location of virtue within a virtuous person. It examines the relations of body, mind and spirit in the Shijing 詩經, which describes virtue in terms of the bodies and minds of virtuous agents. I argue that virtue is attributed to outward behavior, rather than inner state, and that that behavior is described via the performance of the shen or gong body.

ABSTRACTThis response to Analogical Investigations concentrates on the legacy of Lloyd's polarity and analogy, other theories of metaphor, and relations between theories of metaphor and theories of nature.

Chinese philosophy has long recognized the importance of the body and emotions in extensive and diverse self-cultivation traditions. Philosophical debates about the relationship between mind and body are often described in terms of mind-body dualism and its opposite, monism or some kind of "holism." Monist or holist views agree on the unity of mind and body, but with much debate about what kind, whereas mind-body dualists take body and mind to be metaphysically distinct entities. The question is important for several (...) reasons. Several humanistic and scientific disciplines recognize embodiment as an important dimension of the human condition. One version, the problem of mind-body dualism, is central to the history of both philosophy and religion. Some account of relations between body and mind, spirit or soul is also central to any understanding of the self. Recent work in cognitive and neuroscience underscores the importance of our somatic experience for how we think and feel. (shrink)

Weaving and archery are strongly gendered skills, and both occur repeatedly in both Chinese and Greek accounts of skill and ethics. I examine both metaphors and narratives that liken these skills to various aspects of ethics, wisdom and government, with particular interest in how or whether the account of the skill reflects the experience of the gender of its typical expert.

Falk Wunderlich präsentiert einen grundlegend neuen Ansatz zum Verständnis der Kant'schen Bewusstseinstheorie. Im ersten Teil bietet er eine detaillierte Rekonstruktion der bewusstseinstheoretischen Diskussionen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Rekonstruktion des Geflechts von Diskussionen, in dessen Kontext sich Kants Überlegungen bewegen. Auf diese zeitgenössischen Debatten werden im zweiten Teil Kants bewusstseinstheoretische Ansätze bezogen. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass Kant die zeitgenössischen Standardansichten über Bewusstsein, Apperzeption und Selbstbewusstsein entgegen dem Anschein nur einschränkt modifiziert und ihre begrifflichen Grundlagen (...) beibehält. Schließlich wird vor dem Hintergrund dieser Kontextualisierung eine alternative Interpretation der transzendentalen Deduktion entwickelt. (shrink)

In order to formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary underpinnings that preceded the first glimmerings of language, mother-infant gestural and vocal interactions are compared in chimpanzees and humans and used to model those of early hominins. These data, along with paleoanthropological evidence, suggest that prelinguistic vocal substrates for protolanguage that had prosodic features similar to contemporary motherese evolved as the trend for enlarging brains in late australopithecines/early Homo progressively increased the difficulty of parturition, thus causing a selective shift toward females that (...) gave birth to relatively undeveloped neonates. It is hypothesized that hominin mothers adopted new foraging strategies that entailed maternal silencing, reassuring, and controlling of the behaviors of physically removed infants (i.e., that shared human babies' inability to cling to their mothers' bodies). As mothers increasingly used prosodic and gestural markings to encourage juveniles to behave and to follow, the meanings of certain utterances (words) became conventionalized. This hypothesis is based on the premises that hominin mothers that attended vigilantly to infants were strongly selected for, and that such mothers had genetically based potentials for consciously modifying vocalizations and gestures to control infants, both of which receive support from the literature. Key Words: bipedalism; brain size; chimpanzees; foraging; gestures; hominins; infant riding; motherese; prosody; protolanguage. (shrink)

The emotion of anger has received overall negative treatment in recent moral philosophy. This article explores the gendered representations of anger in the Lienüzhuan 《列女傳》 of Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE). It begins with a brief account of the semantic field of anger and its representation in the Lienüzhuan, focusing on three important patterns. Perhaps most important is the didactic role of anger; and how female teachers use it (or avoid it) in instructing male sons, husbands and rulers. Second is (...) the treatment of women’s distinct strategies for addressing the effects of being the object of the anger of others. The third is the representation of female anger in accounts of female vice. The representations of anger in the LNZ provides an important alternative to views of anger as motivated by the desire for payback and status. The LNZ, like other pre-Qin texts, understands anger very differently, and focuses on other-regarding anger, based on perceptions of wrongdoing and injustice. (shrink)

There is a paradox lying at the heart of the study of heredity. To understand the ways in which features are passed down from one generation to the next, we have to dig deeper and deeper into the ultimate nature of things - from organisms, to genes, to molecules. And yet as we do this, increasingly we find we are out of focus with our subjects. What has any of this to do with the living, breathing organisms with which we (...) started? Organisms are living. Molecules are not. How do we relate one to the other? In Genetic Analysis, one of the most important empirical scientists in the field in the twentieth century attempts, through a study of history and drawing on his own vast experience as a practitioner, to face this paradox head-on. His book offers a deep and innovative understanding of our ways of thinking about heredity. (shrink)

This collection illustrates the centrality of skill within ancient ethics, including ancient Chinese ethics, showing how skill or techne has been a touchstone from the beginning of philosophical thought. Covering Socrates' search for expertise in virtue, the Republic's 'craft of justice', Aristotle's delineation of the politike techne and the Stoics' 'art of life'. Divided into four sections on Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Chinese ethics, it brings together world-leading philosophers working across this broad topic. Yet it is not limited to (...) traditional figures and traditions, featuring essays on the importance of skill in lesser-known philosophers, such as Carneades and Antipater, and texts, such as the Zhuangzi. In doing so, it illustrates how skill, expertise and 'know how' are important in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action and cognitive science. This collection of specially-commissioned chapters is the first to foreground skill as central to Ancient and Chinese ethics specifically making it an essential for anyone interested in the value of cross-cultural philosophy today. (shrink)

This book contends that the forces of late modernism are being caught between a capital-driven globalization and a territorially rooted revival of tribalism and ultra-nationalism.

A regularity theory of causation analyses type-level causation in terms of Boolean difference-making. The essential ingredient that helps this theoretical framework overcome the problems of Hume’s and Mill’s classical accounts is a principle of non-redundancy: only Boolean dependency structures from which no elements can be eliminated track causation. The first part of this article argues that the recent regularity-theoretic literature has not consistently implemented this principle, for it disregarded an important type of redundancies: structural redundancies. Moreover, it is shown that (...) a regularity theory needs to be underwritten by a hitherto neglected metaphysical background assumption stipulating that the world’s causal makeup is not ambiguous. Against that background, the second part then develops a new regularity theory that does justice to all types of redundancies and, thereby, provides the first all-inclusive notion of Boolean difference-making. (shrink)