In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:We Walk the Path Together: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh and Meister EckhartSeung Hee KangWe Walk The Path Together: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh and Meister Eckhart. By Brian J. Pierce. New York: Maryknoll, 2005. 202 pp.Being that he is a contemplative, Pierce’s Trinitarian Christian love beautifully manifests itself in this book in his art of interdialoguing on the Buddhist-Christian religious traditions. Pierce’s manner of interdialoguing resonates with (...) what Ann Belford Ulanov also attempts: “I am writing not about how to prove that God exists but rather about what happens religiously when psyche and soul create a space for conversation [End Page 178] out of which life can flow.” 1 If someone asks whether Pierce and Ulanov point to two different absolute realities, my response would be, “Absolutely not!” The sacred inner space that Pierce points to, in light of the two contemporary mystics from different religious traditions, namely Thich Nhat Hanh and Meister Eckhart, also reminds me of Lao Tzu’s wisdom that permeates the Tao Te Ching, specifically in his concept of “useful emptiness.” 2We Walk the Path Together is neither an abstract account nor sheer philosophical speculation. The whole of the book is rooted in Pierce’s faith-based lived experience (pp. 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 113, 163); this renders the book life-giving and deeply ecological in terms of its transcendence of either/or dichotomies.Chapter 1 summarizes the meaning and art of dialogue. Pierce utilizes mystical language to illustrate what the dialogue is. For Pierce, dialogue connotes “a mutual giving and receiving, and it posits a profound sense of being of one heart and mind” (p. 3). Pierce extends his personal experience of a vow of obedience into the meaning of dialogue. For Pierce, this vow means to “transcend any illusion of separateness” and thus “obedience liberates him from his tiny world of ego” (p. 4). In the process of dialogue, according to Pierce, “our hearts are challenged to grow larger, all-inclusive and universal” (p. 8). This expansion of the heart is what mystics call “magnanimity.” As Pierce is acutely aware, “magnanimity is one of life’s un-planned for graces; it teaches us to see and hear and learn things that we never dreamed were possible” (p. 9).Chapter 2 discusses mindfulness as a gateway to eternity. Pierce asserts that home is everywhere in the present moment; it is where freedom is possible. This particular point echoes with what Thomas Merton spoke about in reference to the prodigal son who turned away from his father: “sin is our refusal to be what we are, a rejection of our spiritual reality hidden in the mystery of God” (p. 23). However, when the prodigal son was restored his senses, he was able to attune himself back to present moment: “I’ll get up and go to my father” (cited by Pierce, ibid.). He became free from his sin, returning home. In this chapter, Pierce highlights the words of the mystics (St. Irenaeus, St. John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence, St. Augustine, Jan van Ruusbroec, and St. Catherine de Siena) who lived this present moment in order to help the readers understand the intrinsic relationship between our mindfulness of the present moment and eternity. He argues that Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and Christianity’s tradition concerning the kingdom of God are mutually informative (pp. 19, 21).In chapter 3, Pierce expands the meaning of present moment through its association with breathing; being present is not a concept, but a living reality, as we experience the Holy Spirit in our breathing practice, such as centering prayer and meditation (p. 36). Pierce carefully states, “contemplation is authentic only if it flows out in loving-kindness to others. When we breathe in all the spiritual energy of the universe, thus, we literally implode—a spiritual ego intoxication” (p. 40). Pierce explains further what contemplation means; breathing in the Holy Spirit and breathing out the Holy Spirit may mean two separate phenomena. Contemplation is, for Pierce, authentic, only when the Spirit that is breathed in reaches out to our community. [End Page 179] This is also Pierce’s ecological aspect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Poe?Why Not Peirce?Roger SeamonFrederick Crews has twice tried to mock deep interpretation to death, but it won't work. There is, as he himself says, "a desperate need to root around and 'find' some redeeming features of Pooh to hang on to," and thus The Pooh Perplex did not, and Postmodern Pooh will not, put an end to the love affair between literary interpreters and deep meanings.1 The opposition (...) of Plato and Aristotle did not do it in the ancient world,2 and Dr. Johnson was still protesting two millennia later: "They see with great clearness whatever is too remote to be discovered by the rest of mankind, but are totally blind to what lies immediately before them. They discover in every passage some secret meaning, some remote allusion, some artful allegory... which no other reader ever suspected" (Rambler, p. 176). Early in the last century academic critics tried to resist the practice within academe, but they too failed, and Crews himself only gave it up after writing one of the best works of the genre, The Sins of the Fathers.3Disbelieving in literary deep meanings is roughly the equivalent of being an atheist. We have a strong propensity to find them in both natural and cultural phenomena. Stars and entrails are interpreted as symbols of a deeper reality, and we create such devices as the I Ching and the Tarot deck to gain entrance to a hidden world of meaning. Dreams, which straddle nature and culture are, perhaps, the most common object upon which to exercise the impulse, and Hayden White reminds us that this propensity has also been part of our intellectual traditionfrom the time that Plato set the world of ideas over against the world of things and Aristotle set the contemplative life over against the active life as end to means. This Absurdist moment [White is speaking about post-structuralist [End Page 256] literary interpretation] was potentially present from the beginning of modern European humanism, with its gnostic bent, its celebration of scholarship as an end in itself, its notion of privileged readers enjoying the status of priests interpreting the book of life. It was potentially present in modern Western philosophy, with its insistence that things are never what they appear to be but are manifestations of noumenal essences whose reality must be supposed but whose "natures" can never be known.4We are often not content with surface meaning in life and texts, but wish to find what Paul Tillich calls, none too modestly, "ultimate reality," which "characterizes the whole appearing world as non-ultimate, preliminary, transitory and finite," and "it is the awareness of the deceptive character of the surface of everything we encounter which drives one to discover what is below the surface."5There is, however, an oddity that may offer non-believers in deep interpretation some consolation. Philosophical texts, which share many characteristics with literary ones (see below, p. 4, for a discussion of the relevant similarities), are almost wholly immune from deep interpretation. There is no hope for us skeptics that literary deep interpreters will abandon their trade, so all we can do is console ourselves with trying to understand why our rich and beloved surfaces are so often abandoned for the very dubious depths. Crews says that interpreters "yearn to have their 'values' validated by books—the killer app of the 1400s" (Postmodern Pooh, p. 136); yes, but why don't other disciplines, such as history and philosophy, engage in the same practice? What is it about literature that makes it vulnerable? Why, in particular, are philosophical texts almost totally immune to such interpretation? As my title puts it, why Poe, why not Peirce?But why just Poe and Peirce, philosophy and literature, in the first place? There are, of course, many other kinds of discourse, but literary and philosophical texts have an especially intimate relationship. First, they have a canonical status that, for example, history no longer does, and it is the canon that attracts hermeneutic attention. Students of philosophy and literature learn a canon—or did until recently, and that is not true of modern historians, psychologists, and economists. Second... (shrink)

Recognized as one of the greatest philosophers in classical China, Chu Hsi is especially known in the West through translations of one of his many works, theChin-su Lu. Julia Ching, a noted scholar of Neo-Confucian thought, provides the first book-length examination of Chu-Hsi's religious thought, based on extensive reading in both primary and secondary sources.

In this book, Julia Ching offers a survey of over 4,000 years of Chinese civilization through an examination of the relationship between kingship and mysticism. She investigates the sage-king myth and ideal, arguing that institutions of kingship were bound up with cultivation of trance states and communication with spirits. Over time, the sage-king myth became a model for the actual ruler. As a paradigm, it was also appropriated by private individuals who strove for wisdom without becoming kings. As the (...) Confucian tradition interacted with the Taoist and the Buddhist, the religious character of spiritual and mystical cultivation became more pronounced. But the sage-king idea continued, promoting expectations of benevolent despotism rather than democratization in Chinese civilization. (shrink)

This study uses a rational ethical decision-making framework to examine the influence of moral intensity (potential harm and social pressure) on whistleblowing intention and behaviour using organisational commitment as a moderator. A scenario was developed, and an online questionnaire was used to conduct an empirical analysis on the responses of 533 participants. The mean age and years of work experience of the respondents were 31 and 8.2 years, respectively. The results show, first, that while moral intensity is correlated with whistleblowing (...) intention, only the potential harm is positively correlated with such intention. Second, potential harm and social pressure differentially affect whistleblower choice of using an internal or external channel. Third, organisational commitment has a moderated mediation effect among moral intensity, whistleblowing intention and behaviour. Fourth, whistleblowers may be grouped into four conceptual types: indifferent, rebel, mature and spoil. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Only problems that cannot be solved without representational changes can be regarded as pure insight problems; others are classified as pseudo-insight problems. Existing studies using neuroimaging...

This paper begins with a contrast between two different views about whether the five sensory consciousnesses are accompanied by vikalpa. For the Abhidharmakośa, the five sensory consciousnesses are accompanied by the svabhāva-vikalpa whose nature is vitarka; but for Yogācāra, the five sensory consciousnesses are without that particular kind of svabhāva-vikalpa because vitarka is regarded as belonging merely to the mental consciousness. My hypothesis for explaining such difference is that Yogācāra assigns that particular kind of svabhāva-vikalpa to mental consciousness rather than (...) to the five sensory consciousnesses. I then look for possible functions of vitarka-vicāra that could map to svabhāva-vikalpa: (a) conceptual vitarka-vicāra in an unconcentrated state; (b) conceptual vitarka-vicāra in a concentrated state; (c) nonconceptual vitarka-vicāra in an unconcentrated state; (d) non-conceptual vitarka-vicāra in a concentrated state. I argue that the svabhāva-vikalpa in the Abhidharmakośa should map to (c) and (d), which in Yogācāra maps to mental perception (mānasapratyakṣa) stipulated by Dignāga. This refers to the discernment of the shape of a cognitive object in the foreground against the background. I end this paper with some general observations about why Yogācāra maps the svabhāvavikapla to the mental consciousness, and about the different senses covered by the Buddhist notion of vikalpa, which is broader than the sense of "conceptualization" as we now understand it. (shrink)

Understanding the meaning of a sentence is crucial for Buddhists because they put so much emphasis on understanding the verbal expressions of the Buddha. But this can be problematic under their metaphysical framework of momentariness, and their epistemological framework of multiple consciousnesses. This paper starts by reviewing the theory of five states of mind in the Yogācārabhūmi, and then investigates debates among medieval East Asian Yogācāra thinkers about how various consciousnesses work together to understand the meaning of a sentence. The (...) major differences between the various explanations proffered lie in the minimum number of types of consciousnesses involved, and the minimum linguistic marks cognized, in order for one to understand a sentence consisting of four Chinese characters. I show that in these disputes, two points are key: First, the role played by the mental consciousness that arises simultaneously with a sensory consciousness: that is to say, whether a sensory consciousness should still be regarded as essential for understanding, if the simultaneous mental consciousness also cognizes the same mark. Second, whether the syntactic structure of a sentence is taken into consideration: that is to say, whether there is a separate determination of understanding regarding each character, or there is no determination until one has heard two or more characters and takes them as a syntactically meaningful unit. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the Yogâcāra Buddhism transmitted by the Indian translator Paramârtha (Ch. Zhendi 真諦) underwent a significant transformation due to the influence of his later Chinese interpreters, a phenomenon to which previous scholars failed to paid enough attention. I begin with showing two contrary interpretations of Paramârtha’s notion of jiexing 解性. The traditional interpretation glosses jiexing in terms of “original awakening” (benjue 本覺) in the Awakening of Faith and hence betrays its strong tie to that text. In contrast, (...) a contrary interpretation of jiexing is preserved in a Dunhuang fragment Taishō No. 2805 (henceforth abbreviated as T2805). The crucial part of this dissertation consists in demonstrating that T2805 and the Awakening of Faith represent two competing lineages of the interpreters of Paramârtha. The first clue is that modern scholars have voiced objection to the traditional attribution of the Awakening of Faith to Paramârtha. In addition, I discovered that striking similarities exist between T2805 and Paramârtha’s corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrine. I further draw attention to the historical testimonies about two different doctrinal views held by Paramârtha’s interpreters. Therefore, I argue that there were two lineages in the name of Paramârtha’s disciples around 590 CE: the indirect lineage interpreted Paramârtha through the lens of the Awakening of Faith; and the direct lineage—represented by T2805—preserved Paramârtha’s original teachings but died out prematurely. Later Chinese Buddhist tradition mistakenly regards the indirect lineage as Paramârtha’s true heir and attributes the Awakening of Faith to Paramârtha. This implies that Paramârtha may have agreed with Xuanzang 玄奘 (600-664) much more than scholars used to assume. For example, Xuanzang’s characterization of the notion of “aboriginal uncontaminated seeds” looks very similar to how Paramârtha depicts jiexing. It also implies that we should distinguish the strong sense of the notion of “tathāgatagarbha” in the Awakening of Faith from its weak sense. The fact that even Vasubandhu endorses the weak sense of “tathāgatagarbha” strongly challenges the received wisdom that Yogâcāra and Tathāgatagarbha were two distinct and antagonistic trends of thought in India. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss Nishida’s 西田 philosophy of body from the aspects of acting intuition, rhythm, and situatedness. Pure experience used to be the starting point of Nishida’s early philosophy. In his later philosophy, however, the keyword in Nishida’s philosophy is no longer “experience” but “acting.” It is neither “I think therefore I am” nor “I will therefore I am,” but “I act therefore I am.” As the organ of acting intuition, body is one of the most important (...) philosophical concepts in Nishida’s later philosophy. I shall interpret the philosophy of acting intuition as a phenomenology of rhythm. Also, I shall argue that acting intuition can be understood as a situated action. For Nishida, our body is historical: I am not a knowing body, but an acting body. (shrink)

This paper argues that a strong-sense Buddhist nominalism, which denies any resemblance between two things, even among natural kinds, fails to explain why names and concepts can successfully identify a group among other things. Drawing evidence from the theory of the three natures in two major Yogācāra texts—the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra and the Mahāyānasaṃgraha—I propose that these two texts affirm the affinity between concepts and things because they hold that it is the utilization of concepts in previous lives that gives rise to (...) our shared world. While rejecting the idea that there is an inherent property or universal shared by natural kinds, these two texts agree that natural kinds are regulated by concepts and therefore share some features from among the set of characteristics defined by those concepts. I therefore propose a weak-sense Buddhist nominalism that endorses the idea that natural kinds share resemblances. (shrink)

This study aims to disclose how the magnetic resonance imaging neuroimaging approach has been applied in education studies, and what kind of learning themes has been investigated in the reviewed MRI neuroimaging research. Based on the keywords “brain or neuroimaging or neuroscience” and “MRI or diffusion tensor imaging or white matter or gray matter or resting-state,” a total of 25 papers were selected from the subject areas “Educational Psychology” and “Education and Educational Research” from the Web of Science and Scopus (...) from 2000 to 2019. Content analysis showed that MRI neuroimaging and learning were studied under the following three major topics and nine subtopics: cognitive function, science education, and brain development. As for the type of MRI neuroimaging research, the most frequently used approaches were functional MRI, followed by structural MRI and DTI, although the choice of approach was often motivated by the specific research question. Research development trends show that the neural plasticity theme has become more prominent recently. This study concludes that in educational research, the MRI neuroimaging approach provides objective and empirical evidence to connect learning processes, outcomes, and brain mechanisms. (shrink)

Includes texts by Leibniz and Wolff, translated from French, German and Latin.

The Goose Lake Monastery Debate was an important event in the history of Chinese thought, chiefly because it marked the differences between two of the greatest representatives of the movement of thought known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. In this article, it is my aim to offer a historical reconstruction of the events that took place, to give an exegetical analysis of the problems discussed, and to conclude with an interpretation that places these problems in a wider perspective. I hope (...) to show how this event which occurred in China 800 years ago was not a hair-splitting affair with little consequence for men today, but that it concerned a problem that is both universal and contemporary: the conflict between learning and wisdom. (shrink)

As of July 1, 2008, females aged 11-26 years seeking status as permanent residents in the United States must produce documentation that they have received the human papillomavirus vaccine before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will approve their status adjustment. Immigration rights activists and public health officials have objected to this new requirement on the grounds that it is unnecessary and imposes unreasonable barriers to lawful immigration due to its expense. The Supreme Court has generally upheld mandatory vaccination requirements (...) for citizens and non-citizens and has tolerated federal immigration regulations that would be unconstitutional if applied to citizens. However, the HPV vaccination requirement may be arbitrary, unnecessary, and discriminatory as applied to green card applicants who pose no greater threat to public health than citizens who are not subject to the same requirements. Furthermore, the requirement may also impose unreasonable restraints on aliens individual liberties as well as real barriers to immigration. (shrink)

Research on self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of the internalization of motivation as a crucial factor for determining the quality of motivation. Hence, intrinsic motivation is deemed as an important predictor of learning. Research on epistemic beliefs, on the other hand, focuses on the nature of knowledge, and learning with more sophisticated epistemic beliefs associated with more adaptive outcomes. While learning and achievement are multiply determined, a more comprehensive theoretical model that takes into account both motivational quality and epistemic beliefs (...) is needed. Hence, this study aims to examine the role of intrinsic and instrumental motivation alongside epistemic beliefs in predicting students’ achievement in science. Data were drawn from the PISA 2015 survey. We focused on four of the top-performing societies. Two were Eastern societies – Singapore and Hong Kong, and the other two were Western societies: Canada and Finland. We found both common and specific patterns among the four societies. Regarding the common patterns, we found that intrinsic motivation and epistemic beliefs had direct positive effects on science achievement. As for the regionally-specific findings, instrumental motivation positively predicted achievement only in Western societies, but not in Eastern societies. The interaction effect between motivation and epistemic beliefs also demonstrated different patterns across the four societies. Implications for the role of motivation and epistemic beliefs in optimizing student learning and achievement are discussed. (shrink)

This was what Heidegger said to his Japanese enquirer in “A Dialogue on Language,” which, however, concluded on a note bespeaking much more of convergence than of divergence. Yet the difficulties which lie in any comparative study of two thinkers belonging to such distinct and independent traditions as Heidegger and Wang Yang-ming remain great and many. First of all, as Heidegger himself pointed out, we have the language hurdle. Chinese as well as Japanese lacks a clear verb to be; the (...) Chinese language in particular organizes its uninflected words solely according to word order and the placing of particles. Such a language seems to defy logical analysis and forbids an exact translation of the term, “Being.” How is common ground to be found in such a case? (shrink)

Studies of the reaction of European thinkers of the Enlightenment - Leibniz, Wolff, Hegel, Kant, et al -to Chinese culture and ideas.

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

It is fair to say that Confucius never ceased to be the object of the cult he had wanted: . . . [celebrating] the wisdom that causes men to turn away from mystical practices and theories, from magic and prayer, from doctrines of personal power and salvation. Marcel Granet..