I am concerned that the military’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) exclusively focus on prescribing permissible actions but fail to consider the servicemembers’ blameworthiness. In explaining this concern, I will illuminate how permissible actions do not necessarily yield blamelessness. While permissibility is generally a function of rules or good outcomes, blameworthiness is at least a function of an agent’s intentions. Why should we care about permissible actions done with blameworthy intentions? I offer two distinct motivations. Using a self-defense situation as an (...) example, I explain that neglecting to consider blame can increase the magnitude of harm done to an apparent but merely possible attacker. Secondly, we should certainly be concerned about the harms done to servicemembers, and I show that ROE that fail to prescribe a blameless intention may result in increased harm to servicemembers in the form of a “moral injury”. In even more general terms, I am advocating for a more robust in bello consideration of intentions. (shrink)

The book's significance is two-fold: it argues for a new stage in the development of contemporary Confucian philosophy, and it demonstrates the value to Western ...

The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974 ; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but (...) the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or ‘project’ as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker’s turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next. (shrink)

My goal in this paper 1 is, first, to collect together a number of themes and observations that have usually been kept apart, locked up in their respective disciplines. When these are brought together, some general and far reaching implications become really rather clear. In particular, I want to make a case for the implicit coherence of these themes in the idea that.

There is considerable disagreement and even confusion over what forms of border‐crossing philosophizing are most appropriate to our times. Are comparative, cross‐cultural, intercultural, blended, and fusion philosophy all the same thing? Some critics find what they call “comparative philosophy” to be moribund or problematically colonialist; others assert that projects like “fusion philosophy” are intellectually irresponsible and colonialist in their own way. Can we nonetheless identify a distinctive project of comparative philosophy and say why it is important? Based on a broad (...) survey of approaches, this essay offers schematic answers to these questions, clarifies some persistent confusions, and stresses the constitutive gamble that lies at the heart of all comparative philosophy. There are several different ways to do comparative philosophy well; which method to employ depends on the values that motivate and the pragmatic situation that frames one's inquiry, and on the ways in which one or more communities receive and respond to one's contribution. (shrink)

Are there any coherent and defensible alternatives to liberal democracy? The author examines the possibility that a reformed democratic centralism-the principle around which China's current polity is officially organized-might be legitimate, according to both an inside and an outside perspective. The inside perspective builds on contemporary Chinese political theory; the outside perspective critically deploys Rawls's notion ofa "decent society " as its standard. Along the way, the author pays particular attention to the kinds and degree of pluralism a decent society (...) can countenance, and to the specific institutions in China that might enable the realization of a genuine and/or decent democratic centralism. The author argues that by considering both inside and outside perspectives, and the degrees to which they inter-penetrate and critically inform one another, we can engage in a global philosophy that neither pre-judges alternative political traditions nor falls prey to false conceptual barriers. (shrink)

Tian 天 is central to the metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics of the 800-year-long Chinese philosophical tradition we call “Neo-Confucianism,” but there is considerable confusion over what tian means—confusion which is exacerbated by its standard translation into English as “Heaven.” This essay analyzes the meaning of tian in the works of the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi 朱熹, presents a coherent interpretation that unifies the disparate aspects of the term’s meaning, and argues that “cosmos” does an excellent job of capturing this (...) meaning and therefore should be adopted as our translation of tian. (shrink)

In this essay, I find much to admire and little to disagree with in Shu-Shan L ee ’s use of James Scott’s “public transcript” framework to excavate a theory of political obligation that applies to common people in premodern China. I offer some ways to further explore the implications of Lee’s analysis, in part by connecting Lee’s essay to related work on the obligations of elites. I then build on Lee’s own suggestions of connections to contemporary empirical attitudes and contemporary (...) normative views, asking in what ways Lee’s account of public obligation might be able to make room for the idea that the people, as political children, might one day be able to grow up. (shrink)

The essay begins from Alan Gewirth's influential account of human rights, and specifically with his argument that the human right to political participation can only be fulfilled by competitive, liberal democracy. I show that his argument rests on empirical, rather than conceptual grounds, which opens the possibility that in China, alternative forms of participation may be legitimate or even superior. An examination of the theory and contemporary practice of 'democratic centralism' shows that while it does not now adequately support the (...) right to political participation, a reformed version could. I focus in particular on the roles that could be played by consultative institutions, looking both to recent Chinese proposals and to analogues currently existing in Japan. I conclude that a reformed democratic centralism may well be the objective toward which Chinese people should strive. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 241-261 [Access article in PDF] Should We All Be More English? Liang Qichao, Rudolf von Jhering, and Rights Stephen C. Angle [T]he Celestial Empire, with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. The natural disposition of the (...) Swiss in the matter of art and poetry is anything but ideal. It is sober and practical, like that of the Romans. But, in the sense in which I have thus far used the expression "ideal," in its relation to rights, it is just as applicable to the Swiss as to the Englishman. 1Rudolf von Jhering (1818-92) published Der Kampf ums Recht (The Struggle for Law) in 1872. He was already regarded as one of Germany's most important legal philosophers, and Der Kampf helped to ensure a world-wide reputation. His argument that people should be less like the "adult children" of China and more like the English found audiences everywhere, including China, where Der Kampf was translated between 1900 and 1901. Jhering's doctrines stimulated Liang Qichao (1873-1929), one of China's leading thinkers, to publish "Lun Quanli Sixiang (On Rights Consciousness)," in 1902 as part of his manifesto On the New People. Liang tells us that the "essential points" of his essay, which is among the earliest and most sustained treatments of the concept of rights to appear in Chinese, are mostly taken from Der Kampf. 2 We will see that there are indeed certain similarities that make Liang's "quanli" 3 (the standard Chinese translation of "rights") resonate with Jhering's notion of "Recht," and these similarities--chief among which is a kind of individual assertiveness--help to explain [End Page 241] Liang's interest in Jhering. My discussion of the two thinkers will offer at least the beginnings of an explanation of why German conceptions of law and rights were so attractive to Chinese intellectuals.As is often the case with cross-cultural comparisons, we will also see that these similarities mask some less obvious but deeply important differences. For Jhering the relation between following the procedures of the law and exercising one's Recht is crucial; for Liang, in contrast, quanli are deeply related to ethical concerns. This difference in turn colors their respective notions of assertiveness, which thus turn out not to resemble one another as closely as first appeared. When we see Recht and quanli as separate concepts emerging from separate discourse contexts, these differences will make sense.In "On Quanli Consciousness" Liang regularly quotes Jhering, often at some length. One important passage reads as follows: In ancient times, Lin Xiangru scolded the King of Qin saying: "Smash both my head and the jade disk!" 4 Now given the size of the state of Zhao, how could such love be expressed for a tiny thing like a jade disk? He was saying that Qin could smash the disk, kill him, invade his territory, endanger his state, and still he would not surrender. Ah! This was nothing other than "quanli"! Jhering has also said: "If an Englishman traveling to the European continent is one day asked to pay an irrational charge by the hotel's carriage driver, in every case he will resolutely scold [the driver]. If the driver won't heed his scolding, the Englishman will struggle for justice without tiring, always preferring to extend his stay; even if his traveling expenses were to increase as much as ten-fold, he would not cease. Unknowing people all laugh at this great fool, but none of them understand that this person's struggle over a few shillings is in fact a vital part of what allows the nation of England to stand tall by itself in the world. This abundance of quanli consciousness and sharpness of feelings of quanli are the great reasons behind the ability of the English to establish their state. Now let... (shrink)

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid (...) picture of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

Harvey Lederman has argued that the relationship signaled by W ang Yangming’s 王陽明 slogan “_zhi xing he yi_ 知行合一” is best captured by the principle “Unity: A person genuinely knows filiality if and only if they are acting filially.” In this essay I explain that Lederman views “extending knowing” and attaining “genuine knowing” as primarily episodic, in just the way that our actions are episodic (sometimes we are acting, sometimes we are not), but I argue that “extending knowing” and attaining (...) “genuine knowing” are centrally about a deeper and sustained transformation. (shrink)

In June of 2008, the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP) convened its third Constructive Engagement conference, on the theme of “Comparative Philosophy Methodology.” During the opening speeches, Prof. Dunhua ZHAO, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Peking University, challenged the conference’s participants to put forward a minimal definition of “comparative philosophy” and a statement of its methods. Based on the papers from the conference and the extensive discussion that ensued, during my closing reflections at (...) the end of the conference I offered a tentative synthesis of the conference’s conclusions. That summary has already been published on-line as part of the bi-annual ISCWP newsletter (Angle 2008). In this brief essay, I recapitulate the themes of my earlier summary and expand, in my own voice, on some of the key points. (shrink)

JeeLoo Liu makes two main arguments in her insightful essay “The metaphysical as the ethical.” First, against claims made by Wing-tsit Chan and others, she demonstrates that Wang Yangming’s metaphysics is not a problematic form of subjective idealism but in fact “aligns with commonsense realism.” Second, against both Chan and Chen Lai, she maintains that Wang does not commit a problematic conflation of fact and value. Instead, Liu shows that Wang can be read along lines very similar to contemporary pragmatist (...) metaphysics, which itself resists a hard distinction between fact and value. This essay offers a range of clarifications and cautions against the background of general agreement and ends with a question about how far we can really push the parallel between Wang and pragmatism. (shrink)

By their nature, the most vexing social problems reflect collisions between social and economic interests of parties with highly divergent views and perspectives on the cause and character of what is at issue and the consequences that flow from it. Conflicts around biotechnology applications are good examples of these problems. When considering the potential consequences of proposed biotechnology applications, an enormous range of perspectives arise reflecting the breadth of different and often competing interests with a stake in life's future.This essay (...) starts from an assumption that the traditional tool of cost‐benefit analysis is not adequate for adjudicating competing claims around the introduction of new biotechnology applications. It tends to require implicit simplifying assumptions that reduce or mask true underlying levels of complexity and uncertainty, and the results it produces deliver a definitive and singular answer, as opposed to a multiplicity of outcomes. In this essay, I describe some of the key elements of formal scenario planning to show how CBA could be redeployed as a supporting tool within the broader decision support methodology of formal scenario planning. (shrink)

It is argued that "quanli" meant something different from the "rights" that it purports to translate in the writings of Liu Shipei (1884-1919). This does not mean that "quanli," as Liu used it, has no overlap with any of the meanings of "rights." But it can be argued that these overlaps are in a crucial sense coincidental, since the notion of "quanli" in Liu's major works represents a growth out of, rather than an imposition on, the Confucian tradition. In general, (...) to make sense of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese political and ethical discourse, we must highlight the degree to which the concepts involved developed out of various strands of native tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Communication, and the Relevance of Philosophy to Human Rights:A Response to Randall PeerenboomStephen C. AngleRandy Peerenboom has paid me the enormous compliment of thinking it worthwhile to engage in sustained, critical dialogue with my book. In this response to his review essay, I attempt to return the compliment. I focus on issues surrounding concepts and communication, since that is where Peerenboom puts his emphasis. Near the end, I (...) look at what is at stake in our discussions of Raz, touch on the question of judgments and objectivity, and close with some thoughts about the relevance of history to my goals in the book. [End Page 320]At the heart of Peerenboom's critique of my account of concepts and communication are two concerns. First, he worries that I do not "provide a satisfactory answer to the questions of how to determine whether we are dealing with a single concept or discourse or multiple concepts or discourses." Second, he suggests that my entire discussion of concepts, "while interesting academically, at least for those with a taste for philosophy, diverts attention from the real issues." I will begin with the first. A valuable result of Peerenboom's essay is that it helps me to see where I have not made myself as clear as I would have liked to. At various points in the book, I raise the issue of the normative nature of questions like those Peerenboom has posed (see, e.g., pp. 27 and 32), but this is clearly something that needs more emphasis. Asking what a word means, or whether two people share a concept, or, for that matter, where the boundaries of a discourse lie are never simple, descriptive questions. These are normative questions, which always receive normative answers. By "normative," I mean that the questions and their answers are prescriptive for those in my shared community. When someone says "we mean such-and-such by that word," the "we" is crucial: it is saying that people like us, in some respect, ought to talk this way. Thinking about language in normative terms permeates Brandom's approach. He writes, for example: "When the prosecutor at Oscar Wilde's trial asked him to say under oath whether a particular passage in one of his works did or did not constitute blasphemy, Wilde replied 'Blasphemy is not one of my words.'"1 Wilde recognized, that is, that using the word "blasphemy" brought with it certain commitments that he—and other like-minded individuals—ought to reject, even if he were to deny that a particular passage was blasphemous.So far so good. But Peerenboom sees a tension between what looks like a community-based definition of concepts—perhaps all Chinese ought therefore to share the same commitments?—and my endorsement of a holistic approach to meaning, according to which our individual webs of commitments always vary from one to another. This latter idea leads him to be puzzled about when two people can ever be said to share the same concept. He searches for a criterion for a sufficiently similar concept, wonders whether my talk of "keeping score" can provide such a criterion, and in the end decides that the choice of where to draw these lines is, in many cases, arbitrary. There is indeed a tension, and some arbitrariness, too, although not exactly where Peerenboom sees it. But none of this is problematic, I think, and in any case it emerges from the very complexity of our linguistic practice. Communities do not impose norms on us: we authorize the norms through the ways we speak, act, and react to others. "Authorize" is apt because it combines the ideas of creation and legitimation. Our perpetual roles as authorizers of a community's linguistic (and other) norms give us a certain amount of autonomy with respect to the norms, as well as explaining some variance, as we (consciously or unconsciously) push boundaries in one direction or another. At the same time, no one is a member of only one community. We interact with different groups at different times and in different ways, which puts the notion that we could be bound by the norms of a single... (shrink)

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the (...) universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of “universal,” we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confucian Sentimental Representation: A New Approach to Confucian Democracy by Kyung Rok KwonStephen C. AngleKWON, Kyung Rok. Confucian Sentimental Representation: A New Approach to Confucian Democracy. New York: Routledge, 2022. vi + 128 pp. Cloth, $128.00; eBook, $39.16Two facts have driven much of the recent theorizing about Confucian democracy. First, even in robust democracies like South Korea and Taiwan, East Asian citizens hold distinctive views about the relation (...) between leaders and led. Two-thirds of South Korean respondents and a third of those from Taiwan agreed with the statement "If we have political leaders who are morally upright, we can let them decide everything." Second, it is uncontroversial to say that traditional Confucianism advocated for rule by the virtuous. Most observers believe these two facts are linked but disagree about their normative upshot. Some regret the lingering authoritarianism polluting East Asian democracies, while others—primarily based in less democratic [End Page 146] countries—call for an embrace of "meritocracy" instead of democracy. A third group, to which Kwon Kyung Rok and I both belong, believe that properly understood "rule by virtue" can be better realized in a democracy. This means that modern Confucians should be democrats, and it suggests a distinctive way of conceptualizing democracy that both may be more apt for East Asia and may even offer lessons applicable worldwide. For Kwon, the key to all this is rethinking how we understand political representation.Kwon argues that we should look to representation rather than directly at democracy because representation is both central to modern conceptions of democracy and yet makes a more constructive dialogue partner for Confucian virtue-based politics. Democracy, says Kwon, is at its core concerned with the equal distribution of political power, whereas representation concerns "a special relationship and psychology" between the representer and the represented that he understands in terms of "authorization," the making of "sound judgments," and "accountability." Chapters 1 and 2 of the book explore the primarily "rationalist" notion of representation found in the Western tradition and the more "sentimentalist" version of representation that can be constructed out of Confucian virtue politics. The latter chapter is the creative core of the book. Kwon argues that for one to count as a representative in a modern Confucian context, one needs to make sound judgments of the true interests of society and share emotions with the people—in the process of transforming them into more morally cultivated people. This sense of "representing" the people builds on what it is to be a virtuous exemplar. Along the way Kwon makes a detailed case that direct caring rather than empathy is core to the idea of humaneness (or benevolence; ren) that is so central to Confucianism; this is a good example of how he engages with interpretive literature to clarify aspects of his picture.The final two chapters engage with alternative accounts of modern Confucian political theory. Chapter 3 provides a negative defense of democratic sentimental representation by demonstrating that various "meritocratic" alternative arguments fail. One of the key points here is that Daniel Bell and Tongdong Bai are overly concerned with the instrumental value of a ruler's competence, missing the intrinsic value of a ruler's virtue and its contribution to the ethically good life of the community; as a result, their views fail to be distinctively Confucian. Chapter 4 takes Sungmoon Kim's influential idea of "public reason Confucianism" as its point of departure. Kwon is quite sympathetic to Kim's framework and defends Kim against certain misunderstandings, but perceptively argues that there is a gap in Kim's account between citizens, understood primarily in affective terms, and the state, which in Kim's account is exemplified by the high court and is understood primarily in rationalist terms. What is missing is the bridging role of leaders. Kwon writes that mediating between formal and informal decision-making processes, leaders should "make ordinary citizens feel respected and make them focus on public issues in appropriate ways." He believes that a caring and competent [End Page 147] leader can "broaden the horizon of mutual understanding by exhorting [citizens] to think of all as belonging to an extended family." In short... (shrink)

This essay examines the questions raised about debate in _Zhuāngzǐ_ 莊子 2, the practical advice this chapter offers us for dealing with debates when they arise, and some of the questions that will predictably occur about how and why to apply that advice. On the present interpretation, _Zhuāngzǐ_ 2 argues that joining any side in a verbal conflict promotes continued conflict, and that only appreciating and working along with each speaker’s distinct point of view affords us access to what is (...) “really” or “conclusively” (_guǒ_ 果) the case. In contentious situations, the text advises that we pay close attention to speakers and their ways of life—rather than to what they are supposedly speaking about—and that we abandon any immediate goal beyond preserving our own health. Along the way, it foregrounds pleasure and comfort rather than rightness as what we are most attuned to when we listen and respond to one another’s words. (shrink)

Responds to the reply by L. T. Hoshmand and J. Martin to S. C. Yanchar and K. B. Kristensen's comments on Hoshmand and Martin's proposal for a naturalistic epistemological approach to psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin argue that in Yanchar and Kristensen's stance toward some aspects of their proposal, they have attributed to Hoshmand and Martin a relationship between theory, method, and data that they do not hold. According to Hoshmand and Martin, in making their case Yanchar and Kristensen have (...) objected to empirical means of evaluation, and essentially undermined their own argument. The authors clarify their position by responding to these claims. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Abstract:This article aims to help Anglophone scholars recover a neglected Zhuangist dialogue for philosophical engagement. The discussion between "Knowlittle" and "Great Unbiased Harmony" in Zhuangzi 25 preserves an extensive, relatively technical analysis of "dao" and its infinite referent that throws interesting light on many other treatments of this topic in the surrounding literature. Apparently taking exception to the practice of using "dao" as a label for something different in kind from ordinary things, whoever wrote this dialogue maintains that dao includes (...) those things—and hence is just as available for understanding and description as they are. While its place in the historical development of "Daoist" conversations remains an open question for future research, this dialogue's fascinating claims and arguments in and of themselves reward attention. (shrink)

Many Christian scholars have argued that standard versions of evolutionary theory and orthodox theological commitments can be reconciled. Some theistic evolutionists or “evolutionary creationists” have argued that evolutionary mechanisms such as random mutation and natural selection are nothing less than God’s way of creating. Though I dispute the logical coherence of these attempted reconciliations elsewhere, I argue here that there is little reason for Christians to attempt them, since an accumulating body of evidence from multiple subdisciplines of biology casts doubt (...) on the creative power of the main evolutionary mechanisms. Thus, rather than addressing the question, “Can a meaningful doctrine of divine providence or creation be reconciled with mainstream evolutionary theory?” this essay will address the question of whether Christians should, or need to, attempt such a reconciliation at all. (shrink)

Confucian democrats hold that the roles of Confucian political leaders must be rethought, just as the modern Confucian polity must shift from a monarchy to a constitutional democracy. This does not mean that modern Confucians must turn their backs on traditional Confucian views of leadership, however: the key traditional insights are still important, although to some degree they take on new significance in the new context of modern democratic Confucianism. Drawing on recent work by Joseph Chan and Elton Chan, I (...) begin by outlining a traditional Confucian view of the ‘inspirational’ leader. Next, I unpack and then critique Jiwei Ci’s argument that Confucian leadership rests on an ‘identification model’ of agency that is incompatible with democracy. Third, I build on some of the argument from my book Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy: Toward Progressive Confucianism to the effect that modern Confucians need to resolve a tension within traditional Confucianism by embracing a person-based democracy instead of mass-based authoritarianism. Finally, I conclude by making explicit why Confucian democracies still need leaders playing roles that are very much in the spirit of traditional Confucian leadership. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a vigorous discussion of human rights both within China and between China and other nations. It is easy to think of China as a latecomer to human rights discourse, in part because during most of the post-1949 period, rights and human rights were taboo subjects in the People's Republic. In fact, however, there was a rich and contested debate on rights throughout the first half of this century. By translating the most important pre-1949 essays on (...) rights and human rights, we aim to reintroduce themes from this forgotten discourse into contemporary debates. These essays show that the discussion of rights in China has long been motivated by indigenous concerns, rather than imposed from without, and it has been interpretive and critical, rather than passive and imitative. (shrink)

Danielle Macbeth has two principal goals in "The Place of Philosophy": to diagnose the plight of contemporary Western—and especially analytic—philosophy, and to argue for an alternative conception of philosophy's role, according to which engagement with its history and with the philosophies of other cultures becomes crucial. I have a great deal of sympathy with both halves of her project, and feel I have learned a considerable amount from her essay. As Macbeth herself emphasizes, though, the a priori and dialectical nature (...) of philosophy urges readers to see for themselves whether a given work of philosophy is fully convincing, and if not, then to engage in constructive criticism. In that spirit, I propose that we... (shrink)

I am grateful to Dr. Yu Yihsoong for having engaged so deeply with my book Sagehood and its view of Coherence, and to the editor for giving me this opportunity to reply. I am also pleased that Dr. Yu is not hung up on the translation of li as “Coherence”—indeed, he says he likes the translation—but rather argues with the details of what I say about li itself. As I read him, Dr. Yu’s critique of my book has three main (...) aspects. First, he sees that I defend a virtue-ethical rather than a rule-ethical reading of Neo-Confucianism, and based on his sense of what virtue ethics is and requires, this leads Dr. Yu to conclude that I am forced into certain errors of interpretation. Second, Dr. Yu believes that while... (shrink)

Confucius (551–479 BCE) is the Latinized name of Kong Qiu, best known in Chinese as Kongzi (Master Kong). Only partially successful in his public career, Confucius' private teaching inaugurated an era of reflectiveness and helped to define core elements of Chinese civilization. Subsequent generations of students built on his initial formulations to develop one of the world's great philosophical traditions, which in English we call “Confucianism”; various terms are used in Chinese, including Ru jia (the Scholars' School) and Dao xue (...) (the Learning of the Way). While later Confucian thinkers would develop elaborate frameworks of metaphysics, mind, and epistemology, Confucius' own teachings concentrated on ethics, politics, social values, and personal improvement. These teachings and the key terms in which they are phrased remained touchstones for the tradition ever after, and the Confucian tradition became absolutely central to what it meant to be Chinese. Given the scope of China and its civilization, it is no exaggeration to say that Confucius is among the most influential of humanity's thinkers. (shrink)

An overview of Zhu Xi's moral psychology, with a special focus on the metaphysical underpinnings and the relations between heartmind (xin), emotions (qing), and nature (xing). The authors explain how Zhu uses his account to balance the demand for independent standards of assessment with his commitment to ethical norms that virtuous agents can embrace wholeheartedly.

The contributors to this book rewrite Richter's history to include his pivotal role in the development of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and his political activism.

This paper presents an analysis and defense of competition in retail electricity supply. It includes some account of its development in the UK over the last dozen years, to the point where all retail price controls have now been removed. The development of this competition illustrates a number of the themes in Israel M. Kirzner’s writing – for example, the nature of competition as a process over time, the entrepreneurial and learning nature of this process, the role of marketing in (...) alerting customers, the role of competition in establishing price and in discovering the services and suppliers that customers prefer, and the advantages of competition over regulation.Cet article propose une analyse et une défense de la concurrence de l’offre de détail d’électricité. Il comporte quelques résultats de son évolution au Royaume-Uni durant les douze dernières années, jusqu’au moment où tous les contrôles de prix au détail ont été abolis. L’évolution de cette concurrence illustre quelquesuns des thèmes des écrits d’Israel Kirzner — par exemple, la nature de la concurrence en tant que processus à travers le temps, la nature entrepreneuriale et cognitive de ce processus, le rôle du marketing dans l’information des consommateurs, le rôle de la concurrence dans la fixation des prix et dans la découverte des services et des offreurs que les consommateurs préfèrent, et les avantages de la concurrence par rapport la réglementation. (shrink)

A consideration of the genetics of sociopathy suggests the following. The author's Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) types 2 to 4 are more likely than types 1 and 5 in crimes of violence, and there may not be an ESS for crimes of property or for sociopathy. Correlations between sociopathy and crimes of property are also more likely due to environmental than to genetic variants, and correlations between sociopathy and crimes of property are due more to environmental than genetic variants.

Lifelines by Steven Rose is supposed to present a new perspective on biology replacing an emphasis on genes with one on organisms. However, much of the book is a highly biased critique of sociobiology and behavior genetics. Some of the flaws in Rose's description and depiction of these fields are presented and refuted. Also, it would appear that these aspects of the book and many others are, in fact, related more to Rose's perennial concern for the ideology, social origins or (...) social consequences of behavioral biology. These concerns are, I believe based, in part, upon Rose's misunderstandings and misinterpretations of genetics, behavior genetics, and sociobiology. (shrink)

The self‐teaching hypothesis describes how children progress toward skilled sight‐word reading. It proposes that children do this via phonological recoding with assistance from contextual cues, to identify the target pronunciation for a novel letter string, and in so doing create an opportunity to self‐teach new orthographic knowledge. We present a new computational implementation of self‐teaching within the dual‐route cascaded (DRC) model of reading aloud, and we explore how decoding and contextual cues can work together to enable accurate self‐teaching under a (...) variety of circumstances. The new model (ST‐DRC) uses DRC’s sublexical route and the interactivity between the lexical and sublexical routes to simulate phonological recoding. Known spoken words are activated in response to novel printed words, triggering an opportunity for orthographic learning, which is the basis for skilled sight‐word reading. ST‐DRC also includes new computational mechanisms for simulating how contextual information aids word identification, and it demonstrates how partial decoding and ambiguous context interact to achieve irregular‐word learning. Beyond modeling orthographic learning and self‐teaching, ST‐DRC’s performance suggests new avenues for empirical research on how difficult word classes such as homographs and potentiophones are learned. (shrink)

Comments on L. T. Hoshmand & J. Martin's (see record 1995-28533-001) proposal for providing unity in psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin suggest that psychology may derive its own naturalized epistemology by studying and describing the activities in which psychologists are currently engaged, find successful, and how it is that they historically arrived at these practices. While Hoshmand and Martin's notion that an historico-descriptive analysis may be helpful for the study of psychology is not rejected, it is argued that a critical (...) examination of the theoretical bases of psychological research programs, as well as the theoretical assumptions of the historico-descriptive method itself, must precede its employment. (shrink)

Jones's system of constraints promises interesting insights into the typology of kin term systems. Three problems arise: (1) the conflation of categories with algorithms that assign them threatens to weaken the typological predictions; (2) OT-type constraints have little psychological plausibility; (3) the conflation of kin-term systems and kinship systems may underplay the “utility function” character of real kinship in action.

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 2 Seiten: 131-131.

How important is Jiang Qing, whose extraordinary proposals for political change make up the core of the new book A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future? In his Introduction to the volume, co-editor Daniel Bell maintains that Jiang’s views are “intensely controversial” and that conversations about political reform in China rarely fail to turn to Jiang’s proposals. At least in my experience, this is something of an exaggeration. Chinese political thinking today is highly pluralistic, (...) and for many participants Jiang is simply a curiosity—if indeed they are aware of him. Still, for three reasons Jiang is very much worth our attention. First, there is a vibrant and .. (shrink)

I approach this encounter with Joseph Chan’s important work on Confucian perfectionism from a fundamentally sympathetic standpoint. Most basically, I agree with two of his key premises. Confucianism is more than a rich historical tradition: it is a live strand of political theory, able to criticize and contribute to our lives today. But for modern Confucianism to be plausible and attractive, it must find a way to embrace the idea of limited government or constitutionalism in a deeper fashion than it (...) did historically. There are many other issues that Joseph covers in his book, and on many of these I am also in agreement with him. But my interest here is in the grounding of limited... (shrink)

Daniel Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, argues that natural selection is a universal acid that eats through other theories, because it can explain just about everything, even the structure of the mind. Emanuel Schegloff in ‘Between Micro and Macro: Context and Other Connections’ opposes the importation of ‘macro’ factors into the ‘micro’, suggesting that one might reverse the strategy instead. Like Darwin, he is coy about whether he just wants his own turf, but the idea opens up the possibility of (...) interactional reductionism. I will argue against interactional reductionism on methodological grounds: Don't bite off more than you can chew! Instead I'll support the good old Durkheimian strategy of looking for intermediate variables between systems of different orders. I try and make the case with data from Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea. (shrink)

This paper contains a discussion of a theory of laws of nature formulated recently by Michael Tooley. He sees the truth-makers for laws of nature as consisting of particular sorts of contingent relations between universals. He is not alone in this idea; it has also been advanced by Fred Dretske and D.M. Armstrong. However, its most thorough and detailed presentation is by Tooley. Being a challenging and stimulating idea, it merits investigation.