This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

In Book 2 of The Peloponnesian War, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides describes the Plague of Athens which killed an estimated 75,000 people in 430 BC, the second year of the war. Thucydides i...

Jason Clower publishes English translations of this most famous and influential of modern Chinese philosophers for the first time. In essays chosen for their clarity and approachability, this leading contemporary Confucian speaks on the topics that best define his career: the future of Chinese culture and philosophy, the unique achievements of Confucianism, the place of Buddhism and Daoism in Chinese culture, and the possibility of a new partnership between Chinese and Western thought.

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

v. 1-32. Mou Zongsan xian sheng quan ji -- [33] Mou Zongsan xian sheng quan ji. Zong xu xiang mu.

Through a comparative case analysis regarding the Chinese language, it is discussed how the structure and functions of a natural language would bear upon the ways in which some philosophical problems are posed and some ontological insights shaped. Disagreeing with Chad Hansen's mass-noun hypothesis, a collective-noun hypothesis is argued for: (1) the denotational semantics and relevant grammatical features of Chinese nouns are like those of collective nouns; (2) their implicit ontology is a mereological ontology of collection-of-individuals with both part-whole and (...) member-class structure; and (3) encouraged and shaped by the folk semantics of Chinese nouns, classical Chinese theorists of language take this kind of mereological nominalism for granted. (shrink)

In this journal theme introduction, first, I explain how comparative philosophy as explored in the journal Comparative Philosophy is understood and how it is intrinsically related to the constructive engagement strategy. Second, to characterize more clearly and accurately some related methodological points of the constructive-engagement strategy, and also to explain how constructive engagement is possible, I introduce some needed conceptual and explanatory resources and a meta-methodological framework and endeavor to identify adequacy conditions for methodological guiding principles in comparative studies. Third, (...) as a case analysis, I show how the constructive-engagement reflective practice bears on recent studies of Chinese and comparative Chinese-Western philosophy, especially in the past decade, for two purposes: to illustrate the foregoing theoretic characterization of the constructive engagement strategy, and to identify and explain some constructive morals that might have general significance for comparative studies. (shrink)

How are Chinese philosophy and analytic philosophy-two very distinct traditions-alike? In this volume, fifteen distinguished scholars compare and contrast the methodologies, finding areas in which each tradition can learn from, contribute to, and complement the other.

In this paper, I suggest an approach to the alleged problem with the Tarskian formal definition of truth: its enumerative character seems to make it unable to capture our pretheoretic general understanding of truth. For this purpose, after spelling out two requirements for extending an enumerative definition to new cases, I examine to what extent Tarski's Convention T provides what are needed for extending the Tarski's enumerative definition. I conclude that, though not explicitly providing what are needed, Convention T does (...) implicitly suggest something quite promising and provide necessary conceptual resources for its further modifications. Then I suggest a Tarskian explicitly general definition of what it is to be a truth-definition on the basis of some theoretical and conceptual resources within Tarski's semantic theory, and I explain how it would make the Tarskian seemingly enumerative formal definition have a general character in accord with our pretheoretic understanding of truth. Finally, I examine the current proposal in comparison with Davidson's approach and in the light of Hintikka's new perspective. (shrink)

In this article, through a comparative analysis of Dewey's and Laozi's relevant accounts, I examine a pragmatic insight concerning moral rules and moral experience to the effect that (i) fixed and formulated moral rules should not be taken as the final absolute moral authority, and (ii) attention needs to be paid to the moral agent's own moral experience that responds to the felt demands in concrete situations. The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding the crucial points of the (...) pragmatic insight and to look at how, in certain complementary ways, Dewey's and Laozi's distinct approaches could contribute to the pragmatic insight and learn from each other. I endeavour to show several points: (1) The pragmatic insight has its distinct metaphysical foundations in Dewey's and Laozi's accounts, whose combination could enhance each other's visions and overcome each other's limitations; (2) Both Dewey and Laozi reject some sharp dualism to look at the nature of moral experience that responds to the felt demands in concrete situations; in so doing, their distinct focuses on different aspects, or developing stages, of such moral experience could be complementarily coordinated into a whole; (3) Their characterisations of the pragmatic insight are also based upon their distinct but related naturalistic perspectives to human moral foundation; Laozi's approach could provide some constructive insight for and due natural limitations on Dewey's account. (shrink)

In this article I intend, on the basis of some previous relevant works on the issue, to further examine a range of conditions for maintaining adequate methodological guiding principles concerning how to look at the relation between distinct methodological perspectives in comparative-engagement exploration in philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to explore how, in the global context, distinct approaches in philosophy can be engaged in order toconstructively talk to each other and make a joint contribution to the development of (...) philosophy and society. (shrink)

This book is an inquiry into the philosophical concern with truth as one joint subject in philosophy of language and metaphysics and presents a theory of truth, substantive perspectivism (SP). Emphasizing our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth (i.e., what is captured by the axiomatic thesis of truth that the nature of truth consists in capturing the way things are), and in the deflationism vs. substantivism debate background, SP argues for the substantive nature of non-linguistic truth and its notion’s indispensable substantive (...) explanatory role, both of which are not only intrinsically beyond what the linguistic function of the truth predicate can tell but are fundamentally related to the raison d’être of the truth predicate. Taking a holistic approach, SP endeavors to do justice to various reasonable perspectives, which are somehow contained in many competing accounts of truth, through a coordinate system: SP interprets such perspectives as distinct but related perspective-elaboration principles that distinctively (regarding distinct dimensions of the truth concern and/or for the sake of distinct purposes) elaborate, but are also unified by, the truth axiom thesis. To look at the issue from a broader vision, the book also takes a cross-tradition approach exploring the relationship between Daoist thinking of truth and thinking about truth in analytic philosophy.This book will enhance our systematic understanding of the issue through its holistic approach, broaden our vision on the issue via its cross-tradition approach, and enrich the conceptual and explanatory resources in treating the issue. (shrink)

From the vantage point of comparative philosophy, this anthology explores how analytic and "Continental" approaches in the Western and other philosophical traditions can constructively engage each other and jointly contribute to the contemporary development of philosophy.

Whole Set of Contents of Current Issue (for cross-reference reading and hard-copy preservation of the whole issue).

In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical examination of three major orientations in comparative studies (i.e., historical one, interpretation-concerned one, and philosophical-issue-concerned one) and four 'sins' that are oft-cited in critically evaluating a comparative study, namely over-simplification, over-use of external resources, exaggerated distinction, and blurring assimilation. I argue that the appropriateness of these 'sins' depends on orientations, purposes and methodological approaches in comparative studies and that, in those comparative studies with the interpretation-concerned and philosophicalissue- concerned orientations, due simplification, use of (...) external resources and assimilation are not merely legitimate but also adequate or even necessary. In so doing, I explain how constructive engagement between Chinese and Western philosophy, or, more generally speaking, between different philosophical traditions, is related to contemporary development and resources of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical analysis of the core idea of deflationism by discussing some basic conceptual and methodological issues involved in the debate between deflationism and substantivism. In so doing, I argue for three positive points. First, the crux of the dispute between deflationism and substantivism is whether or not truth is substantive in its metaphysical nature and in its explanatory role in philosophical enterprises, rather than whether or not a minimal approach regarding conceptual resources is taken (...) to explain truth; a minimal approach itself is philosophically innocent. Second, there is no intrinsic connection between the core idea of deflationism and the Tarski-style equivalence thesis, which is often identified as implying or supporting the former. Third, there are some unbridged fundamental gaps between the core idea of deflationism and various redundancy theses; these redundancy theses cannot be identified as the former, nor can they be used to justify the former on their own. (shrink)

In reflective explorations of the nature of truth in the philosophical concern with truth (as conceived in people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth), there are two seemingly opposed strategic directions of explaining the relationship between the two closely related but distinct basic semantic notions, truth (with sentential truth bearers) and reference (with referring terms at the subject position): by virtue of which to hook up to the world in the fundamental relationship between language, thought and the world; eventually which one is (...) more fundamental in this connection, explaining truth by virtue of reference or explaining reference by virtue of truth. In this essay, through elaborating a holistic double-reference explanatory basis of truth, I explain how our pre-theoretic “way-things-are-capturing” understanding of truth fundamentally plays its normative-basis role for a unifying pluralist account of truth through the complementary interplay of its vertical “double-reference-based” dimension and horizontal “sentential-predication-based” dimension. For illustration and for a relatively complete understanding, in Appendix, I present a sample version of the suggested unifying pluralist account of truth which consists of the referentially enhanced base account, as explained in this essay, and sample accounts of some distinct types of perspective elaborations. (shrink)

What I intend to do here are closely related three things. First, in response to Searle’s “reply” comments on my previous article “Searle, Zhuang Zi, and Transcendental Perspectivism”, I will clarify and further elaborate one of the central points concerning the “perspective” dimension and “perspective-transcending” dimension of consciousness there. Second, more substantially, I will strengthen my point by explaining the “double-aboutness” character of consciousness which is intrinsically related to the foregoing two dimensions of consciousness concerning its “hooking-up-to-objects” capacity; through a (...) semantic-ascent strategy, I will also explain how the point has substantial theoretic implications for exploring the issue of how the cross-perspective engagement is possible. Third, I will explain how bridging Searle’s and Zhuang Zi’s resources in view of the double-aboutness character of consciousness can contribute to our understanding and treatment of the foregoing issue. (shrink)

"This book examines various issues concerning philosophical methodology, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and logic, and investigates both the living-spring source of Chinese philosophy and its contemporary implications and development through contemporary resources." -- Half t.p.

The History of Chinese Philosophy is a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the movements and thinkers that have shaped Chinese philosophy over the last three thousand years. An outstanding team of international contributors provide seventeen accessible entries organised into five clear parts: Identity of Chinese Philosophy Classical Chinese Philosophy : Pre-Han Period Classical Chinese Philosophy : From Han Through Tang Classical Chinese Philosophy : From Song Through Early Qing Modern Chinese Philosophy: From Late Qing Through 21st Century This outstanding collection (...) is essential reading for students of Chinese philosophy, and will be of interest to those seeking to explore the lasting significance this rich and complex philosophical tradition. (shrink)

College underachievers’ educational transformation is the important work to comprehensively cultivate the builders and successors of the socialism with Chinese characteristics, but a hard, sensitive, and complex work. Starting from the root of this problem, this article puts forward the “people-oriented” educational concept and research method, explores the work art of underachievers’ educational transformation, in order to comprehensively enhance the effect of educational transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to present and explain a meta-philosophical methodological framework of how to look at seemingly competing approaches for the sake of cross-tradition understanding and constructive engagement in comparative philosophy in a global context. For this purpose, first, I introduce and explain some relevant conceptual and explanatory resources employed in the framework, especially the distinction between the methodological perspective and the methodological guiding principle, and make some initial methodological points. Second, I suggest six meta-philosophical adequacy conditions (...) for adequate methodological guiding principles, which constitute one core portion of the suggested methodological framework. (shrink)