ExcerptTo the Columbia Community:Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are wellmeaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves1 by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia (...) University, who are connected to our community and deeply engaged with our culture and history. We would like to speak in our name. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo increase knowledge of how doctors perceive futile treatments and scarcity of resources at the end of life. In particular, their perceptions about whether and how resource limitations influence end-of-life decision making. This study builds on previous work that found some doctors include resource limitations in their understanding of the concept of futility.SettingThree tertiary hospitals in metropolitan Brisbane, Australia.DesignQualitative study using in-depth, semistructured, face-to-face interviews. Ninety-six doctors were interviewed in 11 medical specialties. Transcripts of the interviews were analysed using thematic (...) analysis.ResultsDoctors’ perceptions of whether resource limitations were relevant to their practice varied, and doctors were more comfortable with explicit rather than implicit rationing. Several doctors incorporated resource limitations into their definition of futility. For some, availability of resources was one factor of many in assessing futility, secondary to patient considerations, but a few doctors indicated that the concept of futility concealed rationing. Doctors experienced moral distress due to the resource implications of providing futile treatment and the lack of administrative supports for bedside rationing.ConclusionsDoctors’ ability to distinguish between futility and rationing would be enhanced through regulatory support for explicit rationing and strategies to support doctors’ role in rationing at the bedside. Medical policies should address the distinction between resource limitations and futility to promote legitimacy in end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

Much of the commentary in the wake of the Charlie Gard litigation was aimed at apparent shortcomings of the law. These include concerns about the perceived inability of the law to consider resourcing issues, the vagueness of the best interests test and the delays and costs of having disputes about potentially life-sustaining medical treatment resolved by the courts. These concerns are perennial ones that arise in response to difficult cases. Despite their persistence, we argue that many of these criticisms are (...) unfounded. The first part of this paper sets out the basic legal framework that operates when parents seek potentially life-sustaining treatment that doctors believe is against a child’s best interests, and describes the criticisms of that framework. The second part of the paper suggests an alternative approach that would give decision-making power to parents, and remove doctors’ ability to unilaterally withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment that they regard is futile. This proposal is grounded in several values that we argue should guide these regulatory choices. We also contend that the best interests test is justifiable and since the courts show no sign of departing from it, the focus should be on how to better elucidate the underlying values driving decisions. We discuss the advantages of our proposed approach and how it would address some of the criticisms aimed at the law. Finally, we defend the current role that the judiciary plays, as an independent state-sanctioned process with a precedent-setting function. (shrink)

Background Victoria was the first Australian state to legalize voluntary assisted dying (elsewhere known as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia). Some institutions indicated they would not participate in voluntary assisted dying. The Victorian government issued policy approaches for institutions to consider Objective To describe and analyse publicly available policy documents articulating an institutional objection to voluntary assisted dying in Victoria. Methods Policies were identified using a range of strategies, and those disclosing and discussing the nature of an institutional objection were thematically (...) analysed using the framework method. Results The study identified fifteen policies from nine policymakers and developed four themes: (1) extent of refusal to participate in VAD, (2) justification for refusal to provide VAD, (3) responding to requests for VAD, and (4) appeals to state-sanctioned regulatory mechanisms. While institutional objections were stated clearly, there was very little practical detail in most documents to enable patients to effectively navigate objections in practice. Conclusion This study demonstrates that despite having clear governance pathways developed by centralized bodies (namely, the Victorian government and Catholic Health Australia), many institutions’ public-facing policies do not reflect this guidance. Since VAD is contentious, laws governing institutional objection could provide greater clarity and regulatory force than policies alone to better balance the interests of patients and non-participating institutions. (shrink)

El texto presenta un adelanto de un profundo “trayecto” de trabajo colectivo en curso impulsado por un grupo de jóvenes investigadores y docentes que integran el Programa “Problemáticas comunicacionales barriales, organizacionales y políticas. Experiencias de lucha y resistencia a comienzos de siglo XXI en la provincia de Córdoba” (Argentina), desde el año 2011. La sistematización de las distintas experiencias, que presenta el libro, permite poner en común las peculiaridades de los contradictorios escenarios de conflicto y resistencia analizados, organizada en tres (...) capítulos que repasan con cuidadosa “vigilancia epistemológica” los procesos realizados con los actores sociales que integran los proyectos a saber: habitantes de las ciudades-barrio, trabajadores de la economía solidaria y vecinos e instituciones que forman parte de instancias participativas en los gobiernos locales. (shrink)

Os heróis japoneses estão cada vez mais presentes no cotidiano brasileiro, influenciando o público infanto-juvenil e pré-adolescente. O animê ganhou força na década de 60 através de Osamu Tezuka. Os personagens são orientais, mas a narrativa é construída a partir da cultura pop. Hoje a preocupação se volta para Bey Blade -desenho atuante no inconsciente, colocando a razão em último plano, prevalecendo a alienação e a exclusão social.

Partiendo de una serie de tesis respecto del significado de la negación lógica, se ofrece una reflexión acerca de la relación entre el pluralismo lógico y el estatus de ciertos principios lógicos fundamentales. El objetivo de este trabajo es mostrar que el Problema de la Adopción, tal como se encuentra formulado por Kripke-Padró, no representa un conflicto para una visión antiexcepcionalista de la lógica. Las leyes lógicas no poseen un status privilegiado, independientemente de que existan algunas que no podemos adoptar, (...) porque sí podemos decidir abandonar principios lógicos y es abandonando reglas y no adoptándolas como se revisa una teoría lógica; en consecuencia es aceptable un tipo de pluralismo lógico que parta de considerar que más de un conjunto de principios capturan de manera adecuada el significado de la negación. (shrink)

Medieval theology is, at times, still conventionally identified with systematic thought as exemplified by the works of scholastic thinkers such as the Franciscan friar, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, and the Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. However, this was not the only form of medieval theology. Influential studies have established that monastic theology can be treated as an older partner of scholasticism.1 An increasing number of scholars are adopting the concept of vernacular theology as a third theological tradition from medieval Christianity.2This essay considers vernacular (...) theology, with examples from late medieval Italy, and its relationship to a concept of translation.3 Reflections are drawn.. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas, se ha consolidado un campo de estudios alrededor de la expertise que articula enfoques y programas de investigación heterogéneos, según los modos de conceptualizar la relación entre ciencia y política, saber y poder, de fijar sus conexiones y de determinar el nivel del análisis para su abordaje. El corpus foucaulteano contiene herramientas analíticas fructíferas para el tratamiento sustantivo de la politicidad inherente a los saberes, al cuestionar las lecturas instrumentales de aquella relación e inscribir la actividad (...) especializada en estrategias de gobierno y en formas de resistencia hacia ellas. Sin embargo, las conceptualizaciones del saber experto desde una matriz foucaulteana registran cierta dispersión y, pese al avance de los estudios sobre gubernamentalidad en este aspecto, la ausencia de una reflexión sobre la categoría de expertise introduce el riesgo de que en estos análisis se establezca una cuestionable relación de coherencia y correspondencia entre saberes y racionalidades de gobierno. En este artículo, nos proponemos revisar el corpus foucaulteano y sistematizar otras claves de lectura sobre los saberes y su condición política, a fin de aportar con ello al campo de estudios sobre expertise. Examinamos la “hipótesis de la guerra”, mostramos su pulso en el ejercicio de saber y ponemos en juego estas coordenadas analíticas en un pequeño trabajo de archivo sobre una serie documental de textos de Hayek, a propósito de la articulación de la racionalidad neoliberal de gobierno. La conformación del corpus y el análisis de los textos se valieron, metodológicamente, de una traducción instrumental de tales coordenadas mediada por una perspectiva materialista del discurso. (shrink)

How does sign language compare with gesture, on the one hand, and spoken language on the other? Sign was once viewed as nothing more than a system of pictorial gestures without linguistic structure. More recently, researchers have argued that sign is no different from spoken language, with all of the same linguistic structures. The pendulum is currently swinging back toward the view that sign is gestural, or at least has gestural components. The goal of this review is to elucidate the (...) relationships among sign language, gesture, and spoken language. We do so by taking a close look not only at how sign has been studied over the past 50 years, but also at how the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech have been studied. We conclude that signers gesture just as speakers do. Both produce imagistic gestures along with more categorical signs or words. Because at present it is difficult to tell where sign stops and gesture begins, we suggest that sign should not be compared with speech alone but should be compared with speech-plus-gesture. Although it might be easier (and, in some cases, preferable) to blur the distinction between sign and gesture, we argue that distinguishing between sign (or speech) and gesture is essential to predict certain types of learning and allows us to understand the conditions under which gesture takes on properties of sign, and speech takes on properties of gesture. We end by calling for new technology that may help us better calibrate the borders between sign and gesture. (shrink)

Emotional processing and episodic memory are closely related throughout childhood development. With respect to emotional episodic memory, available evidence shows that the consolidation of information is accompanied by an arousal that generates longer duration and persistence of the memory representations. In the case of early stages of development (i.e., first 5 years), it is less clear how these associations emerge and are modulated by individual and environmental factors. In this study, 116 4- to 5-years old Argentinean children from different socio-environmental (...) contexts (i.e., favorable or unfavorable living conditions at home), performed a task of visual emotional memory in which they observed a set of 15 images with variable emotional valences (negative, neutral, and positive). The child’s task was to appraise each image using one of the following three possible valences: (a) drawings of faces with smiles (positive valence), (b) drawings of faces with tears and round mouth with edges down (negative valence), or (c) drawings of faces with horizontal mouth (neutral valence). Five years-old children exhibited greater accuracy appraisal. Individual differences in emotional accuracy appraisal allowed us to observe different performances in free recall of negative visual images. Accuracy appraisal did not vary between children with respect to gender, living conditions at home, or language ability. Seven to ten days after the emotional appraisal children were asked to tell the experimenter all the images they remembered (variables of interest: free recall of negative, positive, or neutral images). Results showed individual (age) differences. Specifically, 5-years-old children evoked more images than 4-years-old children. These findings contribute to the understanding of emotional memory in early developmental stages and raise the need to include emotional appraisal in the assessment of episodic memory. (shrink)

In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named—they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies. We present a computational model that accounts for the emergence of word-learning biases in children at both ends of the vocabulary spectrum based solely on vocabulary structure. The results of Experiment 1 (...) show that late-talkers' and early-talkers' noun vocabularies have different structures and that neural networks trained on the vocabularies of individual late talkers acquire different word-learning biases than those trained on early-talker vocabularies. These models make novel predictions about the word-learning biases in these two populations. Experiment 2 tests these predictions on late- and early-talking toddlers in a novel noun generalization task. (shrink)

Apology is arguably the central act of the reparative work required after wrongdoing. The analysis by Claudia Card of complicity in collectively perpetrated evils moves one to ask whether apology ought to be requested of persons culpably complicit in institutional evils. To better appreciate the benefits of and barriers to apologies offered by culpably complicit wrongdoers, this article examines doctors’ complicity in a practice that meets Card's definition of an evil, namely, the non-medically necessary, nonconsensual “normalizing” interventions performed on babies (...) born with intersex anatomies. It argues that in this instance the complicity of doctors is culpable on Card's terms, and that their culpable complicity grounds rightful demands for them to apologize. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the aspects of Mencius that did and did not interest Han-dynasty writers. With the help of digital concordances, it is easy to discover that many of the passages considered crucial today were rarely, if ever, cited in the Han. These include the parable of the infant about to fall into a well (2A.6), the debate with a Mohist named Yi Zhi 夷之 (3A.5), and the concept of liangzhi 良知 (7A.15), which, since Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1528), has been (...) considered a cornerstone of Mencian ethics. The chapter discusses other key passages that are never mentioned in Han sources. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and thus one cannot simply infer that these passages were unknown in the Han dynasty, but it remains significant that they were not regarded as essential to understanding Mencius’s philosophy. The conclusion will explore the differences between Mencius’s reception in the Han dynasty and his Neo-Confucianized reception today. (shrink)

Background In June 2016, Canada legalized medical assistance in dying (MAiD). From the outset, some healthcare institutions (including faith-based and non-faith-based hospitals, hospices, and residential aged care facilities) have refused to allow aspects of MAiD onsite, resulting in patient transfers for MAiD assessments and provision. There have been media reports highlighting the negative consequences of these “institutional objections”, however, very little research has examined their nature and impact. Methods This study reports on findings from 48 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with (...) MAiD assessors and providers, MAiD team members (working to coordinate care and lead MAiD programs in institutions and health authorities), and family caregivers on their experiences with institutional objection. Participants were recruited from the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. Data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Results Themes identified were: (1) basis for institutional objection (with objections commonly rooted in religious values and a particular philosophy of palliative care); (2) scope of objection (demonstrating a wide range of practices objected to); (3) lack of transparency regarding institutional position; (4) impacts on patients; (5) impacts on health practitioners; and (6) catalysts for change. Participants reported that many institutions’ objections had softened over time, lessening barriers to MAiD access and adverse impacts on patients and health practitioners. Participants attributed this positive change to a range of catalysts including advocacy by health practitioners and family members, policymaking by local health authorities, education, and relationship building. Nevertheless, some institutions, particularly faith-based ones, retained strong objections to MAiD, resulting in forced transfers and negative emotional and psychological impacts on patients, family members, and health practitioners. Conclusions This paper adds to the limited evidence base about the impacts of institutional objection and can inform practical and regulatory solutions in Canada and abroad. Reform is needed to minimize the negative impacts on patients, their caregivers, and health practitioners involved in MAiD practice. (shrink)

As Heraclitus, Cioran conceives man as a being that possesses lógos and is ruled in his life by it in its multiple aspects. Man not only makes use of word; this word also shapes him and traverses him entirely. Word is the necessary and intrinsic expression of every human being, and, as a result, he cannot elude it. In many of his works, Cioran warns us about the dangers that lógos has for man: not to find his genuine expression in (...) the midst of so many words, and to fall into totalizing fictions that lead us to deception and indoctrination. For this reason, in the midst of this misfortune, Cioran even considers silence as the only possible way out. However, if man denies the mark of language by avoiding all forms of expression, the anguish that his own existence entails will end up destroying him. Paradoxically, Cioran finds that the expression of lógos is the only possible salvation for man from the clutches of death, and that is, why by expressing oneself through lógos, one's own unhappiness becomes a necessary condition of life. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta reflexões teóricas sobre a atividade de ensino que se torna práxis bem-sucedida. Essa discussão gira em torno de duas categorias teóricas: atividade e afetação. A atividade, categoria teórica de base marxista, é discutida a partir dos aportes da psicologia sócio-histórica. A categoria afetação é aqui analisada com base na filosofia de Baruc de Espinosa. Realizamos este estudo a partir de pesquisa bibliográfica que tem como objetivo refletir sobre o que contribui para que o professor consiga realizar um (...) ensino capaz de afetar com alegria seus alunos levando ao desenvolvimento de uma práxis bem-sucedida. A pesquisa bibliográfica é realizada a partir dos teóricos da psicologia sócio-histórica, sobretudo Vygotsky e Leontiev. Da filosofia de Espinosa pesquisamos a obra Ética. Os resultados revelam que professores e alunos são sujeitos que se constituem historicamente, a partir de múltiplas mediações. Significados, sentidos e afetações são parte das mediações que constituem professores e alunos envolvidos em atividades de ensino consideradas exitosas. O estudo aprofundado acerca dessas categorias poderá contribuir de forma determinante para que o ensino, como atividade social que se realiza entre pessoas, possa tornar-se um encontro alegre, gerador de afetos que potencializem desejos e aumentem a potência de agir e pensar de professores e alunos, fato que contribui para a emancipação humana. Palavras-chave: Atividade de ensinar. Sentido e significado. Encontros alegres. Afetação. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, one of the richest depositories of rabbinic reflections on the study of the Torah. It is the earliest commentary on Abot, the only tractate of the Mishnah that does not deal with legal matters but exclusively with "agada," an unlimited variety of religious, ethical, and edifying subjects.

Debate a formação de educadores e de professores na sociedade contemporânea, com destaque para as políticas de formação de professores presentes na estrutura institucional do Estado e da sociedade brasileira. Analisa as condições históricas da produção das políticas de educação e, dentro delas, os aspectos de formação e de preparação de professores para as diversas etapas, graus e níveis da Educação Básica. Estuda as causas históricas e políticas do atraso cultural, institucional e político da organização da escola no Brasil e (...) debate as ressonâncias dessas contradições na vida cotidiana, na identidade subjetiva dos professores e em sua autoestima. Apresenta fundamentos filosóficos de uma formação docente para as relações humanas de igualdade e de alteridade, de dialeticidade e de elevação ética e estética. Apresenta a educação escolar como processo de formação humana e destaca a tarefa de educar como processo de desenvolvimento ou de formação humana. Apresenta as esperadas características de uma docência humanizadora e emancipatória. Enuncia processos humanistas e atitudes éticas de acolhimento voltados para as práticas de formação de professores, com destaque para os estágios e os percursos formativos. Destaca com esperanças as novas propostas de novas docências diante de novos sujeitos sociais e de novos desafios para a educação e a escola na sociedade tecnológica. (shrink)

Goldin thus begins the book by asking the basic question "What are we reading?" while also considering why it has been so rarely asked. Yet far from denigrating Chinese philosophy, he argues that liberating these texts from the mythic idea that they are the product of a single great mind only improves our understanding and appreciation. By no means does a text require single and undisputed authorship to be meaningful; nor is historicism the only legitimate interpretive stance. The first (...) chapter takes up a hallmark of Chinese philosophy that demands a Western reader's cognizance: its preference for non-deductive argumentation. Chinese philosophy is an art he demonstrates, more than it is a rigorous logical method. Then comes the core of the book, eight chapters devoted to the eight philosophical texts divided into three parts: Philosophy of Heaven, Philosophy of the Way, and Two Titans at the End of an Age.. (shrink)

Aristotle’s account of epistēmē is foundationalist. In contrast, the web of dialectical argumentation that constitutes justification for scientific principles is coherentist. Aristotle’s account of explanation is structurally parallel to the argument for a foundationalist account of justification. He accepts the first argument but his coherentist accounts of justification indicate that he would not accept the second. Where is the disanalogy? For Aristotle, the intelligibility of a demonstrative premise is the cause of the intelligibility of a demonstrated conclusion and causation is (...) asymmetric. Within the Posterior Analytics itself, Aristotle does not account for this, but elsewhere he develops the resources for doing so: the cause is what acts on a substrate to actualize a potential in that substrate, resulting in the effect. On the other hand, it may well happen that two propositions entail each other, in which case one may as well justify the one on the basis of the other as vice versa. (shrink)

BackgroundThis paper investigates the content of Australian policies that address withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment to analyse the guidance they provide to doctors about the allocation of resources.MethodsAll publicly available non-institutional policies on withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment were identified, including codes of conduct and government and professional organization guidelines. The policies that referred to resource allocation were isolated and analysed using qualitative thematic analysis. Eight Australian policies addressed both withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment and resource allocation.ResultsFour resource-related themes were (...) identified: doctors’ ethical duties to consider resource allocation; balancing ethical obligations to patient and society; fair process and transparent resource allocation; and legal guidance on distributive justice as a rationale to limit life-sustaining treatment.ConclusionOf the policies that addressed resource allocation, this review found broad agreement about the existence of doctors’ duties to consider the stewardship of scarce resources in decision-making. However, there was disparity in the guidance about how to reconcile competing duties to patient and society. There is a need to better address the difficult and confronting issue of the role of scarce resources in decisions about life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

Learning depends on attention. The processes that cue attention in the moment dynamically integrate learned regularities and immediate contextual cues. This paper reviews the extensive literature on cued attention and attentional learning in the adult literature and proposes that these fundamental processes are likely significant mechanisms of change in cognitive development. The value of this idea is illustrated using phenomena in children's novel word learning.

Medications of choice, necessary supplies, and evidence-based health care now seem like luxuries. The contrast between my experience at a well-funded health unit and the Lev El Lev (“heart to heart”) African Refugee Clinic in Tel Aviv, Israel, is staggering. The complex personal, social, health, psychological, educational, and economic difficulties create a unique ethical environment for the health care provider.

The article is an approach to the work of Colombian writer Manuel Mejía Vallejo having as starting point the recognition of the importance of memory for literary creation, especially the remembrance of childhood. It is evident in the work of Mejía Vallejo the intention of leaving proof of the time and space in which he lived, as well as a concern to work out the role of memory in the life of the human being. It is argued in the article (...) that the literary style of the author might be understood as a narrative of memory, where memory reaches the category of poetic. (shrink)

All languages, both spoken and signed, make a formal distinction between two types of terms in a proposition – terms that identify what is to be talked about (nominals) and terms that say something about this topic (predicates). Here we explore conditions that could lead to this property by charting its development in a newly emerging language – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). We examine how handshape is used in nominals vs. predicates in three Nicaraguan groups: (1) homesigners who are not (...) part of the Deaf com- munity and use their own gestures, called homesigns, to communicate; (2) NSL cohort 1 signers who fashioned the first stage of NSL; (3) NSL cohort 2 signers who learned NSL from cohort 1. We compare these three groups to a fourth: (4) native signers of American Sign Language (ASL), an established sign language. We focus on handshape in predicates that are part of a productive classifier system in ASL; handshape in these predicates varies sys- tematically across agent vs. no-agent contexts, unlike handshape in the nominals we study, which does not vary across these contexts. We found that all four groups, including home- signers, used handshape differently in nominals vs. predicates – they displayed variability in handshape form across agent vs. no-agent contexts in predicates, but not in nominals. Variability thus differed in predicates and nominals: (1) In predicates, the variability across grammatical contexts (agent vs. no-agent) was systematic in all four groups, suggesting that handshape functioned as a productive morphological marker on predicate signs, even in homesign. This grammatical use of handshape can thus appear in the earliest stages of an emerging language. (2) In nominals, there was no variability across grammatical con- texts (agent vs. no-agent), but there was variability within- and across-individuals in the handshape used in the nominal for a particular object. This variability was striking in homesigners (an individual homesigner did not necessarily use the same handshape in every nominal he produced for a particular object), but decreased in the first cohort of NSL and remained relatively constant in the second cohort. Stability in the lexical use of handshape in nominals thus does not seem to emerge unless there is pressure from a peer linguistic community. Taken together, our findings argue that a community of users is essential to arrive at a stable nominal lexicon, but not to establish a productive morpholog- ical marker in predicates. Examining the steps a manual communication system takes as it moves toward becoming a fully-fledged language offers a unique window onto factors that have made human language what it is. (shrink)

Despite their importance in public discourse, numbers in the range of 1 million to 1 trillion are notoriously difficult to understand. We examine magnitude estimation by adult Americans when placing large numbers on a number line and when qualitatively evaluating descriptions of imaginary geopolitical scenarios. Prior theoretical conceptions predict a log-to-linear shift: People will either place numbers linearly or will place numbers according to a compressive logarithmic or power-shaped function (Barth & Paladino, ; Siegler & Opfer, ). While about half (...) of people did estimate numbers linearly over this range, nearly all the remaining participants placed 1 million approximately halfway between 1 thousand and 1 billion, but placed numbers linearly across each half, as though they believed that the number words “thousand, million, billion, trillion” constitute a uniformly spaced count list. Participants in this group also tended to be optimistic in evaluations of largely ineffective political strategies, relative to linear number-line placers. The results indicate that the surface structure of number words can heavily influence processes for dealing with numbers in this range, and it can amplify the possibility that analogous surface regularities are partially responsible for parallel phenomena in children. In addition, these results have direct implications for lawmakers and scientists hoping to communicate effectively with the public. (shrink)

Chapter 49 of the Han Feizi, entitled 'Wudu', includes one of the earliest discussions in Chinese history of the concepts of gong and si: Han Fei takes si to mean 'acting in one's own interest'. Gong is simply what opposes si. 'Acting in one's own interest' is not inherently reprehensible in Han Fei's view; but a ruler must remember why ministers propose their policies: they are concerned only with enriching themselves, and look upon the ruler as nothing more than a (...) resource to be exploited in their quest for material aggrandizement. The interests of the ministers and the ruler are diametrically opposed. Ministers hope for a comfortable career; a ruler must weed out the posers in his search for those rare and invaluable adjuvants who are genuinely capable of administering the state. In short, if si is the self-interest of the minister, gong is the self-interest of the ruler. (shrink)

After decades of attempts, comparisons between classical Chinese and Greco-Roman philosophy have had limited success. While there have been some productive lines of inquiry (for example, comparing early Confucian ethics to virtue ethics as represented by Aristotle), the overall record is disappointing because concepts such as Plato’s theory of forms or Aristotle’s emphasis on syllogism have proved incommensurable with most classical Chinese ways of thinking. But much of the problem can be attributed to the habit of comparing Chinese thinkers to (...) Plato and Aristotle without asking whether they are the most suitable philosophers for this purpose. For most of the twentieth century, Hellenistic philosophy was scarcely considered. Yet very recently, provocative similarities have been identified between Chinese philosophy and Stoicism, especially Epictetus. I shall argue that these parallels are even more significant than previous scholarship has recognized (I hope to convince the reader that some of them are indeed staggering), and conclude by asking why we find such parallels in the first place. My claim will not be direct or even indirect transmission; this is a case, to borrow a distinction from evolutionary biology, of analogous rather than homologous development. -/- . (shrink)