Tianxia and renlei mingyun gongtongti are two Chinese concepts that are of significance for reflecting on ‘China and Global Development.’ Both present a revival of cosmopolitanism in China, while accompanied by a calling for Chinese rejuvenation. In defining cosmopolitanism in terms of two intrinsic conditions – common community and universal equality – I argue that cosmopolitanism rooted in the Chinese philosophical tradition may provide a distinct solution to the equality condition from the Western liberal-individualist ones. I propose the notion of (...) Confucian relational equality. There is indeed ‘inequality’ for the roles in a relation, in the sense that obligations and norms of conduct are defined differently and accomplished co-dependently. However, ideally, all full-fledged person-ings (understood as life stories in a society in a given historical period) are constituted by a dynamic and unfolding manifold of always specific relations concretized by various social roles, and usually do bear a comparable amount of functionally equivalent primary roles. As roles co-emerge among person-ings, relational equality is only possible when roles are continuously generated and sustained by transmission, which entails that community with a history, rather than an abstract and ontological individual, is a prerequisite. (shrink)

Hume claims in the Treatise that all virtuous actions derive their moral merit only from virtuous motives. Many scholars regard this statement as a universal axiom in Hume’s moral theory, and others read it as applying to all natural or non-artificial virtues. This paper challenges both of these readings. It argues that Hume does not endorse this statement universally since many virtuous qualities in his catalogue are not characterized by motives, and that he does not need to endorse it given (...) his conception of character and theory of moral sentiment. Moreover, many qualities not characterized by motives can also be classified as natural, according to the distinction between natural and artificial virtues offered in part 3, Book 3 of the Treatise. Finally, I propose some alternative interpretations of the proper scope and function of this principle of virtuous motives. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the optimal output feedback control problem for networked control systems with Markovian packet losses. In this paper, the packet losses occur both between the sensor and controller and between the controller and actuator. Moreover, the packet loss channels are described with two-state Markov chains. Since the precise state information cannot be obtained, thus an optimal recursive estimator is designed. Furthermore, by adopting the dynamic programming approach, we derive the optimal output feedback control, which is based (...) on the solution to a given modified Riccati equation. The obtained results can be seen as an important implementation of the control theory for NCSs with unreliable communication channels. (shrink)

Hume’s account of obligation has been widely discussed in the literature, but many aspects of his conception of obligation, including its definition, taxonomy, and scope, are still subjects of interpretative controversy. Some scholars read his concept of moral obligation as denoting a determining motive in regard to moral values, while some read it as identical to the approbation of virtue which cannot motivate by itself. I argue against both views in this thesis. The primary concern of Hume’s account of obligation, (...) in my reading, is not with motivation but with accommodating moral obligation in a virtue-centred moral theory. For him, the sentiment of moral obligation is a specific form of disapprobation, and it has different features when felt about ‘natural virtues’ like benevolence and ‘artificial virtues’ like justice. Noteworthily, for justice, considerations about law and obligation precede those about character, which makes justice an anomalous case for Hume’s virtue-centred theory, and he develops an account of the conventional origin of justice to explain its law-regulated features. The idea of obligation, on this account, arises from principles in human nature in a social and historical process but has features in tension with such principles’ natural inclinations. In Chapter 1, I delineate the basic features of Hume’s conception of obligation from both positive and negative perspectives. Chapter 2 discusses his taxonomy of obligation in the light of its relationship to natural law theories. Chapter 3 examines the nature, origin, and scope of the sentiment of moral obligation. Chapter 4 explores how concerns about features of the obligation to justice motivate Hume to propose a distinction between natural and artificial virtues. Then, Chapter 5 discusses how Hume constructs a genealogical account to explain the anomalous features of justice, and Chapter 6 explores whether and how this account can do its job. (shrink)

Mr. Tang Junyi is the son of the great scholar of Sichuan, Mr. Tang Difeng. As a child, he received much of the nurturing influence of the scholarship in his family; he was a wise young man from a very tender age, with many unusual thoughts. Since the publication of his essay "The theory of Nature in Xun Zi's Thought" when he was fifteen years old and still in middle school, Mr. Tang has pursued the road of a scholar and (...) a thinker with the utmost dedication, as indefatigably today, after several decades, as if it were only the beginning. In the end, with his accomplishments of moral conduct and wisdom, his widespread and profound influence as a teacher, and his magnificent accomplishments in scholarship, he has established an unmatched reputation among academic circles both at home and abroad, and has become an epoch-making philosopher of contemporary China who has stood far above his generation, remained unbent and unsubdued by the test of time, and has established his own school of thought for the ages. (shrink)

From the perspective of entrepreneurial team processes, this study examines the effect of dynamic team environment on entrepreneurial team innovation. Through applying the uncertainty reduction theory and group process theory, this study proposes the influence mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between dynamic team environment on entrepreneurial team innovation. By analyzing a sample of 270 entrepreneurial teams in China, this study found that dynamic team environment could evoke entrepreneurial team innovation via triggering team members’ agreement seeking behavior and then (...) promoting team knowledge integration. In addition, team centralization of decision making can weaken the relationship between agreement seeking behavior and team knowledge integration. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial teams’ reactions to dynamic environment and the multistep mechanism that transfers the impact of dynamic team environment to entrepreneurial team innovation through team members’ reactions and team interactions. (shrink)

If philosophy is the only discourse that has ever intended to receive its name from itself, and to leave nothing outside itself, what would be (Western) philosophy's relation to its (Chinese) other? This question is rethought through a rereading of three major Western philosophers, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and a Chinese philosopher, Feng Youlan. Philosophy is seen, on the one hand, to dialecticize its other but necessarily to fall short of its aim and, on the other, to claim for itself (...) uniqueness and originality but necessarily to be constituted by and through an other. Also, the claim made by the other of philosophy to the rightful title of "philosophy" can also turn out paradoxically to be a claim by philosophy to its other. (shrink)

Ideal interpretation is understanding a text in the best possible way. It is usually used when the text has a canonical status, such as the Bible or the U.S. Constitution. We argue that Zhu Xi’s view about interpreting the Four Books and Ronald Dworkin’s view about constitutional interpretation are examples of ideal interpretation and that their basic principles are similar. Each holds, roughly, that their target text contains moral truth; that the author’s mind requires the mediation of learning; that the (...) purpose of interpretation is not only to lead the reader to the moral truth but to become a better person; that all propositions are about the same moral truth or about political justice; that the interpretation ultimately must come from oneself, purged of prejudices; and that the only correct interpretation is one that captures the original meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I scrutinize the “rational beliefs” in the concept of rationalizability in strategic games [Bernheim, Pearce ]. I illustrate through an example that a rationalizable strategy may not be supported by a “rational belief”, at least under one plausible interpretation of “rational belief”. I offer an alternative formulation of “rational belief” in the concept of rationalizability, which yields a novel epistemic interpretation of the notion of point-rationalizability.

A survey article about the ethical tradition in China.

ABSTRACTTo assess the strength of Lloyd's conception of analogy, in particular, his innovative conceptual apparatus ‘the multidimensionality of reality’ and ‘the semantic stretch’, I propose the notion of hermeneutic mechanism as a rival tool of investigation. Hermeneutic mechanism manifests in the interaction of negative and positive hermeneutic forces, the dynamic interdependence between ideal universality and contextualized individuality, and the organism-like ‘hermeneutic circle’. I argue that hermeneutic mechanism not only offers a meta-methodological perspective for appreciating Lloyd's methodological development of analogy for (...) cross-cultural studies, but also incorporates both Lloyd's quest for diversity and his critique of logical dichotomy, and moreover overcomes the explicatory flaw in his ‘multidimensionality of reality’ and colour metaphor. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that creative cognitive reappraisal is highly effective in regulating negative emotions. We conducted three experiments to explore its transferability. In Experiment 1, we observed that free recall performance was better for creative reappraisal compared to non-creative reappraisal. Memory retention of reappraisals was associated with creativity ratings, but not with perceived effectiveness ratings. In Experiment 2, participants generated reappraisals for newly introduced unpleasant images before (pre-session) and after (post-session) exposure to creative reappraisal, non-creative reappraisal, and descriptive control (...) interpretation. Results showed increased reflective effectiveness of self-generated reappraisals in the post-session. The level of creativity of the self-generated reappraisals was associated with differences in perceived effectiveness between creative and non-creative exposed reappraisals. In Experiment 3, we investigated how two processing approaches (effectiveness-oriented vs. memory-oriented) influenced the transferability of creative reappraisal. We observed creativity levels of self-generated reappraisals increased in both conditions. The reflective effectiveness of the self-generated reappraisals tended to increase only in the effectiveness-oriented processing condition. Our findings demonstrate that recognising the effectiveness of creative reappraisal plays a crucial role in its transfer across different situations. (shrink)

Heart disease is the deadliest disease and one of leading causes of death worldwide. Machine learning is playing an essential role in the medical side. In this paper, ensemble learning methods are used to enhance the performance of predicting heart disease. Two features of extraction methods: linear discriminant analysis and principal component analysis, are used to select essential features from the dataset. The comparison between machine learning algorithms and ensemble learning methods is applied to selected features. The different methods are (...) used to evaluate models: accuracy, recall, precision, F-measure, and ROC.The results show the bagging ensemble learning method with decision tree has achieved the best performance. (shrink)

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia on May 7, 1999, triggered a sharp reaction from the Chinese government, and for three consecutive days after May 8 there were violent anti-American demonstrations, with the emergence of a powerful wave of anti-American nationalism among the populace in mainland China. The May Eighth Incident was the most important political incident in China in the 1990s. Not only will this incident have a major impact on relations between China and (...) the United States, and among China and its peripheral countries and regions, but the nationalism it has triggered will be a constant and major political factor with far-reaching effects on the political culture and political options in the era of "post-omnipotentism". (shrink)

A function is boundedly finite-to-one if there is a natural number $k$ such that each point has at most $k$ inverse images. In this paper, we prove in $\textsf{ZF}$ (i.e. the Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory without the axiom of choice) several results concerning this notion, among which are the following: (1)For each infinite set $A$ and natural number $n$, there is no boundedly finite-to-one function from $\mathcal{S}(A)$ to $\mathcal{S}_{\leq n}(A)$, where $\mathcal{S}(A)$ is the set of all permutations of $A$ and $\mathcal{S}_{\leq (...) n}(A)$ is the set of all permutations of $A$ moving at most $n$ points. (2) For each infinite set $A$, there is no boundedly finite-to-one function from $\mathcal{B}(A)$ to $\textrm{fin}(A)$, where $\mathcal{B}(A)$ is the set of all partitions of $A$ such that every block is finite and $\textrm{fin}(A)$ is the set of all finite subsets of $A$. (shrink)

Based on the quarterly data of mutual funds in China from the fourth quarter of 2004 to the fourth quarter of 2019, this paper constructs a series of complex bipartite networks based on the overlapped portfolios of mutual funds and then explores the influences of fund network position on mutual fund’s investment behavior and performance. This paper finds that a mutual fund with shorter information transmission path to other entities in the fund network or with stronger ties with those entities (...) in important information positions will achieve better investment performance. However, a stronger mediating role over the potential information flow of the fund network cannot help a mutual fund increase performance. The empirical results also indicate that a mutual fund holding stock portfolios with high valuation difficulties caused by the market or fundamental information uncertainty will achieve better investment performance, while holding hard-to-value portfolios caused by limited public information will reduce the performance of the fund. Furthermore, high closeness centrality or eigenvector centrality can help mutual funds deal with the disclose problems of public information, thus reducing the likelihood of a mutual fund holding hard-to-value portfolios caused by limited public information to achieve worse performance. Eigenvector centrality brings information advantages about company fundamentals, so it is easier for a mutual fund with high eigenvector centrality to profit from holding hard-to-value portfolios caused by the fundamental information uncertainty. The conclusions of this paper can enhance our understanding of the fund network and its information mechanism and shed new light on mutual fund’s information advantages and related asset allocation strategies. (shrink)

The conceptual changes of Jian儉 in the pre-Qin period were the results of changes in the social and political structure. It originally referred to Jian virtue, which was a kind of political norm of clan states. This required the aristocrats to be moderate in accordance with the patriarchal hierarchy and generously share their wealth with their own clansmen. The opposite of Jian virtue is Tan and Chi. In the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, many states formed their politics (...) based on ministerial families. The aristocrats glorified greed and extravagance as Fu, and stigmatized Jian virtue as Pin. After the collapse of the clan-based state order, the states in the Warring States Period gradually developed into territorial states, and the institutional political norm became a new, abstract concept, indicated by the compound Jian Yue and was used to describe the consumption attitudes of individuals and families. Meanwhile, with the increase of social mobility, the pursuit of riches was highly popular in the ideological world. The new expression of “means-ends” advocated by Legalists, which stipulated that individuals and families acquire wealth through Jian Yue, took shape and endures to this day. (shrink)

Sun Yatsen , pioneer of modern China's great democratic revolution, was a materialist philosopher. Inheriting the tradition of simple materialism of ancient China and absorbing modern Western mechanistic materialist thought, he relied on a knowledge of the natural sciences to develop his own naturalistic view of mechanistic materialism. This was an important element in the structure of his world view.

The development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has raised many concerns about privacy violations in the public. Thus, privacy-preserving computation technologies (PPCTs) have been developed, and it is expected that these new privacy protection technologies can solve the current privacy problems. By not directly using raw data provided by users, PPCTs claim to protect privacy in a better way than their predecessors. They still have technical limitations, and considerable research has treated PPCTs as a privacy-protecting tool and focused (...) on possible technical improvements. In this article, we argue that PPCTs cannot effectively protect privacy in the narrow sense due to their technical limitations. Moreover, although these shortcomings could be remedied, they still fall into a paradox because their aim is to protect privacy, but they could reveal private information from users. This paradox of privacy protection not only aggravates the social impact arising from AI privacy issues but may also make the current privacy protection lose its meaning, resulting in a situation in which privacy protection is useless. (shrink)

Daniel A. Bell’s searching for the possible alternatives to liberal democracy in light of the political progresses in the Asian countries spans two decades, culminating in his proposal of the so-called Chinese political meritocracy or xianneng zhengzhi. This article indicates the conceptual asymmetry between xianneng zhengzhi and “meritocracy” in three aspects. Firstly, xianeng zhengzhi remains at the brighter end of the spectrum of political ideas while “meritocracy” is bogged down in a highly polarized reception. Secondly, “meritocracy” lacks the quintessence of (...) xianneng zhengzhi, namely, an explicit stress on priority of moral worthiness. Thirdly, “meritocracy” is built upon foundational individualism and focuses on the individual performance and achievement. Although Confucian political tradition and the Western conception of meritocracy share some functional similarities, using the synthesized term “Confucian meritocracy” to introduce the Confucian political tradition may commit a cross-cultural hermeneutic fallacy. (shrink)

There is a bifurcation between shenghuo meixue and everyday aesthetics – the two discourses often seen as forming the same trend in contemporary aesthetics concurrently happening in the East and the West. The disparity can be observed from the critical reflection on everydayness, the recognition of negative aesthetic qualities and experience, and the expectation of defamiliarisation. I suggest that in the Neo-Confucian practice of gewu or investigating things, one may find another Chinese inspiration for dealing with the familiar, ordinary, and (...) routine aesthetically. Gewu offers another possibility of “experiencing the ordinary as ordinary”. It can lead to an aesthetical immersive experience, characterised by a sensuous and intuitive recognition of the appropriateness of everyday things dwelling in their contexts, as well as a cosmic understanding of generative power of the universe that is both profound and poetic. By contemplating aesthetic experience facilitated by gewu, I argue that aesthetic experience is typically not individual per se, but collective in the sense that many prima facie private and personal aesthetic experiences are possible only because of the collective underneath. (shrink)