The Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) concept is a comprehensive Chinese proposal for a better future of mankind. In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of this concept by focusing on its origin, evolution and philosophical foundation. This article deals with the origin and evolution of the CSFM concept. We show that the concept originated during the presidency of Hu Jintao, who initially used it for the domestic affairs of China. However, the usage of the concept was (...) later extended from domestic to international affairs. Though Hu Jintao conceived the CSFM concept, it is president Xi Jinping who became its greatest advocate. We explore the CSFM concept’s development and evolution into one of the most influential, diverse and dominant concepts of international relations under president Xi. Furthermore, the article explores the philosophical foundation of the CSFM concept. We argue that although CSFM concept is seen as a 21st century Chinese idea, the roots of the concept can be traced back to much earlier time in history. The concept is based on three major philosophical thoughts: Marxism, Confucianism and the philosophy of Mencius. We show that the CSFM concept is greatly influenced by Marx’s ideas such as the transformation of the world, the free association of producers, historical materialism and dialectics. We also point to a number of Confucian principles that are adopted by the CSFM concept. The CSFM concept not only adopts Confucian principles but also extends their scope from the individual level to international relations. Similarly, we also highlight that the CSFM concept is influenced by Mencius’ concepts such as universal brotherhood, responsibility towards the betterment of the world, humane governance, free trade, equal sharing of wealth and the conservation of natural resources. (shrink)

abstract: This paper considers the challenge of transcending partisan and ideological attachments in the work of peace activism through the Buddhist hermeneutic of nonduality. The Diamond Sutra as well as the witness and teaching of Thích Nhất Hạnh form the foundation of the paper's argument. It first recalls Nhất Hạnh's contribution to peace activism, especially his radical stance of neutrality and peace at any cost, which caused him to be marginalized by the American peace movement during the Vietnam War. It (...) then presents the teaching of the Diamond Sutra, where the Buddha challenges the bodhisattva to practice acts of generosity without being attached to the signs of self, person, living being, and life span. Nhất Hạnh's teaching of interbeing is invoked to help explain the dialectical logic of the Diamond Sutra. Finally, the same bodhisattva ideal is shown to be found in the teaching and example of Jesus in the New Testament. The paper concludes with the belief that both Christianity and Buddhism demand from their followers a radical transformation of consciousness that transcends egoism and dualism. (shrink)

Many empirical studies have been conducted to investigate self-regulated learning in the Western countries. Less well investigated is the SRL in the Chinese Mainland students and how it affects their academic achievement. On the basis of PISA 2009, this paper is aimed at exploring the SRL of 15-year-old Shanghai students, as measured by cognitive strategy, metacognition, and motivational belief. In the aspect of SRL nature, the results reveal that 15-year-old students in Shanghai use elaboration strategy frequently and seldom use memorization (...) strategy, and that they have high metacognition in understanding, remembering, and summarizing but have low control strategy, and that their enjoyment of reading is relatively high. In the aspect of SRL’s consequence for reading literacy, findings from multilevel linear regression corroborate previous evidence from the Western countries about the effect of SRL on academic achievement. Specifically, elaboration strategy, metacognition in understanding and remembering, metacognition in summarizing, control strategy, and enjoyment of reading are conducive to students’ reading literacy, while memorization strategy exerts a significantly negative effect on reading literacy. The findings could be useful in helping us to gain a better understanding of Shanghai students’ SRL. (shrink)

The approach of returning to the original and recovering nature is a typical characteristic of Chinese philosophy. It was founded by the Daoist School and followed by both Daoist and Confucian schools. The precondition of returning to the original and recovering nature is the stillness and goodness within nature integrated into a whole afterwards. Its implementation includes not only returning to the original root so as to achieve the philosophical aim but also restoration to the original nature after it is (...) injured by man’s physical nature and desire. The realization of human nature depends on the work making up for the loss of the original nature. Although there are different methods of realization concerning the return to the original nature, such as returning to the root, seeking the lost mind, extinguishing desire, being good at return, and the self-consciousness of intuitive knowledge, all of these aim at returning to the original nature of stillness and purity. The philosophical value consists in the unceasing pursuit of returning to the original nature. (shrink)

Through a key passage (Xici 2.2) from the Book of Changes, this paper shows that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms shares similarities with the canonical account of symbolic formation in the Chinese tradition: the genesis of xiang (象), often translated as image or symbol. xiang became identified with the origins of culture/civilisation itself. In both cases, the world is understood as primordially (phenomenologically) meaningful; the expressiveness of the world requires a human subject to consummate it in a (...) symbol, whilst the symbol in turn gives us access to higher orders of meaning. It is the self-conscious creation of the symbol that then allows for the higher forms of culture. For both the Xici and Cassirer, symbols and the symbolic consciousness that comes with it is the pre-condition for the freedom, ethics and the cultivation of agency. As for both the Xici and Cassirer, it is human agency that creates these symbols, it will be argued that the Xici is making a Cassirerian argument about the (ethical) relationship between human agency, symbols and ethics/freedom. (shrink)

This volume brings the first English translation of the Confucian classics Four Books for Women, with extensive commentaries, to the English-speaking world. Written by women for women's education, this work provides an invaluable look at the tradition of Chinese women's writing, education, history, and philosophy, from the 1st to the 16th century.

On January 1, 1958, in the journal Democratic Critique, Zhang Junmai, Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, and Xu Fuguan published the "Manifesto on Chinese Culture for the World: Our Common Understanding of Chinese Scholarship Research and of the Future of Chinese Culture and World Culture."1 This manifesto is commonly seen as the founding statement of the New Confucianism movement. Section 2 of the manifesto, "Three Motives, Approaches, and their Shortcomings in the Study of Chinese Culture in World Scholarship," claimed that Chinese (...) culture had not been understood by three kinds of people who had approached it, namely, Christian missionaries, sinologists, and students of present world history. For the New Confucians, the... (shrink)

This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, and Herder’s (...) account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times. (shrink)

Kirk Lougheed argues that active euthanasia (here ‘euthanasia’) is impermissible for people who are extremely sick and cannot exercise their vital forcei because (1) exercising vital force does not require volition but only being an object of caring relationships and (2) African philosophy entails other-regarding deontological duties to stay alive.1 In this commentary, we point out an implication of Lougheed’s view that is morally problematic and offer a revision that avoids this implication. We also argue for an additional advantage of (...) this revision. Lougheed’s view implies that a person who is the object of very few relationships has a much weaker duty to stay alive than a person who is well-loved and the object of many relationships. This is because he seems to think that duties to stay alive are derived entirely from one’s relationship with other people. While he is clear that a person, even if terminally ill or permanently unconscious, has a duty to stay alive so that they could remain the object of harmonious relationships, he is silent on whether duties to stay alive could be grounded in reasons that have to do with oneself. Plausibly, on this view, the strength of one’s duty to stay alive depends solely …. (shrink)

In most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective predicates argues that sometimes a wh-question must be interpreted with a higher-order reading, in which this question calls for an answer that names a generalized quantifier. This paper investigates the distribution and compositional derivation of higher-order readings of wh-questions. First, I argue that the generalized quantifiers that (...) can serve as semantic answers to wh-questions must be homogeneously positive. Next, on the distribution of higher-order readings, I observe that questions in which the wh-complement is singular-marked or numeral-modified can be answered by elided disjunctions but not by conjunctions. I further present two ways to account for this disjunction–conjunction asymmetry. In the uniform account, these questions admit disjunctions because disjunctions may satisfy the atomicity requirement of singular-marking and the cardinality requirement of numeral modification. In the reconstruction account, the wh-complement is syntactically reconstructed, which gives rise to local uniqueness and yields a contradiction for conjunctive answers. (shrink)

In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the (...) classical age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a "symbolic animal." The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post-Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture" by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition. (shrink)

IntroductionDuring the COVID-19 outbreak, many citizens were asked to stay at home in self-quarantine, which can pose a significant challenge with respect to remaining physically active and maintaining mental health. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of inadequate physical activity, anxiety, and depression and to explore the relationship of physical activity with anxiety and depression symptoms among Chinese college students during quarantine.MethodUsing a web-based cross-sectional survey, we collected data from 1,396 Chinese college students. Anxiety and depression were assessed with (...) the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale and the Self-Rating Depression Scale, respectively. The data on physical activity were collected by types of physical activity and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire.ResultsDuring the COVID-19 outbreak, about 52.3% of Chinese college students had inadequate physical activity. The rates of anxiety and depression symptoms were 31.0 and 41.8%, respectively. A high level of physical activity was significantly closely associated with low anxiety, while a moderate, or high level of physical activity was significantly closely associated with reduced depression after adjusting confounding demographic factors. Moreover, specific types of physical activity, such as stretching and resistance training, were negatively correlated with both anxiety and depression; doing household chores was negatively correlated with depression.ConclusionOur findings highlight specific levels and types of home-based physical activities that need to be taken into consideration to protect the mental health of college students during the COVID-19 epidemic. (shrink)

In a previous article we have shown that Kuhn's theory of concepts is independently supported by recent research in cognitive psychology. In this paper we propose a cognitive re-reading of Kuhn's cyclical model of scientific revolutions: all of the important features of the model may now be seen as consequences of a more fundamental account of the nature of concepts and their dynamics. We begin by examining incommensurability, the central theme of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, according to two different (...) cognitive models of concept representation. We provide new support for Kuhn 's mature views that incommensurability can be caused by changes in only a few concepts, that even incommensurable conceptual systems can be rationally compared, and that scientific change of the most radical sort—the type labeled revolutionary in earlier studies—does not have to occur holistically and abruptly, but can be achieved by a historically more plausible accumulation of smaller changes. We go on to suggest that the parallel accounts of concepts found in Kuhn and in cognitive science lead to a new understanding of the nature of normal science, of the transition from normal science to crisis, and of scientific revolutions. The same account enables us to understand how scientific communities split to create groups supporting new paradigms, and to resolve various outstanding problems. In particular, we can identify the kind of change needed to create a revolution rather precisely. This new analysis also suggests reasons for the unidirectionality of scientific change. (shrink)

本书系统梳理了中国传统忠伦理的起源,演变等脉络和轨迹,深入挖掘了其在不同历史时期的内涵及价值,从而汲取传统忠伦理的尽心尽力,忠心奉公等丰厚滋养,使忠的核心观念与社会主义核心价值观中的"爱国""敬业"" 诚信""友善"等有机衔接,融通, 建构现代忠诚观念,以更好地将忠于国家和人民的社会公德,忠于职守的职业道德,忠于家庭的家庭美德,忠于他人的个人品德等伦理原则付诸实践.

When a widely reused ontology appears in a new version which is not compatible with older versions, the ontologies reusing it need to be updated accordingly. Ontobull has been developed to automatically update ontologies with new term IRI(s) and associated metadata to take account of such version changes. To use the Ontobull web interface a user is required to (i) upload one or more ontology OWL source files; (ii) input an ontology term IRI mapping; and (where needed) (iii) provide update (...) settings for ontology headers and XML namespace IDs. Using this information, the backend Ontobull Java program automatically updates the OWL ontology files with desired term IRIs and ontology metadata. The Ontobull subprogram BFOConvert supports the conversion of an ontology that imports a previous version of BFO. A use case is provided to demonstrate the features of Ontobull and BFOConvert. (shrink)

This discussion seeks to highlight the ability of poetry to combat loneliness, a growing public health problem with significant negative health outcomes that potentially impact millions of Americans. We argue that poetry can play a very relevant role and have an impact in medicine. Through a brief literature review of previous studies on poetry in medicine, we demonstrate that poetry can not only combat loneliness but can also play important roles in helping patients, physicians, and other healthcare professionals/providers. Because of (...) the COVID-19 pandemic, we believe now is the perfect opportunity to utilize poetry because the benefits can be experienced even in solitude, which is why this is such a timely and pertinent issue today. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease is having an unprecedented and unpredictable impact on the world's economy. The pandemic has driven the world toward adapting to the current circumstances regardless of the business, sector, or industry. The coronavirus epidemic has affected the global economy and service sector. The purpose of the current study is to assess the effect of COVID-19 on service sector growth and sustainability. Global sectors and industries are trying to anchor themselves amidst the pandemic. The study focuses on the sectors that (...) are badly hit by the outbreak and discussed the strategies and responses different countries are taking to sustain their economies. This study concludes that the vital role of Information Technology and digitization supports the economies in their fight against the pandemic and helps them sustain themselves amid crises. This study also contributes to the body of literature by suggesting IT-based solutions for various industries to elevate effective responsiveness and avoid significant losses. (shrink)

This article argues that Ernst Cassirer's views about the concept of substance and his views on mythic consciousness are applicable to the concept of race. By analyzing examples from the most influential and representative racial theories, this article shows that the concept of race functions like the concept of substance whereby random, large-scale, and irreducibly complex phenomena is explained through the deterministic behavior of a smaller, material, constituent part. Given that mythic consciousness explains causality in the same way, this substance-mode (...) explanation of becoming can also be termed “mythic.” Further, under this substance/racial understanding of personhood, humans have no agency to determine their own fates. It is this fatalism that Cassirer railed against in The Myth of the State. In place of this substance (racial) understanding of personhood, and as this article will describe, Cassirer argued for a “functional” (cultural) understanding of personhood. (shrink)

This author-meets-readers discussion centers Shuchen Xiang’s synopsis of her recent book _Chinese_ _Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea_ (2023a), which argues against assumptions that European global colonization and racial atrocities were consequences of human nature. Sungmoon Kim, Bryan W. Van Norden and Don J. Wyatt engage with Xiang about her thesis that historical China upheld a worldview that underscored cross-cultural exchange, mutual flourishing, and growth through cultural encounter. This worldview did not drive it to colonize the (...) world. In contrast, its European counterpart fought difference and therefore sought to conquer the world. (shrink)

To correct the misconception that incommensurability implies incomparability, Kuhn lately develops a new interpretation of incommensurability. This includes a linguistic theory of scientific revolutions (the theory of kinds), a cognitive exploration of the language learning process (the analogy of bilingualism), and an epistemological discussion on the rationality of scientific development (the evolutionary epistemology). My focus in this paper is to review Kuhn's effort in eliminating relativism, highlighting both the insights and the difficulties of his new version of incommensurability . Finally (...) I suggest that some of Kuhn's difficulties can be overcome by adopting a concept of rationality that filly appreciates the important role of instruments in the development of science. (shrink)

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the leadership of the new country carried out a political, cultural, and scientific campaign to “comprehensively learn from the Soviet Union,” with the goal of rapid development on all fronts. In the realm of medicine, this had profound consequences. The hegemonic Soviet theory of physiology and psychology—Pavlovianism—became highly influential in China, first as Party Line and second as the basis for a reformed “traditional Chinese medicine”. In the early 1950s, (...) Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity had the status of unquestioned orthodoxy. However, a disagreement between the Ministry of Health and national leader Mao Zedong led to an important shift in 1954. After that date, instead of adopting the Soviet theories wholesale, Chinese medical practitioners used Pavlovianism to shape Chinese medicine’s underlying theoretical constructs. The influence of this reconstruction persists to this day, in practices thought of by the public as thoroughly Chinese, like acupuncture, holistic thinking, inner organs theory, and acupoint injection therapy. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the pattern of conceptual change during scientific revolutions by using methods from cognitive psychology. We show that the changes characteristic of scientific revolutions, especially taxonomic changes, can occur in a continuous manner. Using the frame model of concept representation to capture structural relations within concepts and the direct links between concept and taxonomy, we develop an account of conceptual change in science that more adequately reflects the current understanding that episodes like the Copernican revolution are (...) not always abrupt. When concepts are represented by frames, the transformation from one taxonomy to another can be achieved in a piecemeal fashion not preconditioned by a crisis stage, and a new taxonomy can arise naturally out of the old frame instead of emerging separately from the existing conceptual system. This cognitive mechanism of continuous change demonstrates the constructive roles of anomaly and incommensurability in promoting the progress of science. (shrink)

_Wh_-questions with the modal verb _can_ admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the _wh_-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox in Mention-some interpretations, MIT seminar, 2013 ) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order _wh_-trace (...) and (ii) the absence/presence of an anti-exhaustification operator. However, treating MS answers as complete answers in this way contradicts the widely adopted analysis of uniqueness effects in questions of Dayal (Locality in _wh_ quantification: Questions and relative clauses in Hindi, 1996 ), according to which the uniqueness effects of singular _which_-phrases arise from an exhaustivity presupposition, namely that a question must have a unique exhaustive true answer. To solve this dilemma, I propose that question interpretations presuppose Relativized Exhaustivity: roughly, the exhaustivity in questions is evaluated relative to the accessible worlds as opposed to the anchor/utterance world. Relativized Exhaustivity preserves the merits of Dayal’s exhaustivity presupposition while permitting MS; moreover, it explains the local-uniqueness effects in modalized singular _wh_-questions. (shrink)

The application of algorithms in organizations is becoming more widespread. Previous research has aimed to enhance employees’ perceptions of algorithmic fairness by focusing on technical features. However, individuals often struggle to observe and comprehend these features, hindering their ability to form rational fairness judgments. Drawing upon fairness heuristic theory, this study explores how individuals perceive algorithmic fairness when technical features are invisible because of algorithmic opacity. Research conducted with food delivery riders in China suggests that, in the absence of transparent (...) algorithmic information, riders heuristically form perceptions of algorithmic fairness based on more salient and accessible distributive fairness information. These heuristic perceptions of algorithmic fairness further predict outcomes such as task performance and helping behavior. We also found that different distributive fairness information holds varying importance in the process of shaping heuristic perceptions of algorithmic fairness and that algorithmic transparency perceptions and tenure moderate this process. The findings extend fairness heuristic theory and have practical implications. (shrink)

In response to the rising obesity rate in China, the Chinese government has used the social media platform WeChat to encourage the public to lose weight. This article investigates the losing weight posts in 健康中国 [Healthy China], the official WeChat account of the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China. Taking a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, I identify the dominant discourses used to represent obesity and individuals related to obesity. One of the most prominent features of the (...) discourses is a trend of responsibilizing weight management by three sub-discourses surrounding obesity, i.e. medical discourse (obesity as a disease), moral discourse (obesity as a self-management issue) and gendered discourse (obesity as a female and mothering issue). I explore how the responsibilization discourse might be understood in the context of China’s efforts in facilitating the making of health-conscious citizens, which echo neoliberal ideas that normalize individual responsibility for obesity. A special note is paid to women. Apart from the neoliberalism-underpinned responsibility, the posts also position women under the Confucian expectation of ‘responsible mothers’ in terms of childhood obesity. This may lead to dual-responsibilities for women and heighten the weight stigma women experience in the society. (shrink)

This paper analyses the text Vital Dispositions Come Via Mandate (Xing Zi Ming Chu, 性自命出) and argues that central to its account of the cultivation of inner virtue are the affections (qing, 情), the heart-mind (xin, 心), and the techniques of the heart-mind (xinshu, 心术; or simply ‘culture’). Qing, it is argued, are intersubjective, socio-culturally produced non-sensory data that act on the heart-mind and serve as the foundation for moral behavior. Qing is encoded in cultural forms such as Music and (...) poetry. Hence, there is an internal relationship between qing, xin, and xinshu. Correctly understanding the connection between these and how they shape the human being will help elucidate the nature of the Confucian moral program. In foregrounding qing, this paper presents Confucian moral philosophy as grounded in a hermeneutic and sympathetic understanding of the perspective of the other. (shrink)

The student management work model in colleges and universities is an effective plan for college student management, but the traditional college student management work is not very good in terms of student psychology, resulting in negative attitudes such as low learning desire, low learning efficiency, and inactive learning. In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence technologies such as sentiment analysis and incentive theory, emotional management and incentive theory have been applied to the management of college students. The emotional (...) management and incentive model is a way to help college students get rid of psychological obstacles and guide students to establish positive and correct values by predict and analyze the psychological state of college students through language emotion recognition and BP neural network. This paper compares the college student management work model based on emotional management and incentives with the traditional college management work mode through experiments. The results show that the students’ learning enthusiasm is better than the traditional college student management work mode based on emotional management and incentives. The student management work model in colleges and universities is 15.8% better, and the students’ grades have improved by 12.5%; the college student management work model based on emotional management and incentives also has a positive role in helping students’ mental health. The way of emotional management and motivation can make better use of college students’ psychology to effectively manage students and guide students to develop in a good direction. (shrink)

Problem and Project Based Learning (PBL) has been used as an educational philosophy and methodology in the construction of a student centered and contextualized learning environment. PBL is also regarded as an effective method in producing engineering graduates who can not only meet the needs of professional competences but are also prepared for new challenges in the globalized and technological context. However, can PBL be a solution to the challenge of a general lack of university students studying engineering and technology (...) in many countries? Gender and Diversity in a Problem and Project Based Learning Environment presents an ethnographical study on the learning experiences of engineering students in the PBL environment in Denmark, and it attempts to question the issue of diversity in engineering education via the exploration of which ways the PBL environment is friendly to diverse groups of learners such as women. (shrink)