Exploiting the regulatory change in China’s Environmental Protection Law in 2015 as a plausibly exogenous shock to the stringency of pollution control, we evaluate the joint role of state ownership and environmental regulation in shaping firms’ environment-friendly (green) investments. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) make significantly more green investments than non-SOEs in response to the regulatory change. We propose and empirically analyze four potential mechanisms that may drive this result: (i) environment-related government subsidies granted to (...) SOEs, (ii) political promotion incentives of SOEs’ top management, (iii) government administrative intervention, and (iv) SOEs’ concern for social welfare. We find strong support for the last mechanism whereby SOEs undertake greater green investments due to their greater concern for social welfare, as evidenced by the fact that SOEs making greater charitable donations and those controlled by local governments (and thus more bonded with local communities) make greater green investments. Consistent with this interpretation, we show that regions where SOEs have a greater economic influence improved their air quality to a greater extent after 2015 than regions where non-SOEs are more dominant. In sum, we demonstrate that state ownership and environmental regulation complement one another in motivating corporate green investment. Our results highlight the important implications for the effectiveness and interplay of different government tools in addressing environmental issues. (shrink)

This translation and commentary on Xunzi’s Tian Lun argues against naturalistic interpretations of Tian. Tracing the course of interpretation of Xunzi down to the present, discussing some of the influences that affected how he was understood, and raising questions about some contemporary revisionary attempts, Machle suggests unusual lines of interpretation.

This essay argues that the philosophy of the Mengzi is not an idealism or naturalism which makes morality something innate. These interpretations are limited by Cartesian presuppositions of objectivity and subjectivity, which were not a part of the Mengzi’s philosophical repertoire. This essay rehearses the problem of subjectivity and objectivity in Western philosophy. It then argues that no such dichotomy informed the Mengzi; instead, it maintains that minds and their worlds are mutually entailing and constituting. It explores the relationship between (...) the concepts of heart-mind, human nature, and tian, arguing that heart-mind is the emergence of human nature which is the internalized interpretive framework of an external Confucian morality referred to as tian. It argues that humans are situated within historical traditions that provide their world horizons. There is no world beyond the Confucian world and no mind beyond the Confucian mind: the Mengzi is a realism with a Confucian face. (shrink)

This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State, which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a number of nation-states, inhabiting a number of (...) histories of their own, all of which are now simultaneously present. But the Euro-American terms empire and nation-state, which increasingly pervade Chinese perceived realities, lack precise Chinese equivalents. Meanwhile, the terms that the Chinese use in referring to the same historical transition, tianli and gongli, are obscure to the Euro-American mind. The reviewer asks whether the Chinese, now facing a plurality of histories, wonder if there may be a plurality of li, as well, or at least if there can be a li that is “universal” in the sense that it is common to them all. The problem here, the reviewer argues, in part derives from Wang's binaries being Hegelian, while the breakdown of the nation-state in Europe projects a postpolitical order in which human communities are incapable of state-based action or of determining their own li. The review ends by questioning whether China is capable of following this path and, in any case, whether Wang's vocabulary is able to encompass it. (shrink)

A hippocampal patient is described who shows preserved item recognition and simple recognition-based recollection but impaired recall and associative recognition. These data and other evidence suggest that contrary to Aggleton & Brown's target article, Papez circuit damage impairs only complex item-item-context recollection. A patient with perirhinal cortex damage and a delayed global memory deficit, apparently inconsistent with A&B's framework, is also described.

Experiments are described, using electroencephalography (EEG) and simple tests of performance, which support the hypothesis that collapse of a quantum field is of importance to the functioning of the brain. The theoretical basis of our experiments is derived from Penrose (1989) who suggested that conscious decision-making is a manifestation of the outcome of quantum computation in the brain involving collapse of some relevant wave function. He also proposed that collapse of any wave function depends on a gravitational criterion. As different (...) brain areas are known to subserve different functions, we argue that `Penrose collapse' must occur in a particular brain area when performing a task that uses it. Further, taking an EEG from the area should amplify the gravitational prerequisite for collapse, so affecting task performance. There are no non-quantum theories which could lead one to expect that taking an EEG could directly affect task performance by subjects. The results of both pilot and main experiments indicated that task performance was indeed influenced by taking an EEG from relevant brain areas. Control experiments suggested that the influence was quantum mechanical in origin, and was not due to any experimental artefact. The results are statistically significant and merit attempts at replication in an independent laboratory, preferably with more sophisticated equipment than was available to us. (shrink)

Should psychology of religion undergo a disciplinary renaissance and, if so, what might it look like? In this paper we explore that question by discussing the benefits of a better grounding of the field within mid-level theories from general psychology that provide it with greater conceptual depth. Such discussion will focus on three already existing and variously productive lines of research as case studies: attribution processes, attachment styles, and religious coping. These case studies represent lines of research at three developmental (...) stages: 1) infancy, with little visible return but with signs of promise , 2) adolescence, with dividends already yielded but also with promise not yet fully realized , and 3) maturity, where a fruitful harvest has already been experienced but yet without decline . Regardless of developmental position, it is argued that research in psychology of religion will be enhanced to the extent that it achieves conceptual depth by being framed in terms of mid-level theories. (shrink)

This paper has three interwoven aims: to demonstrate the constitutive role of style in deconstruction, which, when not entirely misconstrued, has yet to be rigorously appreciated; to develop the notion of ‘de-distancing’ as a necessary but overlooked notion for understanding not only the ontological stakes of Dasein in Being in Time but also Derrida’s intervention in the relation between Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of metaphysics; to demonstrate that Derrida’s recourse to de-distancing as the spatiality of woman in Spurs punctures (...) the horizon within which Heidegger attempts to situate the notion for essential reasons and, in the same stroke, instances the constitutive role of style in deconstruction. (shrink)

This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature (...) ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe. (shrink)

In this response to Jeff Pflug’s review of my dissertation Michael Polanyi’s Integrative Philosophy, I note that Pflug focused on my discussion of possible extension of Polanyi’s epistemology; he has also taken my statements on scientific truth out of context. In addition, he ignored the four major elements of the dissertation, thereby not giving the reader a “map” to the meaning and the rationale of the work – an intellectual biography of Polanyi.

J.S. Mackenzie surveys Western philosophy from Socrates to the New Realists in an uncomplicated and approachable style. Originally published in 1917, this text serves as a useful introduction to philosophy and well-summarises the key theories of great philosophers throughout the centuries and their bearing on early twentieth-century thought. It is ideal for students of Philosophy, both for beginners and the more advanced.

Horace addresses Torquatus again in Carm. 4.7. There the poet distinguishes three cardinal qualities: Torquatus's genus, his facundia, and hispietas. Since Horace distinguishes them they were no doubt qualities on which Torquatus prided himself, but they are, in any case, the key by which Torquatus slips into Horace's lyric. I suggest that we can use the same key to open up the Epistle, and that by taking up these qualities we have ready access to the wit of the poem, carefully (...) predicated upon its addressee. (shrink)