In questo articolo si analizza la situazione della religione nativa popolare coreana, comunemente descritta col termine ombrello di “sciamanesimo”, durante la metà e la seconda parte del periodo Koryŏ. Lo studio tenta di espandere e correggere alcune assunzioni di base del lavoro di Lee Seog-Ju (2010), il quale ha descritto la dialettica esistente tra l’élite confuciana, la casa reale, il buddismo e lo sciamanesimo in epoca Koryŏ, correggendo come detto alcuni assunti storici dell’autore. Nello specifico si terrà conto de: la (...) pervasività della dottrina nell’aiuto esterno dei bodhisattva nella Corea medievale come notato da Yung Sung-chan (2016); l’esistenza di un sincretismo tra le dottrina confuciane e quelle buddiste, notato da Kim Jongmyung (2016) e Vermeersch (2020); la natura sincretica dello sciamanesimo in rapporto col buddismo, notata da più autori quali Grayson (1992) e McBride (2007), infine, l’importanza dello sciamanesimo nei riti nazionali preesistenti come l’Assemblea delle Otto Proibizioni, sottolineata da Vermeersch (2007). Tesi di questo articolo è dimostrare come lo scontro con lo sciamanesimo da parte degli intellettuali confuciani di Koryŏ fosse dovuto non tanto da una supposta devianza dall’ortodossia confuciana da parte della religione nativa, ma da una sua non aderenza ai canoni dei riti del buddismo di Stato. Lo scritto si muoverà secondo il seguente schema: anzitutto verrà brevemente analizzata la società del regno di Koryŏ nei suoi aspetti religiosi, culturali, sociali e politici, verrà poi data una descrizione della relazione trai due attori in campo, vale a dire lo sciamanesimo e il confucianesimo in relazione al buddismo, infine verranno fornite le conclusioni dello studio. (shrink)

It has been not atypical for commentators to argue that Aristotelian friendship features disinterested concern for others, that is, concern for others that is completely independent of one's own happiness. Often, the relevant commentators point to some normative features of Aristotelian friendship, wishing goods for the other's sake and loving the other for herself, where these are assumed to be disinterested. While the disinterested interpretations may be correct overall, I argue that wishing goods for the other's sake and loving the (...) other for herself constitute a dubious foundation for disinterested interpretations. For wishing goods for the other's sake does not involve a reason for action on the other's behalf, and the primary point of loving the other for herself is the role of the other in facilitating one's own happiness, specifically conceived of by Aristotle in terms of one's own virtuous activity. (shrink)

In “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich famously argue from empirical data that East Asians and Westerners have different intuitions about Gettier -style cases. We attempted to replicate their study about the Car case, but failed to detect a cross - cultural difference. Our study used the same methods and case taken verbatim, but sampled an East Asian population 2.5 times greater than NEI’s 23 participants. We found no evidence supporting the existence of cross - cultural difference about (...) the intuition concerning the Gettier car case. Taken together with the failures of both of the existing replication studies, our results provide strong evidence that the purported cross - cultural difference in Gettier intuitions does not exist. (shrink)

The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it (...) acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. (shrink)

Direction of fit theories usually claim that beliefs are such that they “aim at truth” or “ought to fit” the world and desires are such that they “aim at realization” or the world “ought to fit” them. This essay argues that no theory of direction of fit is correct. The two directions of fit are supposed to be determinations of one and the same determinable two-place relation, differing only in the ordering of favored terms. But there is no such determinable (...) because of ineliminable asymmetries between the way that beliefs “aim at truth” and the way that desires “aim at realization.” This essay traces the ills of direction of fit theory to a misunderstanding of Anscombe and proposes a cure that distinguishes theoretical and practical thought by appeal to a distinction between thought in the form of a state and thought in the form of an event. (shrink)

In the explanations of logical laws and inference rules of the mature version of Begriffsschrift in Grundgesetze, Frege uses the predicate “… is the True.” Scholars like Greimann maintain that this predicate is a metalinguistic truth-predicate for Frege. This paper examines an argument for this claim that is based on the “nominal reading” of Frege’s conception of sentences—the claim that for Frege a sentence “p” is equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that p.” In particular, (...) this paper attempts to establish two points concerning this argument based on the nominal reading. First, the argument implies a claim about the nature of assertion which Frege repeatedly denies in his mature works. Secondly, the nominal reading on which the argument depends is false. A sentence “p” is not equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that p” for Frege. Our discussion will lead to an important lesson about Frege’s conception of sentences and of assertion. (shrink)

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, so we will (...) analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes. (shrink)

The use of ethnography to understand archaeology is both prevalent and controversial. This paper develops an alternative approach, using ethnography to build and test a general theory of forager behaviors, and their variations in different conditions, one which can then be applied even to prehistoric sites differing from contemporary experience. Human behavioral ecology is chosen as the framework theory, and forager social learning as a case study. The argument is then applied to social learning in the late Pleistocene, and hence (...) to a famous archaeological puzzle: the late Pleistocene acceleration of technical innovation and regional differentiation. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to provide an exact truthmaker semantical analysis of modalized propositions. According to the present proposal, an exact truthmaker for “Necessarily _P_” is a state that bans every exact truthmaker for “Not _P_”, and an exact truthmaker for “Possibly _P_” is a state that allows an exact truthmaker for _P_. Based on this proposal, a formal semantics will be developed; and the soundness and completeness results for a well-known family of the systems of normal modal propositional logic (...) will be established. It shall be seen that the present analysis offers an exactification of the standard Kripke semantics in the sense that it analyzes the accessibility relation between possible worlds in terms of the banning and allowing relations between the constituent states, and thereby gives an account of “truth at a possible world” in terms of exact truthmaking. (shrink)

Although many accept the Rawlsian distinction between ‘end-state’ and ‘transitional’ principles, theorists disagree strongly over which feasibility constraint to use when selecting the former. While ‘minimalists’ favor a scientific-laws-only constraint, ‘non-minimalists’ believe that end-state principles should also be constrained by what people could (empirically) accept after reasoned discussion. I argue that a theorist who follows ‘non-minimalism’ will devise end-state principles that cannot be realized (as end-state principles), or cannot be stabilized (as end-state principles), or are indistinguishable in content from those (...) she would have selected had she followed ‘minimalism.’ The paper ends by outlining the implications of my analysis for the broader methodological map of political philosophy. (shrink)

When we ask a decision maker to express her preferences, it is typically assumed that we are eliciting a pre-existing set of preferences. However, empirical research has suggested that our preferences are often constructed on the fly for the decision problem at hand. This paper explores the ramifications of this empirical research for our understanding of instrumental rationality. First, I argue that these results pose serious challenges for the traditional decision-theoretic view of instrumental rationality, which demands global coherence amongst all (...) of one's beliefs and desires. To address these challenges, I first develop a minimal notion of instrumental rationality that issues in localized, goal-relative demands of coherence. This minimal conception of instrumental rationality is then used to offer a more sophisticated account of the global aspects of instrumental rationality. The resulting view abandons all-or-nothing assessments of rationality and allows us to evaluate decision makers as being rational to varying degrees. My aim is to propose a theory that is both psychologically and normatively plausible. (shrink)

Humans interpret others. We are able to anticipate both the actions and intentional states of other agents. We do not do so perfectly, but since we are complex and flexible creatures even limited success needs explanation. For some years now Steve Stich (frequently in collaboration with Shaun Nichols) has been both participant in, and observer of, debates about the foundation of these capacities (Stich and Nichols 1992; Stich and Nichols 1995). As a commentator on this debate, Stich (with Nichols) gave (...) explicit and fair-minded sketches of the cognitive architectures presupposed by the various theories of mindreading. As a participant, Stich has mostly been a defender of the theory-theory, the view that normal human agents have an internally represented theory of other agents and they use that theory in interpreting other agents. The main recent rival to this position, simulationism, claims that agents use their own decision-making mechanisms as a model of those of other agents, and derive their predictions by modelling others in something like the way aeronautical engineers derive predictions from the use of scale models in wind-tunnels. Stich has been sceptical about this alternative, for on his view simulation theory makes mistaken predictions about both the development of interpretive competence and about the pattern of interpretive success and failure. (shrink)

Mèngzǐ’s 孟子 advice to King Xuān 宣 to take up his feeling of compassion for an ox and apply it to his people (_Mèngzǐ_ 1A7) is equivocal, and can be understood in two markedly different ways: on one hand, to take immediate care of the people’s needs by performing a kind of (mental) act of applying compassion; on the other hand, to engage in a long-term project of cultivating compassion for them. These views, moreover, when combined with the assumption that (...) emotion is the sole motivator of moral action, give us a perplexing picture of Mèngzǐ as urging the king to do exactly what he cannot—namely, acting out of compassion for his people that he falls short of feeling enough of. This essay explicates the Mengzian model of moral extension (_tuī_ 推) through a solution to this puzzle, specifically by explaining how one’s immediate performance of moral actions are conducive to cultivating related moral emotions. (shrink)

This study developed an online career adaptability improvement program as part of the undergraduate curriculum to improve college students’ career adaptability and verify its effectiveness. This 13-week intervention program, developed using the Korea-Career Adaptability Scale, consists of three domains: knowledge and recognition of the self and work environment, self-directed coping related to career behavior, and environmental interaction for career decisions and adaptation. Two sub-studies were conducted to achieve the research objectives: Study 1 included developing and testing a pilot program and (...) Study 2 quantitatively analyzed the final program to test its effectiveness. In Study 1, preliminary program development and validity were verified, and in Study 2, the effectiveness of the final program was verified. As a strategy to achieve the research purpose, in Study 1, literature review and needs analysis, program design reflecting the results of the needs analysis, validity verification through Delphi survey, preliminary program implementation and evaluation, and the operation of the final program were performed. To test the effectiveness of the program in Study 2, a pre-posttest of career adaptability was conducted on experimental, comparison, and control groups using the non-equivalent group pretest–posttest design, followed by a program satisfaction survey. This study is meaningful in that it developed an online program to help college students improve career adaptability and identified its effectiveness. This study yielded two results. First, it successfully developed a career adaptability improvement program for undergraduate students, wherein the career development tasks, and the sub-factors of career adaptability were organically interlinked. Second, it verified the statistically significant differences in the career adaptability scores among the experimental, comparison, and control groups. The highest mean score was obtained by participants in the experimental group, followed by the comparison and the control group. (shrink)

Extended redundancy analysis is a statistical method that relates multiple sets of predictors to response variables. In ERA, the conventional approach of model evaluation tends to overestimate the performance of a model since the performance is assessed using the same sample used for model development. To avoid the overly optimistic assessment, we introduce a new model evaluation approach for ERA, which utilizes computer-intensive resampling methods to assess how well a model performs on unseen data. Specifically, we suggest several new model (...) evaluation metrics for ERA that compute a model’s performance on out-of-sample data, i.e., data not used for model development. Although considerable work has been done in machine learning and statistics to examine the utility of cross-validation and bootstrap variants for assessing such out-of-sample predictive performance, to date, no research has been carried out in the context of ERA. We use simulated and real data examples to compare the proposed model evaluation approach with the conventional one. Results show the conventional approach always favor more complex ERA models, thereby failing to prevent the problem of overfitting in model selection. Conversely, the proposed approach can select the true ERA model among many mis-specified models. (shrink)

As people struggle to come to terms with cultural pluralism, there is growing recognition of bicultural or multicultural persons and their potential communication patterns. Prior conceptualizations of multicultural identity focused on the idea that people can blend multiple cultures in their minds or switch between representations of cultures as ways to be good towards the Other. This approach may sound sensible, but there is the inescapable injustice embedded in any formulation of the other, and not only the Other but also (...) the other of the Other. The very openness of a genuinely multicultural identity precludes the establishment of such things as ethnic, racial or cultural ‘identities’. The fundamental propositions of this article are that multicultural identity can be seen as different ways of being in the world, which is a facet of enlightened experience by coming into being of ‘intuitive intelligence’ that ‘self/personhood/identity’ is an illusion; the acquisition of multicultural identity is a natural process of human growth, one that does involve a radical shift of personal perspectives, maturation of vision. Ultimately, I suggest a radical rethinking and reversal of the essentialist view of multicultural identity and present multicultural identity as an awareness event transcending one’s cultural identity. It is time for a paradigm shift. (shrink)

Is it possible to characterize the sortal essence of Fs for a sortal concept F solely in terms of a criterion of identity C for F? That is, can the question ‘What sort of thing are Fs?’ be answered by saying that Fs are essentially those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of C? This paper presents a case study supporting a negative answer to these questions by critically examining the neo-Fregean suggestion that cardinal numbers can be fully (...) characterized as those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of one-one correspondence between concepts. (shrink)

This paper explores Mencius' political theory of international relations and the morality of war from the perspective of Confucian moralpolitik. It argues that while acknowledging the possibility of international justice among the feudal, yet de facto, independent states during the Warring States period, Mencius subscribed to the idea that international morality (and justice) can be best maintained under what I call 'Confucian international moral hierarchy' among the states. By upholding international moral hierarchy, Mencius attempted to achieve an international community in (...) which big/strong and small/weak states are mutually connected to each other for the common welfare of the people. The paper then turns to Mencius' ideas on just war and investigates how Mencius rationalized the punitive expedition in the virtual absence of a symbolic institutional authority representing the Mandate of Heaven, the metaphysical ground for the morality of war, by presenting its visible alternatives. It closes by critically revisiting Daniel Bell's interpretation of Mencius's ideas of a just war. (shrink)

The prevailing interpretation of ren (humanness) in the Analects is ethical. One consequence of this interpretation is the one-dimensional image of the Confucian junzi (noble man) as a rigid moralist, a fastidious observer of li (ritual). But there are numerous passages in the Analects that resist such a one-sided representation of the junzi, especially Confucius's remarks related to the (Book of) Songs and music. My basic thesis is that Confucius's concept of junji is aesthetic. This is implied by his notion (...) of junji ru (noble scholar) as opposed to xiaoren ru (common scholar). The noble man is one awakened to the beauty of humanness. It is because of this awareness that he 'sets his mind on the Way, depends on virtue, relies on ren and enjoys the arts.' Confucius included the Songs and music in his curriculum precisely for the purpose of cultivating in his pupils this aesthetic sensibility. (shrink)

This paper argues that the standard formulations of the question of how consciousness emerges, both synchronically and diachronically, from the physical world necessarily use a concept of the physical without either a clear grasp of the concept or an understanding of the necessary conditions of its possibility. This concept will be elucidated and some of the necessary conditions of its possibility explored, clarifying the place of the mental and the physical as abstractions from the totality of an agent engaged in (...) the life world. The notion of a disruption or breakdown in the agent’s normal engagements in the world will play a key role in the argument, which in turn provides a transcendental underpinning to recent enactive and embodied theories of mind by exploring some of the necessary conditions of being an agent in the world. (shrink)