The text analyzes the possibilities to think of pure language as indicated in the harmonization of modes of intention in the translation activity. This language is, in a sense, a regulative idea and it have to be liberated in translation. It is essential to distinguish between the modes of intention and intended objects, between what is named in pure language and what is „overnamed“ in human languages. One of the theses in this text – that language in its auto-relation undergoes (...) auto-modalization – makes the connection with Kierkegaard's understanding of the impossibility of direct communication. The indication of the untranslatable is an opportunity in the language of the translator to insert as indicated the elusive in the translation and thus to introduce the use of a broken language. Awakening of the “echo of the original” means a “thinking more” (according to Kant) through the figure. (shrink)

Truth-telling to competent patients is widely affirmed as a cardinal moral and biomedical obligation in contemporary Western medical practice. In contrast, Chinese medical ethics remains committed to hiding the truth as well as to lying when necessary to achieve the family's view of the best interests of the patient. This essay intends to provide an account of the framing commitments that would both justify physician deception and have it function in a way authentically grounded in the familist moral concerns of (...) Confucianism. It reflects on the moral conditions and possibilities for sustaining a Confucian understanding of truth-telling and consent in mainland China. (shrink)

In Fan's 2019 article, “Symmetric Contingency Logic with Unlimitedly Many Modalities”, it is left as an open question in Fan (2019b) how to (completely) axiomatize contingency logic over the class of symmetric and transitive frames, and conjectured that is the desired axiomatization. In the current article, we show that the conjecture is false, and then propose a desired axiomatization, thereby answering the open question. Beyond these results, we also present a family of axiomatizations of contingency logic over Kripke frames.

This article proposes the axiomatizations of contingency logics of various natural classes of neighborhood frames. In particular, by defining a suitable canonical neighborhood function, we give sound and complete axiomatizations of monotone contingency logic and regular contingency logic, thereby answering two open questions raised by Bakhtiari, van Ditmarsch, and Hansen. The canonical function is inspired by a function proposed by Kuhn in 1995. We show that Kuhn’s function is actually equal to a related function originally given by Humberstone.

Fan takes issues with Li’s arguments in Chap. 1, and Farrell and Tham’s view in Chap. 2.

This essay explores a proper Confucian vision on genetic enhancement. It argues that while Confucians can accept a formal starting point that Michael Sandel proposes in his ethics of giftedness, namely, that children should be taken as gifts, Confucians cannot adopt his generalist strategy. The essay provides a Confucian full ethics of giftedness by addressing a series of relevant questions, such as what kind of gifts children are, where the gifts are from, in which way they are given, and for (...) what purpose they are given. It indicates that Confucians should sort out different types of enhancement and bring them to the test of the Confucian values in terms of both Confucian virtue principles and specific ritual rules. It concludes that Confucians can accept some types of enhancement but must reject others. (shrink)

Ruiping Fan; The Memoirs of a Pagan Sojourning in the Ruins of Christendom, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 5, Issue 3.

Article 14 of the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights sets forth a few basic principles regarding social responsibility for health. It states in part that 14.1 The promotion of health and social development for their people is a central purpose of governments that all sectors of society share. 14.2 Taking into account that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, (...) economic or social condition, progress in science and technology should advance: access to quality health care and essential medicines, especially for the health of women and... (shrink)

The _Xing Zi Ming Chu_ 性自命出 (_Nature Derives from Decree_) is one of the eighteen pieces that were recorded in Guodian 郭店 bamboo slips, which were excavated in 1993 and thought to be buried around 300 BCE. We can observe from this text detailed discussions surrounding terms such as _xing_ 性 (nature), _qing_ 情 (emotion), _xin_ 心 (heart-mind), and _yue_ 樂 (music), which played crucial roles in producing early Chinese philosophical discourses, particularly in the area of moral psychology. Since its (...) publication in 1998, this text has gained huge interest from Chinese scholars. This article illustrates how Chinese scholars, through their concrete studies, reveal the complicated textual nature of the _Xing Zi Ming Chu_ and its intricate relations to different philosophical streams which followed. This article also points out a problematic assumption that lies in the majority of Chinese scholarship and proposes a more sensible approach to examine this text. (shrink)

The completeness of the axiomatization of contingency logic over symmetric frames has been thought of as a nontrivial job, the unimodal case of which cannot be generalized to the finitely multimodal case, which in turn cannot be generalized to the infinitely multimodal case. This paper deals with the completeness of symmetric contingency logic with unlimitedly many modalities, no matter whether the set of modalities is finite or infinite.

Inspired by the supervenience-determined consequence relation and the semantics of agreement operator, we introduce a modal logic of supervenience, which has a dyadic operator of supervenience as a sole modality. The semantics of supervenience modality very naturally correspond to the supervenience-determined consequence relation, in a quite similar way that the strict implication corresponds to the inference-determined consequence relation. We show that this new logic is more expressive than the modal logic of agreement, by proposing a notion of bisimulation for the (...) latter. We provide a sound proof system for the new logic. We lift onto more general logics of supervenience. Related to this, we address an interesting open research direction listed in the literature, by comparing propositional logic of determinacy and noncontingency logic in expressive powers and axiomatizing propositional logic of determinacy over various classes of frames. We also obtain an alternative axiomatization for propositional logic of determinacy over universal models. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to build a Confucian conception of public reason for Confucian-influenced East Asian societies to adopt and tackle political and bioethical issues. The chapter first indicates that public reason is present at various levels of human collectives, namely, communitarian, national, and international. It concentrates on constructing a proper Confucian notion of public reason at the national level given that only the sovereign states are able to make effective public policy and laws to govern their people, although such a (...) Confucian notion can be shared by the peoples across East Asian countries and regions, such as mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Then I lay out Rawls’ liberal conception of public reason and explicate why it is not suitable for an East Asian country like China to accept. This is followed by two sections addressing the two Confucian conceptions of public reason that have been proposed, respectively, by Joseph Chan and Sungmoon Kim. I indicate how each of them faces a dilemma that cannot be adequately resolved. In Sect. 4, I outline a new Confucian conception of public reason based on the view developed in my book Reconstructionist Confucianism, including a Confucian account of basic liberty, equality, and individual rights consistent with the central requirements of the Confucian virtues that are still vibrant in East Asian societies. The values of political justice under this Confucian conception integrate both Confucian virtues and basic rights. Finally, the chapter appeals to this conception to review the bioethical issue of medically assisted suicide and argues why it should not be legalized in East Asia according to this conception of public reason. (shrink)

In Philosophical Investigations §244, Wittgenstein suggests that we understand avowals (first-person psychological utterances) as manifestations or expressions of the speaker's mental states. An interesting philosophical theory, called expressivism, then develops from this Wittgensteinian idea. However, neo-expressivists disagree with simple expressivists on whether avowals are at the same time assertions, which are truth-evaluable. In this paper, I pursue the expressivist debate about whether avowals must also be viewed as assertions. I consider and reject three neo-expressivist objections against simple expressivism. Then, I (...) offer my own account of why we should understand avowals as assertions. (shrink)

Drawing upon self-determination theory, this study aimed to explore the mechanisms underlying the impact of perceived organizational support on proactive innovation behavior and reveal the serial mediation effects of basic psychological needs. We collected time-lagged data of 481 employees from research institutions in China, and structural equation modeling analyses were carried out to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that perceived organizational support is significantly and positively related to proactive innovation behavior, and this relationship was mediated by the need for (...) autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These findings contribute new knowledge to proactive innovation behavior by providing a new perspective of the satisfaction of psychological needs. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Most contemporary bioethicists believe that Western bioethical principles, such as the principle of autonomy, are universally binding wherever bioethics is found. According to these bioethicists, these principles may be subject to culturally‐conditioned further interpretations for their application in different nations or regions, but an ‘abstract content’ of each principle remains unchanged, which provides ‘an objective basis for moral judgment and international law’. This essay intends to demonstrate that this is not the case. Taking the principle of autonomy as an example, (...) this essay argues that there is no such shared ‘abstract content’ between the Western bioethical principle of autonomy and the East Asian bioethical principle of autonomy. Other things being equal, the Western principle of autonomy demands self‐determination, assumes a subjective conception of the good and promotes the value of individual independence, whilst the East Asian principle of autonomy requires family‐determination, presupposes an objective conception of the good and upholds the value of harmonious dependence. They differ from each other in the most general sense and basic moral requirement. (shrink)

The rise in the recent Western pattern of surrogate decision making is not a necessary result of an increase in the number of elderly with decreased competence; it may rather manifest the dominant Western vision of human life and relations. From a comparative philosophical standpoint, the Western pattern of medical decision making is individualistic, while the Chinese is familistic. These two distinct patterns may reflect two different comprehensive perspectives on human life and relations, disclosing a foundational difference that can be (...) seen in the Aristotelian account of friendship and the Confucian account of humanity. The contemporary development of surrogate decision making in the West may illustrate a general tendency toward the Aristotelian account, while the Chinese approaches are congruent with the Confucian view. Also explored are some merits of the Chinese approach to family decision making for health care. (shrink)

In this paper, we axiomatize the negatable consequences in dependence and independence logic by extending the systems of natural deduction of the logics given in [22] and [11]. We prove a characterization theorem for negatable formulas in independence logic and negatable sentences in dependence logic, and identify an interesting class of formulas that are negatable in independence logic. Dependence and independence atoms, first-order formulas belong to this class. We also demonstrate our extended system of independence logic by giving explicit derivations (...) for Armstrong's Axioms and the Geiger-Paz-Pearl axioms of dependence and independence atoms. (shrink)

In recent years, Confucian ethics has been considered as an alternative to the individual-oriented model of medical decision-making that is dominating in the modern West.

Across the world, socio-economic forces are shifting the locus of long-term care from the family to institutional settings, producing significant moral, not just financial costs. This essay explores these costs and the distortions in the role of the family they involve. These reflections offer grounds for critically questioning the extent to which moral concerns regarding long-term care in Hong Kong and in mainland China are the same as those voiced in the United States, although family resemblances surely exist. Chinese moral (...) values such as virtue and filial piety embedded in a Confucian moral and social context cannot be recast without distortion in terms of modern Western European notions. The essay concludes that the Confucian resources must be taken seriously in order to develop an authentic Chinese bioethics of long-term care and a defensible approach to long-term care policy for contemporary society in general and Chinese society in particular. (shrink)

This work offers a systematic interpretation of the problematics of disinterest in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. It examines Kant's thesis that the judgement of taste is free of considerations of morality or utility. Dahan Fan carefully traces Kant's differentiation between the agreeable, the good, and the beautiful, thus casting the relationship between the interests of reason and aesthetic disinterest in a new light.

There is a perennial and universal concern about the "self." The question of "who I am" is a necessary step on the path of self-awakening. The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and has been widely praised. Within the philosophical scope of the "self," the problem of personal persistence or personal identity has attracted a great deal of attention and has been discussed extensively in the Western philosophical tradition. The (...) problem is as follows: how can we ensure that those "I"s that exist at different times, play different roles, present different appearances, and have different thoughts are the same person? For example, I am a scholar; I am a... (shrink)

Drawing upon Confucian ethical insights extracted from the Analects, this essay argues that principlism suffers from fundamental theoretical flaws. Its four principles do not genuinely capture universal principles, because they distort the practice-embedded nature of authentic moral norms found within actual moral cultures, as elucidated by Confucian insights. Specifically, Confucianism highlights the importance of a reflective equilibrium between constitutive rules and regulative principles. Principlism, in reality, represents an abridged version of modern Western liberal ethical norms, as it retains their significant (...) regulative principles while excluding their specific constitutive rules. The essay also employs prominent examples to illustrate the practical ineffectiveness of principlism. Given that diverse cultures either adhere to different regulative principles that diverge from the four principles or are obligated to specify them with their distinct constitutive rules, relying on the four principles as a uniform starting point falls short in providing and justifying universal solutions to the bioethical dilemmas confronting contemporary societies. In addition, the essay delves into the underlying factors that have led to the seemingly widespread adoption of the four principles across different regions worldwide. Lastly, the essay introduces the concept of regioglobal bioethics as an alternative to principlism for global bioethics, outlining a general Confucian endorsement of this proposal and providing a brief response to potential objections, aiming to pave the way for further research. (shrink)

Undoubtedly, the internet has become the most convenient and efficient communication and service delivery channel adopted by most government agencies, referred to as eGovernment. This study explores how eGovernment efficiency influences users’ subjective wellbeing, using trust as a covert stimulus with the capacity to alter individuals’ overt behavior. Covert and overt stimuli act as significant factors influencing the relationship between citizens and the online environment, moderated by socio-demographic characteristics. Using situation–organism–behavior–consequence theory, we propose a research model consisting of online environment (...) eGovernment efficiency influencing trust development, which in turn influences utilization, generating an impact on an individuals’ SWB. We followed the structural equation modeling approach to analyze the data survey N = 300, using Amos statistical techniques. Results reveal that the correlation between eGovernment efficiency and trust is positive and strong, trust and utilization is positive and moderate, and the correlation between utilization and SWB is positive and very strong. Stepwise regression analysis reveals that the control variables affect the relationship between eGovernment efficiency and trust. In the regression model: the highest education level explained 36% of the variance ; adding age increased the variance explained to 39%, and adding internet use frequency increased the variance explained to 41%. This study develops theoretical concepts of eGovernment use and how it affects citizens by indicating the psychological and behavioral situations as antecedents and mediators influencing SWB. It also provides practical suggestions for improving systems to correlate users’ feelings and behavior patterns to motivate trusting behavior, positively impacting users’ SWB to benefit citizens effectively. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Friedrich Nietzsche offers different opinions of the ancient Skeptics. On certain occasions, he praises them as philosophers of intellectual integrity, because they constantly question dogma and continue to inquire (ζητϵῖν) into the truth. He insists, however, that it is indispensable for every individual to adopt her own perspective in specific conditions, rather than suspend judgment as the Skeptics do. On other occasions, Nietzsche criticizes the ancient Skeptics because they separate their academic investigations from their philosophy of life and only (...) comply with conventions or apparent phenomena observed through sensations. Furthermore, he ridicules their ultimate goal – tranquility of mind (ἀταραξία) – as a product of feeble exhaustion. He himself is ready to embrace torments of life as part of the will to power. Although some similarities can be traced between Nietzsche and the ancient Skeptics, Nietzsche is more consistent in connecting his theoretical investigation and his philosophy as a way of life. (shrink)

Victor Fan's dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu's work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold's 2018 existential thriller Transit, Cinema Illuminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

Prior studies report that the business group structure and the associated intra-group capital flows are prone to conflicts of interest between controlling shareholders and minority investors. Yet business group is a prevalent and stable structure around the globe, particularly where capital markets are underdeveloped. Using data from China, this paper empirically studies the trade-off between the negative and positive roles played by intra-group capital flows and tests the efficiency implications of such trade-off. We find that from the perspective of the (...) whole group, intra-group capital flows are most efficient when the groups are least subject to conflicts of interest between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders and when they face strong external financing constraints. (shrink)

Stephan Darwall (2006, 2010) claims that a conceptual connection exists between moral obligation and what he calls ‘second-personal reasons.’ In particular, he (2006) claims that, “moral obligation is an irreducibly second-personal concept. That an action would violate a moral obligation is…a second-personal reason not to do it.” A second-personal reason, according to him (2006), is “a distinctive kind of (normative) reason for acting,” a reason made on one’s will and purportedly given by an authority’s demand or address. This paper argues (...) that Darwall fails to establish the above conceptual connection between second-personal reasons and moral obligation. Since Darwall’s construal of the second-person standpoint is original and the best known version, if I am right, then it seems that there is no conceptual connection between second-personal reasons and moral obligations. The implication is that second-personal reasons at best account for only interpersonal morality. (shrink)

Fan indicates that a suitable conception of public reason must be a “soft” relativism, like agent’s-group relativism, which is not incoherent. He argues why a child of filial piety should not support one’s parent’s request for MAS. He emphasizes that there should be a difference between a normative ethics and a conception of public reason on the one hand and a distinction between policy discussion and policy justification under a conception of public reason on the other.

A mutual interpretation and theoretical transplant of ethical-economical concepts is a process of the dialogue and discussion on its “meaning,” and also a process of the transmission and interaction of values. However, over-interpretation, which is inevitable in “understanding” “meaning,” and the plight of the “hegemony of values,” bring potential risks to value dissimilation in the interpretation and transplant. Value migration—value hegemony—value dissimilation is its general process of development. The academic reasoning behind overcoming the risk of value dissimilation is value ecology. (...) The essence of value ecology is to enable the meaning-dialogue and value interlocutions of ethics-economy follow the rules of ecology. Therefore, the process of mutual interpretation and transplantation becomes a process of the ecological interlocution of ethics-economy, creating a new value, eco-value. (shrink)

While the precipitous decline of biodiversity threatens life-sustaining processes and vast segments of the human population, concern about its loss remains extremely shallow. Nearly all motivational campaigns falsely assume that upon appreciating the relevant information, people will be sufficiently motivated to do something. But rational argumentation is doomed to fail, for there exists a motivational gap between a comprehension of the crisis and action taken based upon such knowledge. The origin of the gap lies neither in the quantity and quality (...) of information on the crisis, nor in the putative conflict between self-interest and morality. Instead, it lies in “remoteness conditions” which dissociate decision-makers from ecological damage and enfeeble incentive to correct it. The central remoteness conditions are spatial, temporal, and consequential. They can be eliminated by concretizing and particularizing earth others. While direct-experience, place-based educational programs satisfy the criteria, they are uncommon. There is also little opportunity for working adultsto engage in these sorts of activities. As such, the outlook for endangered species and humans in the developing world remains dire. (shrink)

The new coronary pneumonia epidemic has had a tremendous impact on the world economic situation, causing a large number of enterprises to suffer from serious losses, but also bringing a large number of entrepreneurial opportunities. For college students, whether the opportunities brought by the epidemic can attract them to step into the entrepreneurial path becomes a question worthy of attention in the process of restoring economic vitality and guiding students’ employment and entrepreneurship. In this article, a mediation model was constructed (...) and tested through 245 questionnaire data by combining event system theory, regulatory focus theory, and emotion cognitive evaluation theory. The results showed that defensive regulatory focus and fear of failure and facilitative regulatory focus and fear of failure were all able to continuously mediate the effect of event intensity of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic on the entrepreneurial intentions of college students. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore an intriguing view of definable numbers proposed by a Cambridge mathematician Ernest Hobson, and his solution to the paradoxes of definability. Reflecting on König’s paradox and Richard’s paradox, Hobson argues that an unacceptable consequence of the paradoxes of definability is that there are numbers that are inherently incapable of finite definition. Contrast to other interpreters, Hobson analyses the problem of the paradoxes of definability lies in a dichotomy between finitely definable numbers and not finitely definable (...) numbers. To bypass this predicament, Hobson proposes a language dependent analysis of definable numbers, where the diagonal argument is employed as a means to generate more and more definable numbers. This paper examines Hobson’s work in its historical context, and articulates his argument in detail. It concludes with a remark on Hobson’s analysis of definability and Alan Turing’s analysis of computability. (shrink)

The graph tong同and its associated concepts, such as da-tong (Great tong大同) and xuan-tong (mystic or dark tong玄同), have played important roles in the development of Chinese philosophy. Yet tong has received scant attention from either western or eastern scholarships. This paper is a first attempt to remedy such regret. Unlike usual understandings of tong as sameness or unity, this paper presents a nuanced account from early China, that is, ‘difference to one,’ a definition from the Mozi墨子. This definition can be (...) supported from etymological, textual, and lexical evidence. ‘Difference to one’ should not be solely attributed to a Mohist understanding; it in fact represents a common understanding of tong across philosophical streams in early China. This nuanced account provides new insights into the concept of tong in early philosophical texts, and furthermore breaks solid grounds for further studies of tong and its associated concepts. (shrink)