Confucian culture has always been the most glorious component of Chinese culture. Governing the mainstream world of China for more than two millennia, it has cast a profound and long-lasting influence on the way of thinking and cultural-psychological formation of the Chinese people. Confucianism emphasizes caring about others with benevolence and governing a state with ethics, reflecting the importance of moral principles for politics. “Ren” and “Li” are important parts of the core values of Confucianism, so analyzing the differences between (...) them and their evolution is of great significance for further understanding Confucian culture. This paper selected 132 classic Confucian works from SikuQuanshu, a large collection of books compiled during the Qianlong’s reign of the Qing Dynasty, to calculate the use of frequency of “Ren” and “Li” in those books by means of big data. Then the data was analyzed to show the development trajectory of “Ren” and “Li” from the Spring and Autumn period to the Qing Dynasty, providing a new perspective for the study of Confucian culture. The analysis result shows that from the Spring and Autumn period to the Qing Dynasty, both the frequencies of “Ren” and “Li” record a peak and a bottom: “Ren” has its peak in the Sui and Tang period while “Li” reaches its climax in the Wei and Jin period ; both “Ren” and “Li” hit their bottom during the Yuan Dynasty. The average frequency of “Li” is higher than that of “Ren” during most of the time. In general, “Li” is more frequently referred to in classic Confucian works than “Ren,” especially in those of the pre-Sui and Tang era. The An-Shi Disturbances in the Tang Dynasty may mark an important turning point for the frequencies of “Ren” and “Li” in classic Confucian works. (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)

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)

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 purpose of this study was to examine the moderating effects of goal orientations and self-efficacy between competitive cognitive anxiety and motor performance under conditions featuring different levels of ego-threat. Eighty-one collegiate-level basketball players completed Sport Competitive Anxiety Test, Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire, and General Self-Efficacy Scale prior to the experiment. Athletes participated in two sessions of free-throw tasks. After the first session, which was under a control condition, participants performed in a free-throw competitive session while being provided opponents’ (...) scores that induced different levels of competitive cognitive anxiety. Performance is defined as the accuracy in two free-throw sessions. A hierarchical multiple regression showed that high level of task-orientation and low level of ego-orientation can buffer the impairment of competitive cognitive anxiety on motor performance. The relationship between competitive cognitive anxiety and motor performance did not vary with self-efficacy. An a repeated-measured analysis of covariance after cluster analysis revealed that a high-task/low-ego profile benefited athletes the most regarding the impairment of competitive cognitive anxiety. Together, ego- and task-orientations and “goal profile” moderate the relationship between competitive cognitive anxiety and motor performance; however, self-efficacy may not serve as a moderator variable in between. (shrink)

Ecological consciousness in traditional Chinese culture is a very important thought resource in the process of constructing ‘a postmodern worldview’.

The Second Enlightenment is a deep reflection and an immanent transcendence of the first Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries). Although the great achievements of the first Enlightenment cannot be denied, its limits are increasingly being exposed. Among the many limitations of the Enlightenment, the suppression of beauty in general and natural beauty in particular is one of its main drawbacks, caused by its blind worship of reason and the domination of a modern mechanistic worldview. The suppression of beauty and natural (...) beauty has produced destructive consequences which are responsible for the ecological, social, and spiritual crisis facing us today. In order to prevent ecological catastrophes and create an ecological civilization, a second Enlightenment whose core concept is beauty is needed. The Second Enlightenment challenges us to rethink the value and importance of beauty and natural beauty, and regards beauty as the aim of the universe, as well as of ecological civilization. In this sense, the Second Enlightenment can be seen as an aesthetic Enlightenment which not only helps us to resist consumerism, guard spiritual dignity, nurture our souls, find a sense of belonging, and lead a poetic life, but also helps Chinese society to overcome a defiant attitude toward rural civilization and farmers, and eventually to remove the Great Wall between city and country. (shrink)

: This paper argues that three salient corrupt practices that mark contemporary Chinese health care, namely the over-prescription of indicated drugs, the prescription of more expensive forms of medication and more expensive diagnostic work-ups than needed, and illegal cash payments to physicians—i.e., red packages—result not from the introduction of the market to China, but from two clusters of circumstances. First, there has been a loss of the Confucian appreciation of the proper role of financial reward for good health care. Second, (...) misguided governmental policies have distorted the behavior of physicians and hospitals. The distorting policies include (1) setting very low salaries for physicians, (2) providing bonuses to physicians and profits to hospitals from the excessive prescription of drugs and the use of more expensive drugs and unnecessary expensive diagnostic procedures, and (3) prohibiting payments by patients to physicians for higher quality care. The latter problem is complicated by policies that do not allow the use of governmental insurance and funds from medical savings accounts in private hospitals as well as other policies that fail to create a level playing field for both private and government hospitals. The corrupt practices currently characterizing Chinese health care will require not only abolishing the distorting governmental policies but also drawing on Confucian moral resources to establish a rightly directed appreciation of the proper place of financial reward in the practice of medicine. (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 this article, I offer an abridged reconstruction of the foundational elements of Confucian moral commitments, which, I will argue, still provide the background moral substance for moral reflection in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea. The essay presents implications of Confucianism for establishing an appropriate health care system and critically assesses the features of current health polices in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The goal is to offer a family-oriented, non-individualist account of resource allocation that takes (...) family authority and responsibility seriously. (shrink)

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)

Common spatial pattern is an effective algorithm for extracting electroencephalogram features of motor imagery ; however, CSP mainly aims at multichannel EEG signals, and its effect in extracting EEG features with fewer channels is poor—even worse than before using CSP. To solve the above problem, a new combined feature extraction method has been proposed in this study. For EEG signals from fewer channels, wavelet packet transform, fast ensemble empirical mode decomposition, and local mean decomposition were used to decompose the band-pass (...) filtered EEG into multiple time–frequency components, and the corresponding components were selected according to the frequency characteristics of MI or the correlation coefficient between its time–frequency components and the original EEG signal. Furthermore, phase space reconstruction was performed on the selected components after the three time-frequency decompositions, the maximum Lyapunov index was calculated, and the features were reconstructed; then, CSP projection mapping was used for the reconstructed features. The support vector machine probability output model was trained by the obtained three mappings. Probability outputs by three different support vector machines were then obtained. Finally, the classification of test samples was determined by the fusion of the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory at the decision level. The results showed that the accuracy of the proposed method was 95.71% on data set III of BCI competition II, which was 2.88% higher than the existing methods. On data set IIb of BCI competition IV, the average accuracy was 86.60%, which was 2.3% higher than the existing methods. This study verified the effectiveness of the proposed method and provided an approach for the research and development of the MI-BCI system based on fewer channels. (shrink)

A proposition is noncontingent, if it is necessarily true or it is necessarily false. In an epistemic context, ‘a proposition is noncontingent’ means that you know whether the proposition is true. In this paper, we study contingency logic with the noncontingency operator? but without the necessity operator 2. This logic is not a normal modal logic, because?→ is not valid. Contingency logic cannot define many usual frame properties, and its expressive power is weaker than that of basic modal logic over (...) classes of models without reflexivity. These features make axiomatizing contingency logics nontrivial, especially for the axiomatization over symmetric frames. In this paper, we axiomatize contingency logics over various frame classes using a novel method other than the methods provided in the literature, based on the ‘almost-definability’ schema AD proposed in our previous work. We also present extensions of contingency logic with dynamic operators. Finally, we compare our work to the related work in the fields of contingency logic and ignorance logic, where the two research communities have similar results but are apparently unaware of each other’s work. One goal of our paper is to bridge this gap. (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)

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)

ArgumentThis paper examines the earthquake monitoring and prediction program, called “collective monitoring, collective defense,” in communist China during the Cultural Revolution, a period of political upheavals and natural disasters. Guided by their scientific and political ideas, the Chinese developed approaches to earthquake monitoring and prediction that emphasized mass participation, everyday knowledge, and observations of macro-seismic phenomena. The paper explains the ideas, practices, and epistemology of the program within the political context of the Cultural Revolution. It also suggests possibilities for comparative (...) analysis of science, state, and natural disasters. The paper redefines the concept of “citizen science” and argues that the concept provides a useful comparative perspective on the intimate relationship between science and the macropolitics of modern state and society. (shrink)

Taiwan is an island country situated in the northwest Pacific, close to the southeast of China. The land area is about 36,000 square kilometers. The population of Taiwan is about 23 million, and it consists of the majority Han ethnic groups and dozens of minority groups who are collectively called “Formosan,” an appellation for indigenous peoples in Taiwan. Formosans can be divided into Pingpu and Gaoshan by their living area. In recent years, marriages between Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Southeast Asians (...) have increased significantly. Because of the genetic background of the Taiwanese people, it was thought to be highly beneficial for Taiwan to establish a biobank specifically designed for the Taiwanese population, as it would enable large-scale cohort studies to be carried out for common diseases occurring in Taiwan. (shrink)

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

The ‘Wu xing’ belongs to Guodian bamboo slips texts, which were buried around 300 BCE and excavated in 1993. Its relation with Mengzi is widely investigated. Yet how it is philosophically related to Xunzi receives little attention. In this article, I illustrate a neglected relation between ‘Wu xing’ and Xunzi, by elucidating how shan 善 (goodness) is first raised in ‘Wu xing’ and developed by Xunzi into a concrete idea. Both ‘Wu xing’ and Xunzi propose that shan exists in action, (...) which boils down to the harmonious unity of the mind and body, and to secure the ideal relation between the mind and body requires constant learning and practicing, particularly, of rituals. Learning and practicing not only lead one to realize shan, but eventually to become a consummate practitioner of rituals, to use Xunzi’s words, to become a sage. (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.

本书不仅从证据学意义上探讨了“视听资料的概念”、“视听资料的收集”、“视听资料的审查判断”、“视听资料的运用”等程序性内容,而且从实际性出行,对视听资料的几种主要表现形式,如录音资料、录像证据、计算机 证据、电子数据资料分别作了深入的论述。.

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)