ABSTRACTThe pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional event in China. At this discursive event, the Chinese premier – ranked second in China’s political hierarchy – is put in the international media limelight, answering journalists’ questions on a range of topics. The section involving the interpreters’ rendering of journalists’ questions is triadic (...) and dynamic and represents a particularly interesting site of ideological contestation, which can be conceptualised profitably using Bakhtin’s concept dialogised heteroglossia. Drawing on a corpus containing 20 years’ press conference data between 1998 and 2017, this CDA study interrogates the interpreters’ agency, particularly in constructing the Chinese government’s image when rendering journalists’ questions. Despite the commonplace assumptions of interpreters being impartial with little agency, the government-affiliated interpreters are found to actively engage in facework and image construction. This leads to a discursive pattern described in Van Dijk’s ideological square, which involves further emphasising and foregrounding the positive elements yet de-emphasising and mitigating the negative elements about Beijing. (shrink)

Kann man das Leben führen? Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge stellen sich in kritischer Absicht dem modernen Konzept der »Lebensführung«, das die Technikphilosophie mit der Lebensphilosophie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert eng verbunden hat und teilweise bis heute verbindet. Auch relevante soziologische Positionen wurden in diesem Kontext entwickelt. Anhand zentraler Autoren wie Simmel, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Blumenberg, Berdjajew, Reuleaux, von Uexküll, Plessner, Freyer, Jonas und Günter Ropohl (dem dieser Band aus Anlass seines 75. Geburtstags gewidmet ist) werden die Bezugnahmen zwischen (...) Technik- und Lebensphilosophie analysiert, aber auch die Abgrenzungsversuche voneinander. Die Verhältnisbestimmung der Konzepte »Leben« und »Technik« kann systemischen Charakter annehmen und deshalb die Idee einer lebensbejahenden oder -verneinenden Technik nach sich ziehen, z.B. artikuliert als Technikoptimismus/-pessimismus oder als emanzipatorische Frage nach dem eigenen Leben und dessen Selbstverwirklichung. Wenn es um Lebensführung geht, werden also gleichzeitig die Ausgangsbedingungen der Identitätskonstruktion moderner Subjekte und die Frage thematisiert, inwieweit Systementwürfe jene ermöglichen oder begrenzen. (shrink)

The present book is the English version of a monograph 'Die aristotelische Syllogistik', which first appeared ten years ago in the series of Abhand 1 lungen edited by the Academy of Sciences in Gottingen. In the preface to the English edition, I would first like to express my indebtedness to Mr. J. Barnes, now fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He not only translated what must have been a difficult text with exemplary precision and ingenuity, but followed critically every argument and (...) check ed every reference. While translating it, he has improved the book. Of those changes which I have made on Mr. Barnes' suggestion I note only the more important ones on pages 4, 12, 24sq, 32, 39, 6lsq, and 158. Since the second edition of the German text appeared in 1963 some further reviews have been published, or come to my notice, which I have 2 been able to make use of in improving the text of this new edition. I must mention here especially the detailed critical discussions of my results and arguments published by Professor W. Wieland in the Philosophische Rundschau 14 (1966), 1-27 and by Professor E. Scheibe in Gnomon 39 (1967), 454-64. Both scholars, while agreeing with the main drift and method of my interpretation, criticise some of my results and disagree with some of my arguments. It would not be possible to discuss these technical matters here with the necessary thoroughness. (shrink)

Based on in-depth interview data and popular culture texts, the current study has explored the politics of reproduction revolving around women’s age in contemporary China. Conceptualizing reproduction as a site of contestation and politics between different, and often contradictory, sets of discourses and power structures, I pursue a feminist and social constructivist analysis of the politics of reproduction in the lives of a group of urban professional women who are yet to enter motherhood at their late 20s and 30s. I (...) engage with Inhorn’s concept of ‘disrupted reproduction’ to highlight the politically, morally and emotionally charged contestations in the ‘problematized’ reproductive lives of these women. I unveil how Chinese professional women beyond their ‘reproductive prime’ are discursively constructed as ‘disrupters’, who fail their femininity test tied to a motherhood identity within the family context, challenge the ‘natural’ biological law regulating their reproductive bodies, and face a doomed reproductive future fraught with medical, physical and emotional traumas which ART cannot alleviate. Such a discourse renders invisible the structural causes of problems and challenges professional women face in negotiating parenthood, social norms and selfhood, which systematically put them under pervasive social surveillance and discipline. (shrink)

A diferencia de todos los demás sistemas de imputación, Jakobs ubica el acento de la relevancia jurídico-penal del hecho en su significado normativo, como algo que trasciende la mera causalidad exterior y la finalidad del autor, de manera que lo decisivo para la imputación jurídico-penal no es ni lo psíquicoreal querido por el autor, ni la causalidad desplegada por su conducta, sino el significado normativo de esa conducta como la expresión de un sentido objetivo de desautorización de la vigencia de (...) la norma en un determinado contexto social. (shrink)

The authors of the concept Health-Related Digital Autonomy have laid the first building block to examine the interactions between artificial intelligence, social media, and depression f...

The time-lag argument seems to put some pressure on naïve realism to agree that seeing must happen simultaneously with what is seen; meanwhile, a wide-accepted empirical fact suggests that light takes time to transmit from objects at a distance to perceivers—which implies what is seen happened before seeing, and, accordingly, naïve realism must be false. In this paper, I will, first of all, show that the time-lag argument has in fact involves a misunderstanding concept of simultaneity: according to Special Relativity, (...) simultaneity is a matter of convention rather than a matter of fact, so, in principle, we can stipulate a perceptual conception of simultaneity, according to which what is seen is simultaneous with seeing. Secondly, the generalized time-lag argument has a mistaken view on the perceived events and perceiving; it has a doubtful assumption that these events are momentary in the mathematical sense. Such idealization is the main reason why we have the intuition that the time-lag effect of perceiving is in conflict with our ordinary perceptual experiences. Finally, I argue that the naïve realist account of the perceptual relation is a nontemporal constitutive relation; and hence naïve realism is compatible with the claim that we can perceive things as they were, and it should not be weakened by the time-lag argument. (shrink)

EDITORS’ AbstractThis article is a direct response to Zhang Xiping’s criticism of Sinologism in particular and to the overall critique of Sinologism in general. With a succinct account of what Sinologism is, it provides detailed answers to a series of questions brought up by the critics. In an effort to clarify the relationship between Sinologism on the one hand and Orientalism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, New Historicism, postmodernism, and ideological theory on the other, it attempts to rethink the issues of paradigms for (...) Sinological studies, China–West studies, and cross-cultural studies. (shrink)

The temporal‐focus hypothesis claims that whether people conceptualize the past or the future as in front of them depends on their cultural attitudes toward time; such conceptualizations can be independent from the space–time metaphors expressed through language. In this paper, we study how Chinese people conceptualize time on the sagittal axis to find out the respective influences of language and culture on mental space–time mappings. An examination of Mandarin speakers' co‐speech gestures shows that some Chinese spontaneously perform past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back (besides future‐in‐front/past‐at‐back) (...) gestures, especially when gestures are accompanying past‐in‐front/future‐at‐back space–time metaphors (Exp. 1). Using a temporal performance task, the study confirms that Chinese can conceptualize the future as behind and the past as in front of them, and that such space–time mappings are affected by the different expressions of Mandarin space–time metaphors (Exp. 2). Additionally, a survey on cultural attitudes toward time shows that Chinese tend to focus slightly more on the future than on the past (Exp. 3). Within the Chinese sample, we did not find evidence for the effect of participants' cultural temporal attitudes on space–time mappings, but a cross‐cultural comparison of space–time mappings between Chinese, Moroccans, and Spaniards provides strong support for the temporal‐focus hypothesis. Furthermore, the results of Exp. 2 are replicated even after controlling for factors such as cultural temporal attitudes and age (Exp. 3), which implies that linguistic sagittal temporal metaphors can indeed influence Mandarin speakers' space–time mappings. The findings not only contribute to a better understanding of Chinese people's sagittal temporal orientation, but also have additional implications for theories on the mental space–time mappings and the relationship between language and thought. (shrink)

Exploring the locality stereotype with respect to CEO’s trustworthiness, we find that firms whose CEOs are from more reputable hometowns have a higher likelihood of stock price crashes, indicating the presence of a CEO “Trust Exploitation” effect, i.e. a high-trust identity does not guarantee managerial ethics; to the contrary, it could tempt CEOs to abuse outsiders’ trust, camouflage their misconducts and conceal adverse information more severely. The effect of CEO’s perceived trustworthiness on tail risk of stock price remains robust when (...) controlling for the region-level trust of firm’s headquarters, and in 2SLS regression with an instrumental variable. Further, CEO’s “Trust Exploitation” effect is more prominent among firms with lower disclosure quality, higher capital market pressure and higher CEO incentives. Our findings highlight an unexplored imperfection of individual-level trustworthiness as a reliable substitute for formal monitoring devices in terms of improving stock market stability. (shrink)

It is not only difficult to be a sports expert but also difficult to grow from a sports expert to a sports elite. Professional athletes are often concerned about the differences between an expert and an elite and how to eventually become an elite athlete. To explore the differences in brain neural mechanism between experts and elites in the process of motor behavior and reveal the internal connection between motor performance and brain activity, we collected and analyzed the electroencephalography findings (...) of 14 national archers and 14 provincial archers during aiming and resting states and constructed the EEG brain network of the two archer groups based on weighted phase lag index; the graph theory was used to analyze and compare the network characteristics via local network and global network topologies. The results showed that compared with the expert archers, the elite archers had stronger functional coupling in beta1 and beta2 bands, and the difference was evident in the frontal and central regions; in terms of global characteristics of brain network topology, the average clustering coefficient and global efficiency of elite archers were significantly higher than that of expert archers, and the eigenvector centrality of expert archers was higher; for local characteristics, elite archers had higher local efficient; and the brain network characteristics of expert archers showed a strong correlation with archery performance. This suggests that compared with expert archers, elite archers showed stronger functional coupling, higher integration efficiency of global and local information, and more independent performance in the archery process. These findings reveal the differences in brain electrical network topologies between elite and expert archers in the archery preparation stage, which is expected to provide theoretical reference for further training and promotion of professional athletes. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable - in (...) case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon transitivity and Appraisal within Systemic Functional Linguistics to study the traumatic discourse of Nanjing Massacre in Chinese Mainland’s and Japan’s history textbooks. Through corpus analysis, this research finds that the Chinese discourse mainly uses effective process, relational process, verbal process to construe Japan’s victimizering experience and China’s victimhood, and employs negative Affect, opposite values of Judgment, negative Appreciation, Expand, Raise and Sharpen to construct a critical voice for the Japanese army and a sympathic tone for (...) the Chinese. By contrast, the Japanese discourse largely uses pseudo-effective and middle processes, mental and existential processes to cover up Japan’s victimizering experience, and employs negative Judgment, positive Appreciation, Contract and Raise to construct an almost uncritical voice for the Japanese army and the massacre. The difference in the representation and evaluation of Nanjing Massacre results from the politics of official memories in both countries. As China endeavors to strengthen its patriotic education by using Nanjing Massacre as an ideological weapon for national solidarity, Japan expedites its nationalist historiography move to recreate its normal national image by marginalizing the massacre. (shrink)

This paper considers the parametric control to the Lorenz system by state feedback. Based on the solutions of the generalized Sylvester matrix equation, the unified explicit parametric expression of the state feedback gain matrix is proposed. The closed loop of the Lorenz system can be transformed into an arbitrary constant matrix with the desired eigenstructure. The freedom provided by the parametric control can be fully used to find a controller to satisfy the robustness criteria. A numerical simulation is developed to (...) illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. (shrink)