Of the three powers—Wei, Shu, and Wu—that divided China for the better part of the third century, Wei has received the most attention in the standard literary historical accounts. In a typical book of Chinese literary history in any language, little, if anything, is said about Wu and Shu. This article argues that the consideration of the literary production of Shu and Wu is crucial to a fuller picture of the cultural dynamics of the Three Kingdoms period. The three states (...) competed with one another for the claim to political legitimacy and cultural supremacy, and Wu in particular was in a position to contend with Wei in its cultural undertakings, notably in the areas of history writing and ritual music. This article begins with an overview of Shu and Wu literary production, and moves on to a more detailed discussion of Wu’s cultural projects, both of which were intended to assert Wu’s legitimacy and cultural power vis-à-vis Wei and Shu’s claims to cultural and political orthodoxy. Ultimately, this article implicitly asks the question of how to write literary history when there is scant material from the period under question, and suggests that we perform textual excavations and make use of what we have to try and reconstruct, as best as we can, what once was. A good literary history of the Chinese medieval period, the age of manuscript culture and that of heavy textual losses and transfigurations, should be written with the awareness of the incomplete and imperfect nature of the data we do have, and incorporate the phenomenon of textual losses and transfigurations as well as some reflections on the underlying reasons into its narrative and critical inquiry. (shrink)

Reviewing a recent book about early medieval Chinese geographical writings, this essay asks what sort of historical contextualization is needed for historical study, and suggests looking at multiple factors, including the material conditions of textual production, that may be responsible for the proliferation of texts. It cautions against embracing a single story to account for a long historical period, especially if that story fits our modern concerns too neatly; even more importantly, we have to allow the primary sources to take (...) the lead, rather than looking for and presenting only evidence that serves a particular agenda. (shrink)

A cross-generic examination of the discursive representations of a changing rela- tionship to a specific subcategory of things that are observable in writings from early to medieval China, this essay suggests that these representations denote the appearance of a culture of sentimentality about old, worn-out things at the turn of the ninth century. This culture of sentimentality indicates a deep-seated anxiety about the blurred boundary, on a conceptual and ideological level, between humans and things, and bespeaks the complex dynamics in (...) the relationship of self and other at a time of profound cultural and intellectual changes, in which the textual representations of dilapidated ordinary things of daily life participated. It anticipates and yet remains profoundly different from Northern Song antiquarianism, thus showing gaps and fissures in the neat, familiar teleological narrative of the “Tang-Song transition.”. (shrink)

It is the continuity between epistemology and empirical science that the naturalism in contemporary philosophy of science emphasizes. After its individual and social dimensions, the philosophy of scientific practice takes a stand on naturalism in order to observe complex scientific activities through practice. However, regarding the naturalism’s problem of normativity, the philosophy of scientific practice today has deconstructed more than it has constructed.

It is the continuity between epistemology and empirical science that the naturalism in contemporary philosophy of science emphasizes. After its individual and social dimensions, the philosophy of scientific practice takes a stand on naturalism in order to observe complex scientific activities through practice. However, regarding the naturalism’s problem of normativity, the philosophy of scientific practice today has deconstructed more than it has constructed.

With the recent rise of the philosophy of scientific practices, SSK (Sociology of Scientific Knowledge), and feminist approaches to the philosophy of science, a new perspective is gradually coming into being, holding that the starting point for scientific research is opportunity. Opportunistic features in solar neutrino experiments, Opportunistic features of complexity studies emerging from economics, and the measurement of insects' flight can prove the above perspective from different angels. It is important and significant to determine whether the starting point for (...) scientific research is opportunity, a problem, or an observation. /// 近年来由于科学实践哲学的兴起，以及 SSK 和女性主义科学哲学研究的兴起， 科学研究始于机会的观点正在悄然形成之中。太阳中微子实验、复杂性研究和昆虫 飞行测量等案例都从不同角度证明了 "科学研究始于机会" 的观点。区别科学研究 "始于机会"、"始于问题" 和 "始于观察" 这三种观点，是重要而且有意义的。. (shrink)

The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms. By Xiaofei Tian. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 108. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University, 2018. Pp. xvi + 454. $49.95.

The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath. By Zhang Daye, translated by XiaofeI Tian. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 200. $75 ; $30.

One type of soft-line reply to manipulation arguments, which I call ‘the another-agent reply’, focuses on the existence of some controlling agent and how this can undermine the actor's moral responsibility. A well-known challenge to this type of reply is the so-called ‘machine induction’ case. This paper provides an argument for why ‘machine induction’ presents no real challenge to the another-agent reply. It further argues that any soft-liner who does not leave room for the existence of some controlling agent in (...) their explanation of why manipulation undermines responsibility will face a dilemma. Thus, instead of presenting a challenge to the another-agent reply, ‘machine induction’ actually presents a reason in support of it. (shrink)

A frequent caveat in online dating profiles – “No fats, femmes, or Asians” – caused an LGBT activist to complain about the bias against Asians in the American gay community, which he called “racial looksism”. In response, he was asked that, if he himself would not date a fat person, why he should find others not dating Asians so upsetting. This response embodies a popular attitude that personal preferences or tastes are simply personal matters – they are not subject to (...) moral evaluation. In this paper, I argue, against this popular attitude, that a personal preference like racial looksism is indeed wrong. A preference like racial looksism is wrong because it is an overgeneralization that disrespects individuality by treating people as exchangeable tokens of one type, and such disrespect denies its objects appreciation that their dignity entitles them to. As it turns out, there is on my account a relevant moral difference between racial looksism and simple looksism. (shrink)

From reviews of the hardback edition: a deep study of 20th century field ... of the conceptual origins and development of twentieth century field theories, ...

This paper is an attempt to improve the practical argument for beliefs in God. Some theists, most famously Kant and William James, called our attention to a particular set of beliefs, the Jamesian-type beliefs, which are justified by virtue of their practical significance, and these theists tried to justify theistic beliefs on the exact same ground. I argue, contra the Jamesian tradition, that theistic beliefs are different from the Jamesian-type beliefs and thus cannot be justified on the same ground. I (...) also argue that the practical argument, as it stands, faces a problem of self-defeat. I then construct a new practical argument that avoids both problems. According to this new argument, theistic beliefs are rational to accept because such beliefs best supply us with motivation strong enough to carry out demanding moral tasks. (shrink)

It will be settled out for the open problem of designing an r-order finite-time state observer for reaction-diffusion genetic regulatory networks with time-varying delays. By assuming the Dirichlet boundary conditions, aiming to estimate the mRNA and protein concentrations via available network measurements. Firstly, sufficient F-T stability conditions for the filtering error system have been investigated via constructing an appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and using several integral inequalities and convex technique simultaneously. These conditions are delay-dependent and reaction-diffusion-dependent and can be checked by (...) MATLAB toolbox. Furthermore, a method is proposed to design an r-order F-T state observer, and the explicit expressions of observer gains are given. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

Philosophers debate over the truth of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the thesis that there is a morally significant difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm to happen. Deontologists tend to accept this doctrine, whereas consequentialists tend to reject it. A robust defence of this doctrine would require a conceptual distinction between doing and allowing that both matches our ordinary use of the concepts in a wide range of cases and enables a justification for the alleged moral difference. (...) In this article, I argue not only that a robust defence of this doctrine is available, but also that it is available within a consequentialist framework. (shrink)

This paper reviews Veli Mitova’s recent article, “The collective epistemic reasons of social-identity groups,” which proposes and defends a collectivist account of epistemic reasons for social-identity groups. The paper first discusses what makes a collectivist account appealing in the context of moral obligations, a context from which Mitova apparently draws inspiration for her collectivist account of epistemic reasons. The paper then considers two issues that may make a collectivist account of epistemic reasons lose much of the theoretical advantage that a (...) collectivist account of moral obligations has over its individualist competitor: (1) epistemic reasons need to be internally possessed and (2) the individual inability that motivates a collectivist account of moral obligations is of a special kind. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the basic entities in the causally organized hierarchy of entities that quantum field theory describes are not particles but fields. Then I move to discuss, from the perspective of a structural realist, in what sense and to what degree this theoretical construction of fields can be taken as an objective representation of physical reality.

In the presence of heterogeneity between the randomized controlled trial (RCT) participants and the target population, evaluating the treatment effect solely based on the RCT often leads to biased quantification of the real-world treatment effect. To address the problem of lack of generalizability for the treatment effect estimated by the RCT sample, we leverage observational studies with large samples that are representative of the target population. This article concerns evaluating treatment effects on survival outcomes for a target population and considers (...) a broad class of estimands that are functionals of treatment-specific survival functions, including differences in survival probability and restricted mean survival times. Motivated by two intuitive but distinct approaches, i.e., imputation based on survival outcome regression and weighting based on inverse probability of sampling, censoring, and treatment assignment, we propose a semiparametric estimator through the guidance of the efficient influence function. The proposed estimator is doubly robust in the sense that it is consistent for the target population estimands if either the survival model or the weighting model is correctly specified and is locally efficient when both are correct. In addition, as an alternative to parametric estimation, we employ the nonparametric method of sieves for flexible and robust estimation of the nuisance functions and show that the resulting estimator retains the root- n n consistency and efficiency, the so-called rate-double robustness. Simulation studies confirm the theoretical properties of the proposed estimator and show that it outperforms competitors. We apply the proposed method to estimate the effect of adjuvant chemotherapy on survival in patients with early-stage resected non-small cell lung cancer. (shrink)

Using pure statistical evidence about a group to judge a particular member of that group is often found objectionable. One natural explanation of why this is objectionable appeals to the moral notion of respecting individuality: to properly respect individuality, we need individualized evidence, not pure statistical evidence. However, this explanation has been criticized on the ground that there is no fundamental difference between the so-called “individualized evidence” and “pure statistical evidence”. This paper defends the respecting-individuality explanation by developing an account (...) of what it means to respect individuality. It combines an idealistic account of respecting individuality and a prioritization account of respecting individuality, and offers a principled way to distinguish individualized evidence from non-individualized evidence. (shrink)

대부분의 연구자들은 주염계의 「태극도설」에 대한 주자의 해석서인 「태극해의」가 이기론을 기반으로 이루어졌다고 주장한다. 그러나 「태극해의」에서 ‘태극=리’라고 명시적으로 주장한 구절은 찾아볼 수 없으며 체계적인 이기론이 나타나지도 않는다. 이와 같은 사실에 비추어 볼 때에 조선유학자들이 이기론을 사용하여 「태극도설」을 해석한 것은 의미가 있다. 남당은 ‘모두 같은 본연지성’과 ‘모두 다른 기질지성’이라는 기존의 이분법적 성론만으로는 인간과 사물의 차이를 본질적으로, 그리고 명실상부하게 분별할 수 없으며, 인간이 도덕적 주체로서 가지는 고유한 지위를 확보하기 어렵다고 보았다. 이와 같은 문제의식에서 남당은 본연지성을 ‘초형기의 본연지성’과 ‘인기질의 본연지성’으로 나누고, 因氣質의 ‘人性과 物性이 다른 (...) 本然之性’이라는 독창적 개념을 토대로 「태극도설」을 해석하였다. 그리고 이 성론에 기반을 둔 ‘一原分殊’의 논리로 「태극도설」에 통일적인 체계를 부여하였다. 그는 리와 기의 분별을 매우 강조하고 있다. 이 분별의 논리가 인물성동이론에 적용될 때 인/물의 본연지성이 다르며 성인과 범인의 마음이 다르다는 ‘차이’의 이론이 정립된다. 그리고 이를 토대로 ‘차이의 형이상학’이 구축된다. 남당은 이 ‘차이의 형이상학’을 기반으로 「태극도설」을 해석하여 통일적인 체계성을 부여한 것이다. 이와 같은 남당의 해석이 ‘동아시아 유학자들의 「태극도설」 해석사에 있어서 어떠한 위상을 차지하고 있는가’라는 문제는 앞으로 중요한 연구과제가 될 것이다. 성리학의 핵심적 쟁점들은 「태극도설」과 밀접한 관계에 있기 때문이다. (shrink)

As an important branch of applied anthropology, business anthropology has developed well in China in the recent past. This has attracted the attention of not only the academic society but also of industrial and commercial circles. This article illustrates the emergence and the development of business anthropology in China, and affirms the work of Chinese pioneers in this branch of cultural anthropology. It elaborates on what contemporary management and anthropological scholars have contributed to promote business anthropology in that country. Moreover, (...) it expounds, from various perspectives, on the role that business anthropology can play for/in China. China is a large country developing at an astonishing speed. Chinese society is transforming from a traditional agricultural and pre-industrial phase into a post-industrial and commercial phase. Therefore, the development of business anthropology in China is promising. (shrink)

New Confucianism is comparative philosophy par excellence. It stands or falls with the validity of the comparisons its thinkers have made regarding Western and Asian religious and philosophical systems and conceptions. Yet comparative philosophy and comparative religion in and beyond Asia have recently received criticisms. Questions that have been raised include: is it not a fallacy to take Asian philosophy and religion out of their historical and social contexts and to present them as unchanging entities? Are the across-space-and-time comparisons between (...) Asian and Western philosophy and religion far-fetched and forced? To answer these questions, this paper presents a case study of comparative philosophy: Mou Zongsan’s post-Kantian Confucian metaphysics. After showcasing Mou, in the second part of this paper I shall consider the validity of comparative philosophy in general and the implications to my appraisal of Mou in particular. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of Chinese business managers’ moral philosophies on the perception of corrupt payments such as bribery, kickbacks and gift giving. Business managers from Mainland China were selected as target respondents. As hypothesized the survey results generally indicate that moral relativism is a significant predictor of Chinese business managers’ favorable perception of bribery and kickbacks. In examining the attitude toward gift giving, the survey showed that an individual’s attitude toward gift giving was neither affected by their moral (...) relativism nor by their moral idealism, which implies that gift giving is widely accepted as legal practice in business in Chinese cultural society. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in employees’ voluntary pro-environmental behavior has begun to emerge. While this research is beginning to shed light on the predictors of workplace pro-environmental behavior, our understanding of the psychological mechanisms linking the various antecedents to employees’ environmentally responsible behavior and the circumstances under which any such effects are enhanced and/or attenuated is incomplete. The current study seeks to fill this gap by examining: the effects of perceived corporate social responsibility on employees’ voluntary pro-environment behavior; an underlying mechanism that (...) links CSR perceptions to these behaviors; and a boundary condition to these relationships. Data from 183 supervisor-subordinate dyads employed in large- and medium-sized casinos and hotels in Guangdong China and Macau revealed that employees’ corporate social responsibility perceptions indirectly affect their engagement in voluntary pro-environmental behavior through organizational identification, and these effects are stronger for employees high in empathy. (shrink)

The history of Chinese Marxist thought is intimately intertwined with ancient autochthonous philosophical texts. In Chinese Dialectics the complete intellectual history of Chinese Marxism is laid bare.

An athlete has faith in her unathletic partner to run a marathon, a teacher has faith in her currently poor-performing students to improve in the future, and your friend has faith in you to succeed in the difficult project that you have been pursuing, even, and especially, when your chance of failing is non-trivial. This paper develops and defends a relational view of interpersonal faith by considering four interesting phenomena: first, in virtue of placing faith in someone, we stand in (...) solidarity with that person; second, interpersonal faith is called for during moments of difficulty, but it can seem inappropriate during moments of ease; third, one’s faith in others can feel unwelcomed, and can be rejected; and fourth, when interpersonal faith is frustrated, disappointment, rather than resentment, is warranted. I propose that when the faithor (e.g., your friend) places faith in the faithee (e.g., you) to φ, the faithor does something close to inviting the faithee to (re)commit to φ-ing. This invitation-like move, once properly taken up by the faithee, puts both sides of the faith in a new kind of normative relationship that is in the same broad family as a promissory relationship, albeit with a different normative profile. (shrink)

A multiphase study tested a proposed mediated moderation model for the joint effects of ethical pressure and power distance orientation on accountants’ ethical judgments of earnings management. Results based on a sample of 354 accountants from China indicated that the relationship between ethical pressure and ethical judgments of earnings management is contingent on the accountants’ power distance orientation. That is, the relationship between ethical pressure and ethical judgments of earnings management was stronger for accountants with a high power distance orientation. (...) The results also demonstrated that ethical beliefs in support of the company serve as a mediator for the interaction effect of ethical pressure and power distance orientation on the outcome. These results are discussed in terms of viewing earnings management as a form of unethical pro-organizational behavior which can be effectively investigated within the framework of the person-situation interactionist model. (shrink)

A series of our experimental studies show that some actions which consequentialists would treat as morally right or wrong were not regarded by ordinary people as a matter of morality. These results...

This paper is aimed at investigating the differences in ethical perception between Mainland China and Hong Kong through qualitative analysis. The level of idealism and relativism of the informants are measured quantitatively. The qualitative analysis of the viewpoints of participants from Hong Kong and other Chinese cities offers a profound understanding of ethical perception. Contradicting previous studies, our research offers a fresh perspective, indicating that those with high idealism are not always the ones who condemn misconduct or advocate for whistle-blowing. (...) Interestingly, we noted that individuals with high relativism frequently consider and emphasize alternative perspectives, rather than merely condemning or advocating misconduct and whistle-blowing. Conversely, those with low relativism frequently exhibit more anger, regardless of their stance. This discovery suggests that high relativism could be beneficial for facilitating communication between conflicting parties. (shrink)

The temporal structure of behavior contains a rich source of information about its dynamic organization, origins, and development. Today, advances in sensing and data storage allow researchers to collect multiple dimensions of behavioral data at a fine temporal scale both in and out of the laboratory, leading to the curation of massive multimodal corpora of behavior. However, along with these new opportunities come new challenges. Theories are often underspecified as to the exact nature of these unfolding interactions, and psychologists have (...) limited ready-to-use methods and training for quantifying structures and patterns in behavioral time series. In this paper, we will introduce four techniques to interpret and analyze high-density multi-modal behavior data, namely, to: (1) visualize the raw time series, (2) describe the overall distributional structure of temporal events (Burstiness calculation), (3) characterize the nonlinear dynamics over multiple timescales with Chromatic and Anisotropic Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA), (4) and quantify the directional relations among a set of interdependent multimodal behavioral variables with Granger Causality. Each technique is introduced in a module with conceptual background, sample data drawn from empirical studies and ready-to-use Matlab scripts. The code modules showcase each technique’s application with detailed documentation to allow more advanced users to adapt them to their own datasets. Additionally, to make our modules more accessible to beginner programmers, we provide a “Programming Basics” module that introduces common functions for working with behavioral timeseries data in Matlab. Together, the materials provide a practical introduction to a range of analyses that psychologists can use to discover temporal structure in high-density behavioral data. (shrink)

The creation of QCD is one of greatest achievements in the history of science. It has radically changed our conception of the fundamental ontology of the physical world and its underlying dynamics. What it has discovered are more than new particles and a new force, but rather a deeper level of physical reality, a new kind of entities. Dynamically, the strong nuclear forces are no longer taken to be fundamental, but are relegated to the status of the un-cancelled residue of (...) far stronger long range force mediated by gluon. From a long term perspective, perhaps more important than these discoveries is that it breaks a new path to explore many novel features of an unknown layer of the physical world, such as instanton, the theta vacuum and effective energy. The notion of effective energy allows us to conceptualize the mysterious quantum number flow and hadronization. Although the metaphysical status of effective energy is not quite clear at this moment, but a window is open for conceptualizing the physical world that is in complex processes of transmutations in a unified way. (shrink)