It has been a popular theory in English, Japanese, and Chinese scholarship that a “victory of Confucianism” occurred during the Han dynasty. Some members of these academic communities challenge this theory. However, it has long been overlooked that they do so by adopting different terminology and research frameworks. English scholarship uses the expression “victory/triumph of Confucianism” to refer to the dominance or growth of Confucianism during that period, while the Japanese use “the establishment of Confucian doctrine/religion as the state doctrine/religion” (...) and the Chinese use “dismissing the hundred schools and revering only the Confucian arts”. The expressions, as the current issue illustrates, exemplify three different ways of studying the history of Han Confucianism. (shrink)

The ‘happy fish’ dialogue is one of the best-known and heatedly debated passages of the Zhuangzi. Scholars have constructed different interpretations of the dialogue. Some argue that this dialogue expresses the idea of living at ease and enjoying life as it is; some refer to the idea of anti-anthropocentrism, while others reconstruct the dialogue as certain epistemological debates. This paper examines the connotations of ‘fish’, ‘water’, and ‘river’ in early Chinese political discourses and reads the political connotations in the dialogue (...) between Zhuangzi and Huizi. This can lead to an alternative interpretation, which is that, at its core, this passage is a dialogue between these two men on politics and their political careers. (shrink)

The Kantian philosophy, for many, largely represents the Modern West’s anthropocentric dominance of nature in its instrumental-rationalist orientation. Recently, some scholars have argued that Kant’s aesthetics offers significant resources for environmental ethics, while others believe that Kant’s flawed dualistic views in the second Critique severely undermine any environmental promise that aesthetic judgments may hold in Kant’s third Critique . This article first examines the meanings of nature in Kant’s three Critique s. It concludes that Kant’s aesthetic view toward sensible nature (...) is indeed inconsistent. The article, however, also suggests that the “I” as “transcendental apperception” discussed in the paralogisms of the first Critique holds some promise of “interthing intersubjective” thinking. The second half of the article demonstrates that Daoism with a dialectic concern similar to Kant’s has something insightful to offer in its idea of interthingness based on a phenomenal account of nature. The article investigates important Daoist ideas of interthing analogical experience, qi , spiritual exercise, and wuwei in its dialect relation to zizan . By bringing Daoism and Kant into dialogue, the author hopes to bring forth a synthetic approach that is better suited to today’s environmental concerns. (shrink)

Relating visual images to textual messages may have great potential in facilitating students’ reading comprehension. The inevitable and important presence of visuals in textbooks obliges language teachers to exploit all semiotic resources to deepen students’ understanding. However, analysis of how images interact with text in textbooks has been rare, and among the efforts it has generally been found that visuals and text often fail to achieve coherence. This study investigates whether and how text and image complement each other ideationally by (...) six sense relations and interpersonally by the Mood system in ninth-grade English as a Foreign Language textbooks to reach intersemiotic complementarity. The results revealed that ideational rather than interpersonal IC is more frequent, where many more Participants than Processes in the texts find their visual complements. Ideational IC is particularly high in Information Reports while Recounts generally mark higher percentages of interpersonal IC. To accomplish ideational IC, repetition is most frequent, followed by hyponymy and collocation. Distinct IC patterns also characterize the different editions of textbooks investigated, which may suggest their different potentials in catering to students of varying proficiencies. (shrink)

To contribute to the debate on the role of social media in responsible business, this article explores blogger buzz in reaction to food companies’ press releases on health and obesity issues, considering the content and the level of fit between the CSR initiatives and the company. Findings show that companies issued more product-related initiatives than promotion-related ones. Among these, less than half generated a substantial number of responses from bloggers, which could not be identified as a specific group. While new (...) product introductions led to positive buzz, modifications of current products resulted in more negative responses, even if there was a high fit with core business. While promotion-related press releases were received negatively in general, particularly periphery promotion generated most reactions. Our exploratory study suggests that companies can increase the likelihood of a positive reaction if they carefully consider the fit between initiatives and their core business, while taking the notion of ‘controversial fit’, relating to the unhealthy nature of original products, into account. Further research avenues and implications, as well as limitations, are discussed. (shrink)

Increasing concerns have been raised regarding artificial intelligence (AI) bias, and in response, efforts have been made to pursue AI fairness. In this paper, we argue that the idea of structural injustice serves as a helpful framework for clarifying the ethical concerns surrounding AI bias—including the nature of its moral problem and the responsibility for addressing it—and reconceptualizing the approach to pursuing AI fairness. Using AI in healthcare as a case study, we argue that AI bias is a form of (...) structural injustice that exists when AI systems interact with other social factors to exacerbate existing social inequalities, making some groups of people more vulnerable to undeserved burdens while conferring unearned benefits to others. The goal of AI fairness, understood this way, is about pursuing a more just social structure with the development and usage of AI systems when appropriate. We further argue that all participating agents in the unjust social structure associated with AI bias bear a shared responsibility to join collective action with the goal of reforming the social structure, and we provide a list of practical recommendations for agents in various social positions to contribute to this collective action. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units (...) affect speakers’ preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse. (shrink)

This paper reports part of a longitudinal research project, which sought to capture students’ conceptualization of caring practice as they progressed to different levels of study in a nursing diploma programme in Hong Kong. Model emulation was found to be an effective means of focusing students’ learning processes on the moral aspects of nursing practice. The theory of model emulation from a Chinese perspective and how it is applied to create a learning context to allow students to acquire a moral (...) sense of nursing are discussed. The participating students are invited to be sincere enquirers in the pursuit of the good embedded in practice through introspective self-examination and dialogue. They are asked to describe and share their experience of positive and negative examples of nursing in written accounts. Van Kaam’s phenomenological method was adopted to explicate the good and bad constituents of nursing from these examples, with the students assuming an active role in the explication process. The explication reveals that the students were able to articulate the good and bad practices in a variety of patient care situations. (shrink)

In Chinese philosophy’s encounter with modernity and feminist discourse, Neo-Confucianism often suffered the most brutal attacks and criticisms. In “Neo-Confucians and Zhu Xi on Family and Woman: Challenges and Potentials,” Ann A. Pang-White investigates Song Neo-Confucians’ views (in particular, that of Zhu Xi) on women by examining the Classified Conversations of Zhu Xi (Zhuzi Yulei),the Reflections on Things at Hand (Jinsi Lu), Further Reflections on Things at Hand (Xu Jinsi Lu), and other texts. Pang-White also takes a close (...) look at the Song law regarding women’s property rights and the Song educational system. Surprisingly, Zhu exhibited a level of flexibility, though still limited, on these subjects. He was particularly adamant about the importance of women’s education. In addition,even though he opposed the social practice and women’s ownership of dowry (seeing it as a form of commercializing marriage), he did not absolutely oppose women’s property rights. However, his normative and philosophical view on the male/yang and female/yin relationship was less satisfactory. At one place, he used it to illustrate gender equity; at another place, he defended female subordination. Zhu’s social-political teaching on women’s role could benefit from a more consistent development of his metaphysics of li-qi and yin-yang , which can bring new insight to the contemporary feminist “essentialist versus non-essentialist” debate on sex and gender. (shrink)

本书对于一分为三的现实与历史、形式与内容、继承与创新等的关系,进行了论述。全书分为四部分,分别是天地之道——一分为三、人间之道——一分为三、一分为三与辩证法、一分为二之粗疏等。.

This study proposes a push notification system that combines digital real-time learning, roll-call, and feedback collection functions. With the gradually flourishing online real-time learning systems, this research further builds roll-call and feedback functions for students to enhance concentration and provide opinions. Additionally, the lecturers can do a roll call irregularly and randomly through the push notification function, avoiding students logging in but away from the keyboard. Lecturers can also send questions to a specific student or invite all students to answer; (...) the replies can show students' learning performance. The system will store each notification in a database and analyse messages automatically to record roll calls. Moreover, the system can record the time and intervals of student feedback, enabling lecturers to check students' attention and learning conditions. Currently, most online digital systems depend on the lecturer to be responsible for the entire system; taking a roll call and asking questions will consume the lecturer's teaching time and strength. The system developed in this article can do roll calls and feedback by push notifications, reducing lecturers' workload. Furthermore, the roll-call and automatic record functions can save the time of paperwork after a course. (shrink)

Objects in the world usually have names at different hierarchical levels (e.g., beagle, dog, animal). This research investigates adults' ability to use cross‐situational statistics to simultaneously learn object labels at individual and category levels. The results revealed that adults were able to use co‐occurrence information to learn hierarchical labels in contexts where the labels for individual objects and labels for categories were presented in completely separated blocks, in interleaved blocks, or mixed in the same trial. Temporal presentation schedules significantly affected (...) the learning of individual object labels, but not the learning of category labels. Learners' subsequent generalization of category labels indicated sensitivity to the structure of statistical input. (shrink)

Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual violence includes both (...) types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates Habermas's social-philosophical exploration of the public sphere in the age of mass communication, which addresses a key question: "Is the public possible in the sociohistorical formation of the mass public sphere?" In his genealogical analysis of different public spheres from feudal to modern times, Habermas indicates that the emergence of inter-subjectivity is historically based upon the dichotomy of private / public (subjective/objective). He emphasizes the opposition of the "subjective side" of rationality to its "objective side" while (...) dealing with the public spheres in different historical periods. Habermas points out that the notion of the public can exist only at the face-to-face level communication. It is impossible for the (impersonal) masses to construct any sense of publicness, since there are no historical and social conditions in which the masses of working class can establish an "autonomous private sphere" outside of material production and consumption, as the bourgeoisie did. In this way, Habermas ambivalently argues that the public is not possible in the mass public sphere. (shrink)