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)

90 nian dai, Du Weiming xian sheng de geng duo jing li zai yu kai zhan "wen hua Zhongguo" de lun yu."Wen hua Zhongguo" zhuo mo zui duo de shi ru jia de ren wen jing shen, yi jiu zheng jiang ru jia ru shi de jia zhi qu xiang he fan su ren wen zhu yi hun wei yi tan de yin xiang, tu xian ru jia yi mai xiang cheng de pi pan jing shen.

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic, which was first reported at the end of 2019, has had a massive impact on the Chinese economy and society. The pandemic has seriously tested the emergency management capabilities of the Chinese government regarding public health. Based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China for the period of 2006–2019, this paper examines the impacts of government public health spending on regional economic growth. Furthermore, the possibility of spatial spillover effects of government public health spending is (...) investigated through spatial econometric analysis. Government public health spending and regional economic growth have significant positive spatial correlation and spatial agglomeration effects. The indicator of government public health spending significantly promotes regional economic growth. In addition, it significantly promotes the economic growth of neighboring areas through certain spatial spillovers. (shrink)

This thesis first introduces the basic principles of model-based image sequence coding technology, then discusses in detail the specific steps in various implementation algorithms, and proposes a basic feature point calibration required in three-dimensional motion and structure estimation. This is a simple and effective solution. Aiming at the monocular video image sequence obtained by only one camera, this paper introduces the 3D model of the sculpture building into the pose tracking framework to provide initial depth information. The whole posture tracking (...) framework can be divided into three parts, namely, the construction of the initial sculpture model, the posture tracking between frames, and the robustness processing during continuous tracking. In order to reduce the complexity of calculation, this paper proposes a new three-dimensional mesh model and a moving image restoration algorithm based on this model. At the same time, the influence of the intensity and direction factors in the scene is added, the simulation results are given, and the next step is discussed. The optimization work that needs to be done. (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)

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)

Tu (Chinese history and philosophy, Harvard U.) offers a panoramic view of the core values of Confucian intellectual thought that have kept it vital for more than two millennia, and underlie the recent resurgence in eastern Asia. Of interest to students of either China or religion and ethics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This study explores how and when ethical leadership predicts three forms of team-level creativity, namely team creativity, average of member creativity, and dispersion of member creativity. The results, based on 230 members of 44 knowledge work teams from Chinese organizations, showed that ethical leadership was positively related to team creativity and average of member creativity but was negatively related to dispersion of member creativity. Consistent with the predictions of uncertainty reduction theory, psychological safety climate mediated the relationship between ethical leadership (...) and the three forms of team-level creativity. Furthermore, supervisor support for creativity positively moderated the effect of ethical leadership on psychological safety climate and the indirect effects of ethical leadership on the three forms of team-level creativity through psychological safety climate. The analysis offers significant theoretical and practical implications on ethical leadership and creativity in organizations. (shrink)

This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid (...) lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language. (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)

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)

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)

It is evident that, being a member of the organization, the team has to cue the influx of the green management concepts. This study focuses on the aspect of team management in green enterprises. Applying leadership theory to sample green enterprises, this paper proposes that political skills of team leadership have moderating effects on the relationship between team conflict and performance at both the individual and team levels. Empirical data were collected from 85 dyads of leaders and team members in (...) 36 green enterprises in China. It was found that the leaders’ political skills weakened the negative effects of relationship conflict on individual performance and team performance. Further, leaders’ political skills strengthened the positive effects of task conflict on individual and team performance. The results of this study deepen the cognition of two types of team conflict in theory and provide theoretical guidance for green enterprises in carrying out effective team conflict management and practical political skills training for leaders. (shrink)

The processes in construction are more likely than others to breed unsafe behaviors, and the consequences of these actions can be serious. This paper first reviews the research status on unsafe behavior in construction teams. It then analyzes the complex mechanisms that lead to unsafe behavior and constructs a three-layer structural model based on agent-based modeling technology. This modeling deals with complexity and elaborates on key points and potential research ideas in the study of unsafe behavior in construction teams. Using (...) the ABM method, the effects of different incentive strategies on the safe behavior of construction teams under different management scenarios were studied. The results showed that when members have a fair perception of the situation, the effect of the excess performance reward distribution, according to the member’s safety awareness level, is better than the average distribution effect. This is the case whether the member’s safety behavior level is positively or negatively related to the member’s safety awareness level. This study proves the feasibility, validity, and universality of the three-layer structural model. It also reaches certain management conclusions and ideas for further development. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reference for research on the containment and prevention of unsafe behavior in construction teams. (shrink)