Many researchers are currently showing interest in researching consumers who are purchasing the products with the help of new tools, and new kinds of markets are emerging rapidly. M-commerce is a prevalent mode of marketing and is famous among young people of Pakistan. Current research is planned to check the status of consumer purchase intentions (PIs) using perceived influence, virtual interactivity, brand image, and brand expected value among customers who purchase their products with the help of m-commerce. Data was collected (...) from customers who were engaged in buying with the help of m-commerce by using the convenience sampling technique and 227 complete questionnaires were used in final analysis. This research examines the direct impact of perceived influence, virtual interactivity, brand image, and brand expected value on PIs and finds the indirect effect of brand image and brand expected value on the relationships of perceived influence and virtual interactivity with PIs. Results indicate that all the hypotheses of direct relationships are accepted except the hypothesis for the relation of virtual interactivity with consumer PIs. Virtual interactivity has an insignificant positive impact on consumer PIs. Brand expected value has a strong positive effect on consumer PIs among all. The current study proposed four mediational hypotheses. All the proposed mediational hypotheses are accepted. (shrink)

Lu Jia's New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han Dynasty is a readable yet accurate translation by Paul R. Goldin and Elisa Levi Sabattini. Celebrated as "a man-of-service with a mouth [skilled] at persuasion", Lu Jia (c. 228-140 BCE) became one of the leading figures of the early Han dynasty, serving as a statesman and diplomat from the very beginning of the Han empire. This book is a translation of Lu Jia's New Discourses, which laid out the reasons (...) for rise and fall of empires. Challenged by the new Emperor to produce a book explaining why a realm that was conquered on horseback cannot also be ruled on horseback, Lu Jia produced New Discourses, to great acclaim. (shrink)

This article is intended to investigate how the concept of the Way (dao) is applied in the Analects of Confucius both as a universal norm and as a practical application in association with other concepts, virtue (de) on the one hand, and ability or skill (neng) or method (fang) on the other. Through a synthetic reconstruction of these concepts, it will come to the conclusion that the Way, virtue, and practical skills are the three central and mutually interpreted themes in (...) the ethical discourse as presented in the Analects. (shrink)

This article is to examine the way of harmony that is initiated in the Analects of Confucius, and further elaborated in the other three of the Four Books. It will argue that the Confucian harmony is a philosophy defining the relation between the self and the other and among the elements of the unity, that it is a way of living and behaving that leads to modesty and flexibility, and that it is a moral process starting from the self and (...) reaching the Middle Way. It concludes that the way of harmony is not only theoretically important for Confucian philosophy but also practically significant for Chinese culture because it later became central to the doctrinal foundation on which all philosophical schools operated. (shrink)

本书分新书, 疏, 赋三部分, 收录了过秦, 宗首, 数宁, 藩强, 大都, 胎教, 论定制度兴礼乐疏, 旱云赋等.

This article is a comparative study of the philosophical views on learning and learning methods elaborated by Wang Yangming and Francis Bacon. It argues that as different criteria for the advancement of learning Bacon's empirical learning and Wang's “learning of the heart-mind” represent two different philosophical orientations, and are responsible, at least partially, for laying down the basis for the parting ways of China and Europe at the dawn of the modern era. It concludes that an appreciation of the mutual (...) complementarity rather than opposition between these two philosophical approaches will be a sign for the new and real advancement of learning. (shrink)

The publication of The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony is yet another step Chen-yang Li has taken in investigating the usefulness and relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy in the contemporary world.1 The book demonstrates a unique insight into the otherwise seemingly random sayings concerning one of the key concepts in the Chinese philosophical traditions, with a particular focus on the Confucian discourse in early texts. By exploring original materials and sifting through the evidence hidden in these texts, examining their arguments and (...) counterarguments, Li has given us what can be said to be the most comprehensive and in-depth study on the concept of harmony in Confucian studies to date. Among its... (shrink)

As a moral system open to spiritual values, Confucianism demonstrates a strong commitment to the cultivation of life and believes that this cultivation can lead to the spiritual ultimate. In this sense the interconnection between religiousness and morality underlies all Confucian discourses on human qualities and is the foundation on which their moral universe is established. This article is an attempt to examine how Mengzi explores the multiple meaning of “nourishing or nurturing” and makes it essentially instrumental for completing one's (...) journey to the oneness of humans and Heaven. (shrink)

Scholars have generally agreed that correlative thinking represents a defining feature of traditional Chinese thought, and their discussions on this enduring mode of thinking have led to a better understanding of the Chinese intellectual and cultural tradition. Although scholars have seldom looked into the causes of the formation of early Chinese correlative thought, some of their discussions have provided inspiration for further investigation.A number of scholars have indicated that the concept of resonance was a fundamental factor in Chinese correlative thinking. (...) For example, both Hellmut Wilhelm and Joseph Needham asserted that, in correlative thinking, order, pattern, and symbolic correlation or.. (shrink)

The underlying idea presented in this book is that there are similarities as well as differences between Confucianism as Humanistic tradition and Christianity ...

Abstract In contrast to the metaphysical, epistemological and psychological understandings of the self traditionally held and today still extensively considered in the West, the self in Confucianism is essentially an ethical concept, representing a holistic view of humanhood and a continuingly constructive process driven by self?cultivation and moral orientations. This paper first examines what is literally and philosophically meant by the self in these two traditions, then examines the contrasts or comparisons between the Confucian conception of the self and the (...) self as perceived in some strands of Western philosophy; and finally, interprets and analyses the constructively organic theory of the Confucian self, which is clearly differentiated from the self perceived in mainstream philosophy in traditional Europe and yet is being echoed in the more recent developments of Western philosophy and in the strong current of postmodernism. [1]. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson’s imperial thought casts new light on the age-old republican dilemma of the tension between empire and liberty. Generations of republican writers had been haunted by this issue as the decline of Rome proved that imperial expansion would eventually ruin the liberty of a state. Many eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers regarded this as an insoluble conundrum and thus became critics of empire. Ferguson shared their basic views but, paradoxically, was still able to defend the British Empire in the debates over (...) the American Revolution. His argument effectively offered a viable solution to the republican dilemma, which distinguished him from his contemporaries. In light of this, I argue that political representation was the pivotal conception for Ferguson to make empire and liberty compatible. It was on this ground that he could advocate the union with Ireland, which he believed would lead to a lasting balance of power in Europe. -/- ; British Empire; liberty; balance of power; political representation; American Revolution; Anglo-Irish Union. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue describes the emergence of the virtue ethics approach within the study of Confucian virtues in recent decades. It will first examine scholarly contributions to the discussion of Confucian virtue ethics and then raises questions concerning whether or not de 德 in early Confucian texts is identical with arête or virtue. It will then investigate the meaning and implication of de in Confucian contexts and make an argument for a new type of Confucian de ethics. (...) It will finally come to the project on de and virtue ethics in early Confucian texts and define its purpose and boundaries. (shrink)

v. 1. Reassessing Confucian traditions -- v. 2. Reinterpreting Confucian ideas -- v. 3. Reconstructing Confucian ethics -- v. 4. Reappraising Confucian ideals.

This book comprises 30 chapters representing certain new trends in reconcenptualizing Confucian ideas, ideals, values and ways of thinking by scholars from China and abroad. While divergent in approaches, these chapters are converged on conceptualizing and reconceptualizing Confucianism into something philosophically meaningful and valuable to the people of the 21st century. They are grouped into three parts, and each is dedicated to one of the three major themes this book attempts to address. Part one is mainly on scholarly reviews of (...) Confucian doctrines by which new interpretations will be drawn out. Part two is an assembled attempt to reexamine Confucian concepts, in which critiques of traditional views lead to new perspectives for perennial questions. Part three is focused on reinterpreting Confucian virtues and values, in the hope that a new sense of being moral can be gained through old normative forms. (shrink)

Wisdom is an integral part of all philosophical and religious traditions in the world. Focusing on the concept of wisdom, this book examines the difficulties and problems facing comparative studies of the early Confucian and Israelite traditions by exploring the cosmological and ethical implications of wisdom in the older layers of Christian and Confucian texts. This book offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the significance of wisdom in the East and West, and to our knowledge of different and (...) yet related ways of life as understood in their literature. (shrink)

While it is widely assumed that greater diversity in corporate governance will enhance a firm’s corporate social performance, this study considers an alternative thesis which relates managerial control to corporate philanthropy. The study empirically evaluates both board diversity and managerial control of the board as possible predictors of corporate philanthropy. The demonstration of a positive relationship between managerial control and corporate philanthropy contributes to our understanding that corporate social performance results from a complex set of economic and social motives. Possible (...) future research and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

This article is intended to examine and then compare ci bei in the Lotus S?tra and ren in the Analects of Confucius. Despite many similarities, compassion and benevolent love have shown a difference between Mah?y?na Buddhist ethics and the Confucian moral system. This difference is revealed in the content and meaning of compassion and benevolent love, but more importantly through the ways they are practised, followed and expanded. Through different ways or paths, compassion and benevolent love have nevertheless established two (...) different and yet mutually supplementary ideals that guide the spiritual and moral world of China and other parts of East Asia. (shrink)

Through a detailed analysis of de德 as used in the Four Books, this article is intended to examine the unity between two kinds of virtue manifested respectively through cultivating an admirable character in one’s self and enabling aretaic activities in the public sphere. By investigating how early Confucian masters integrate internal goodness and virtuous governance as the moral reasons for the common good and the flourishing of human community, we seek to reconstruct the ethics in the Four Books that is (...) focused on de as the gravity center. This leads in turn to an account of a particular kind of “virtue ethics” or better, de ethics, which has underpinned all Confucian discourses on personal character and political practices. (shrink)

Since the publication of his book on Zhongyong, Tu Weiming has worked for more than 30 years on an anthropocosmic reconstruction of the Confucian universe, in which self-transformation is defined both as the starting point and as the necessary vehicle for one’s spiritual journey. This article is primarily intended to examine Tu’s attempts to reconstruct Confucian spirituality but further to take a step forward to argue that in the spiritual world as construed by Confucius and Mencius, the experiential functions as (...) transcendental by which the self initiates and empowers the transformative process. Through exploring the spiritual significance of Confucian experiences, this essay will conclude that although “transcendental experience” is only one of many dimensions in other religious or intellectual traditions, it is the most important path for Confucians by which the self is enabled to become fully integrated with ultimate reality. (shrink)

Emotional recognition has arisen as an essential field of study that can expose a variety of valuable inputs. Emotion can be articulated in several means that can be seen, like speech and facial expressions, written text, and gestures. Emotion recognition in a text document is fundamentally a content-based classification issue, including notions from natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning fields. Hence, in this study, deep learning assisted semantic text analysis (DLSTA) has been proposed for human emotion detection using big (...) data. Emotion detection from textual sources can be done utilizing notions of Natural Language Processing. Word embeddings are extensively utilized for several NLP tasks, like machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering. NLP techniques improve the performance of learning-based methods by incorporating the semantic and syntactic features of the text. The numerical outcomes demonstrate that the suggested method achieves an expressively superior quality of human emotion detection rate of 97.22% and the classification accuracy rate of 98.02% with different state-of-the-art methods and can be enhanced by other emotional word embeddings. (shrink)

Journal of Chinese Philosophy, EarlyView.

Easy of learning judgments occur before active learning begins, and it is a prediction of how difficult it will be to learn new material in future learning. This study compared the amplitude of event-related potential components and brain activation regions between high and low EOL judgments by adopting ERPs with a classical EOL judgment paradigm, aiming to confirm the ease-of-processing hypothesis. The results showed that the magnitudes of EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency cues, and the judgment magnitude increases (...) with encoding fluency; low EOL judgments are associated with higher N400 amplitude at the left superior frontal gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus. High EOL judgments showed enlarged slow-wave potentials than low EOL judgments at the left medial temporal lobe, right ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Our results support the ease-of-processing hypothesis, particularly, by affirming that EOL judgments are affected by encoding fluency in two processing stages. N400 reflects the process of acquiring encoding fluency cues, while slow-wave indicates that individuals use encoding fluency cues for metacognitive monitoring. (shrink)

The heart-mind (xin 心) in Mencius is not merely a rational faculty but a complex that contains such physical, psychological, physiological and spiritual concretes as reason, sentiment, feeling, experience and belief knowing, the study of which in the contemporary world would involve a number of modern disciplines including epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, ethics and education. In the context of Mencius, the mind is already embodied at birth and continues to function as the integration of intellectual and practical, physical and spiritual, and (...) cognitive and behavioural qualities and activities. “Knowing” (zhi 知) in Mencius is an activity of the mind but it is not merely a cognitive process, and must not be confined to the epistemological field. It is enabled through preserving and nourishing the original mind by which a person comes to comprehend human nature and Heaven, and by which he or she becomes fully human. Therefore, the mind in Mencius is not a purely rational entity and the knowing is not merely an epistemic process. They can be understood only in terms of the embodied mind and the embodied knowing. (shrink)

This article is intended to seek adequate answers for such questions as whether or not Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy can be meaningfully interactive, and why it is so important for the new concept of “philosophical China” to be reconstructed in the contexts of the world’s philosophy, through the perspectives of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy that was established by Chung-ying Cheng in 1973. Contextualising the “new enterprise” in the academic world of the 1970s, I will highlight the significance the (...) Journal demonstrated for enriching the diversified paradigm of philosophical discourses, and the important role it has since played in promoting the worldwide studies of Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy and cross-philosophical dialogue. I will also examine how China and the West were philosophically bridged up step by step through the painstaking efforts by Chung-ying Cheng and a great number of distinguished scholars, and how Chinese philosophy has been gradually taken into the mainstream academic discourses of the world. (shrink)

The present study investigated the lasting effects of sickness presenteeism on well-being and innovative job performance in the demanding Chinese work context compounded with the precarities of the post-pandemic business environment. Adopting the conservation of resources theory perspective, especially its proposition of compensation of resources, we incorporated social resources at work as joint moderators in the presenteeism–outcomes relationship. We employed a panel design in which all variables were measured twice with 6 months in between. Data were obtained from 323 Chinese (...) employees working in diverse industries in Taiwan. We found that after controlling for the baseline level of well-being, presenteeism did not have a lasting effect on employees' exhaustion. However, presenteeism did have a negative lasting effect on employees' innovative behavior 6 months later. Moreover, we found a significant three-way interaction of presenteeism, supervisory support, and collegial support on employees' innovative job performance, after controlling for the baseline level of performance. Specifically, when working under illness, employees displayed the best innovative performance with high levels of both supervisory and collegial support, the worst performance with both support being low, and the intermediate when any one of the support being high. This can be taken as the preliminary evidence to support the COR proposition of resource caravans, showing that supervisory support and collegial support compensated for each other as critical resources in alleviating the impact of working under sickness on employees' innovative performance. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed, taking into account the macro-cultural context of the East Asian Confucian societies. We also reflected on the managerial implications of the lasting damages of sickness presenteeism and benefits of mobilizing social resources on employees' well-being and performance. (shrink)

Taking as the background the discourses on friendship initiated by ancient Confucian and Greek philosophers, this article is focused on Xunzi’s perspective on friends by examining where and how he engages effectively ethical justifications of friendship. It will be argued that although Xunzi shows a kind of consistency with Confucius and Mencius, he comes to justify friendship through his own deliberations on human nature, on learning and education, and on the nature and function of human community. We will then proceed (...) to examine the three perspectives Xunzi takes to highlight the ethical value of friends: friendship can be justified as it is needed in overcoming the inborn tendencies towards competition and strife; friendship can be justified because it is taken as supplementary to learning and education where friends are made equivalent to teachers in terms of moral influence and exemplary models; friendship can be justified because it is necessary for communities to function well and for individuals to lead a good life. We will finally come to the conclusion that these justifications constitute a unique ethics of friendship, which is not only significantly divergent from Greek propositions on friends but also differentiable, one way or another, from those proposed or presumed by Confucius and Mencius, and that the Xunzian philosophy of friendship is still an invaluable resource for us to draw on in the age of globalisation and de-globalisation. (shrink)

Abstract Universality, rather than partiality, is the characteristic of Confucian jen. This article puts forward three arguments to clarify confusion of interpretation: (1) that jen, rather than shu, is the main thread running through the whole system of Confucianism, and that by its two procedures of chung and shu, it presents itself as an integration of one's self with others; (2) that jen, as love, does not signify a natural preference, but an ethical refinement of an ordinary feeling of fondness, (...) that it derives from such a feeling but goes beyond it, and that it functions as a universal commitment which begins with family affection but is not limited to it; (3) that jen, as universal love, is deontological in motive, not only in contrast to a mutuality of love but also in opposition to a utilitarianism of love. (shrink)

Background: Ethical challenges are common in clinical nursing practice, and an infectious environment could put nurses under ethical challenges more easily, which may cause nurses to submit to negative emotions and psychological pressure, damaging their mental health. Purpose: To examine the ethical challenges encountered by nurses caring for patients with the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) and to provide nurses with suggestions and support regarding promotion of their mental health. Research design and method: A qualitative study was carried out using a (...) qualitative content analysis. The participants were 18 nurses who agreed to attend an interview and describe their own experiences of providing care to COVID-19 patients in China. They were purposively sampled, and structured, in-depth interviews were performed. Data were iteratively collected and analyzed from February to March 2020. Ethical considerations: The proposal was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Second Hospital of Shandong University, China. Findings: The findings revealed three main themes and 10 categories. The themes were the following: (1) ethical challenges (people with COVID-19, inequality, professional ethics, and job competency); (2) coping styles (active control and planning, seeking support as well as catharsis, and staying focused); and (3) impacts on career (specialized nursing skills, scientific research ability, and management skills). Conclusion: Nurses faced ethical challenges on multiple fronts in caring for COVID-19 patients. The results may help nurses with more safety, ethics, and humanistic care in nursing practice. (shrink)