Shang, Yang. The Book of Lord Shang. A Classic of the Chinese School of Law. Translated from the Chinese with Introduction and Notes by Dr. J.J.L. Duyvendak.

Compiled in China in the fourth-third centuries B.C.E., The Book of Lord Shang argues for a new powerful government to penetrate society and turn every man into a diligent tiller and valiant soldier. Creating a "rich state and a strong army" will be the first step toward unification of "All-under-Heaven." These ideas served the state of Qin that eventually created the first imperial polity on Chinese soil. In this new translation, The Book of Lord Shang's intellectual boldness and (...) surprisingly modern-looking ideas shine through, underscoring the text's vibrant contribution to global political thought. The Book of Lord Shang is attributed to the political theorist Shang Yang and his followers. It epitomizes the ideology of China's so-called Legalist School of thought. In the ninety years since the work's previous translation, major breakthroughs in studies of the book's dating and context have recast our understanding of its messages. This edition applies these advances to a whole new reading of the text's content and function in the sociopolitical life of its times and subsequent centuries. This fully annotated translation is ideal for newcomers to the book while also guiding early Chinese scholars and comparatists in placing the work within a timeline of influence. It highlights the text's practical success and its impact on the political thought and political practice in traditional and modern China. (shrink)

Reprint of Volume XVII in Probsthain's Oriental Series. With a Chinese index and an index of names and references. The Book of Lord Shang was probably compiled sometime between 359 and 338 BCE. Along with the Han Fei-Tzu, it is one of the two principal sources of Legalism, a school of Chinese political thought. Legalism asserts that human behavior must be controlled through written law rather than through ritual, custom or ethics because people are innately selfish and ignorant. The (...) law is not effective when it is based on goodness or virtue; it is effective when it compels obedience. This is essential to preserve the stability of the State. Roscoe Pound recommended this book for the study of old Chinese law in Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence (5th ed.) 235. (shrink)

Digitized information and network have made an enormous impact on the music and movie industries. Internet piracy is popular and has greatly threatened the companies in these industries. This study tests Hunt-Vitell’s ethical decision model and attempts to understand why and how people share unauthorized music files with others in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The norm of anti-piracy, the ideology of free software, the norm of reciprocity, and the ideology of consumer rights are proposed as four deontological norms related to (...) using P2P systems. The model is tested using a scenario survey with four alternatives; the results indicate that the deontological norm of anti-piracy is not a main factor in affecting P2P users’ ethical considerations regarding sharing files with others. This finding suggests that to protect their property rights, record companies should try to realize the consumer benefits brought via new digital and network technology, instead of simply declaring their intellectual property and resisting the innovations resulting from new technologies. (shrink)

Ritual studies, a pivotal domain in the scholarly tradition of ancient China, occupy a crucial role in the exploration of humanistic and theological disciplines. Utilizing bibliometric analysis, corpus linguistics, and scientometric mapping, this paper examines a comprehensive dataset of 15,221 ritual studies articles spanning from 1916 to 2022, sourced from the CNKI database. The focus of these studies has traditionally been on ideological exploration, textual scrutiny, and archaeological verification, with a notable shift in the post-reform era from Confucian critiques to (...) authentication of ancient rituals, propelled by significant archaeological discoveries. Entering the 21st century, the field has broadened to intersect with intellectual history, philosophy, literature, and theological studies, reflecting an expanded methodological repertoire that includes ideological articulation, historical comparative analysis, and interdisciplinary exploration. This research introduces an innovative methodological approach by employing word embedding and semantic networks to delineate and trace underrepresented yet crucial research trajectories within the discipline. Through this semantic analysis, key scholars such as Kuang Heng, Cao Bao, Wang Chong, He Yang, Chen Li, and Chu Yinliang, along with cornerstone texts like the "Collected Commentaries on the Book of Rites" and "Illustrations of the Rites Classic," are identified as significant yet previously underexplored nodes within the academic discourse. This study not only sheds light on the evolution and current state of ritual studies in China but also highlights the profound philosophical and religious implications of these rituals in understanding the divine, the moral, and the human condition, thus contributing to a deeper comprehension of the spiritual and ethical dimensions that these practices embody. (shrink)

Female migrant workers are doubly disadvantaged in China's urban labor market because of their doubly marginalized identities as both women and rural residents. This article takes a process-centered approach to explore how female migrants' two identity categories generate intersectional effects on their job-search experiences in cities. Data from in-depth interviews conducted in Xi'an city, China, in 2010 and 2011 reveal that three patterns of relationship explain the processes where the gender–hukou intersection affects female migrants. In the first pattern, a splintering (...) relationship, hukou and gender work singly to form employment discrimination against female migrants. The second, a contesting relationship, indicates that hukou and gender alternate as the primary identities that affect their employment opportunities. In the third, a collaborating relationship, hukou and gender work together to either positively or negatively shape female migrants' employment prospects. No matter which of the relationships plays out, female migrants' disadvantages as cheap urban laborers have become deeply entrenched in the urban labor market. This can be explained by two powerful social institutions in contemporary China, the hukou system and patriarchy. (shrink)

This paper derives the essence of a substance (i.e., the nominal essence) and its content by respectively discussing substance and real essence, substance and nominal essence, providing an answer to the question: “What certainty can substance derive from Locke’s description of essence”. Substance and real essences answer different questions, and the idea of explaining substance in terms of real essence (as represented by Michael Ayers) is not feasible; the true essence of the substance is nominal essence, from which the substance (...) derives only the meaning of substance’s name, and this meaning cannot be fully revealed, so that one does not have complete knowledge of the essence of substance. Overall, we know very little about substance and the content of their essences (nominal essences), this negative result provides a new perspective on empirical agnosticism. (shrink)

This paper proposes a super-twisting terminal sliding mode-based robust impedance controller to improve the compliance and robustness in robot-environment interaction. Based on the desired impedance dynamics, an impedance reference trajectory is constructed. Then, based on a super-twisting terminal sliding-mode, the robust impedance controller is designed to guarantee the achievement of the desired impedance dynamics in finite-time through the finite-time convergence of an impedance error. The main contribution of this paper is that the proposed control improves impedance control robustness by using (...) the super-twisting nonsingular terminal sliding-mode without causing the chattering problem. The finite-time stability of the closed-loop control system is validated by theoretical analysis based on the Lyapunov theory, and the control effectiveness is illustrated by simulations on a two-link robot manipulator. (shrink)

It has long been suggested that emotion, especially threatening emotion, facilitates early visual perception to promote adaptive responses to potential threats in the environment. Here, we tested whether and how fearful emotion affects the basic visual ability of visual acuity. An adapted Posner’s spatial cueing task was employed, with fearful and neutral faces as cues and a Vernier discrimination task as the probe. The time course of the emotional attention effect was examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony of the (...) cue and probe. Two independent experiments consistently demonstrated that the brief presentation of a fearful face increased visual acuity at its location. The facilitation of perceptual sensitivity was detected at an SOA around 300 ms when the face cues were presented for both 250 ms and 150 ms. This effect cannot be explained by physical differences between the fearful and neutral faces because no improvement was found when the faces were presented inverted. In the last experiment, the face cues were flashed very briefly, and we did not find any improvement induced by the fearful face. Overall, we provide evidence that emotion interacts with attention to affect basic visual functions. (shrink)

In ‘Measuring the Consequences of Rules’, Holly Smith presents two problems involving the indeterminacy of compliance, which she takes to be fatal for all forms of rule-utilitarianism. In this reply, I attempt to dispel both problems.

Given the discovery of a distributed language and motor functional network, surprisingly few studies have explored whether language processing is related to motor skill training. To address this issue, the present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare whole-brain activation between nonexperts and experts in table tennis, an open skill sport in which players make rapid decisions in response to an ever-changing environment. Whole-brain activation was assessed in 30 expert table tennis players with more than 7 years’ experience and (...) 35 age-matched nonexpert college students while they performed both a size and a semantic judgment task of words presented on a monitor. Compared with nonexperts, expert table tennis players showed greater activation in the left middle occipital gyrus and right precuneus while judging the size of the words versus during baseline fixation. They also showed greater activation in the left lingual gyrus during the semantic judgment task versus during baseline fixation. Our findings indicate that the visual regions engaged in language processing are associated with open motor skill training. (shrink)

Consumers often intend to create a socially responsible identity by consuming ethically. Observers, however, do not limit their inferences to the specific identity consumers intend to project. To illustrate, we examine how observers make inferences about consumers on the basis of their ethical consumption. Across four studies we find that, in addition to being viewed as ethical, consumers are viewed as less masculine and more feminine when they consume ethical products. We also identify two boundary conditions to this effect, including (...) the use of self-benefit/other-benefit advertising appeals and the use of descriptive norms to establish gender appropriate behavior. We finally examine how consumers resolve the conflict of creating ethical and gender-congruent identities. We find that when male consumers are in the presence of observers of the opposite sex, they are more likely to prioritize ethical identity even when it threatens their gender orientation. (shrink)

Constructive deviance describes acts that benefit the organization by deviating from outdated organizational norms. Despite emerging interest in this behavior, questions remain about why and how constructive deviance occurs. This paper integrates social learning and uncertainty reduction theories, and develops a multilevel model linking team-level ethical leadership to employee constructive deviance. Surveying 313 subordinates and 52 supervisors from 15 different companies in eastern China, we find that team-level ethical leadership has a positive impact on employee constructive deviance, and that both (...) psychological safety climate and employee moral self-efficacy partially mediate this relationship. In addition, we find a positive cross-level moderating effect of psychological safety climate. These findings contribute to understanding employees’ constructive deviance in the workplace, and provide valuable implications for managerial practices. (shrink)

The transplanted firm is an important force to promote the network evolution and cluster transformation and upgrading of the undertaking firm. From the micro-analytic perspective of firm network, this paper puts forward a theoretical framework with “relationship-network-evolution” as the main line. Taking the refrigeration industry cluster in Minquan County of China as a case study and keeping the firm networks of economic relation, technical cooperation, and social communication firm network in 2009, 2013, and 2017 as the research objects, this paper (...) analyzes the structure and evolution characteristics of regional firm network system, proposes the degree and effect of the local embeddedness of transplanted firms, and discusses their differences between international and interregional transplanted firms. The results revealed that: the local embeddedness of transplanted firms significantly promotes the development of refrigeration industry network. The network power of large-scale transplanted firms in the cluster is increasing day by day, and the network presents a multi-core trend. The local embeddedness of some transplanted firms is not high, and the overall connectivity of the network is not strong. Network intermediary nodes have strong heterogeneity, and the intermediary role of some large transplanted firms in the network needs to be improved. The three network systems have similar structural characteristics, and social capital plays an important role in the local embeddedness of transplanted firms and the development of regional firm network. Compared with international transplanted firms, interregional transplanted firms are more adaptable in terms of local embeddedness. The research results provide a reference for the construction of similar industrial clusters in China and other developing countries. (shrink)

Some bioethicists argue that a doctor may frame treatment options in terms of effects on survival rather than on mortality in order to influence patients to choose the better option. The debate over such framing typically assumes that the survival and mortality frames convey the same numerical information. However, certain empirical findings contest this numerical equivalence assumption, demonstrating that framing effects may in fact be due to the two frames implying different information about the numerical bounds of survival and mortality (...) rates. In this paper, I use these findings to argue that framing is presumptively wrong because it violates the duty of proper disclosure. Along the way, I highlight morally relevant features affecting the permissibility of framing, tackle three objections and draw some general lessons for the ethics of nudging. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the experience of empathizing with the fictional characters of literary works, through the lens of Husserl's theory of presentification. Via a critical analysis of Husserl and other phenomenologists, I argue that fictional characters, though lacking embodied presence, can be presentified to the reader in the mode of "as if." Moreover, I claim that imaginative empathy is a guided creative reproduction of sedimented past bodily experiences. This explains why, motivated by imaginative empathetic presentification, not only (...) aesthetic feelings, but also "as if" existential feelings come to the fore. Finally, it shows to what extent presentation and the different modes of presentification are interwoven and function together. (shrink)

_Uses the concept of religiosity to challenge traditional views of Nietzsche and Zhuangzi as nihilistic and anti-religious._.

At present, many countries have lowered the minimum age of criminal responsibility to deal with the trend of juvenile crime. In practical terms, whether countries advocate for lowering the age of criminal responsibility along with early puberty, or regulating the minimum age of juvenile criminal responsibility through their policies, their deep-rooted hypothesis is that age is tied to adolescents’ psychological growth, and, with the rise in age, the capacity for dialectical thinking, self-control, and empathy gradually improves. With this study, we (...) aimed to test whether this hypothesis is valid. The participants were 3,208 students from junior high school, senior high school, and freshman in the S province of the People’s Republic of China. We subjected the gathered materials to independent-samples t-tests, one-way analysis of variance, linear regression analysis, and Bonferroni post hoc test. The influence of the age variable upon dialectical thinking, self-control, and empathy was significant, but only empathy was positively correlated with age variable ; dialectical thinking ability, and self-control ability were negatively correlated with the age variable. Bonferroni post hoc test confirmed these findings. Therefore, we concluded the following: Juvenile criminal responsibility, based on the capacity for dialectical thinking, self-control, and empathy, is not positively correlated with age. Age is not the only basis on which to judge a juvenile’s criminal responsibility. More research that directly links age differences in brain structure and function to age differences in legally relevant capacities and capabilities is needed. Political countries should appropriately raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility and adopt the doli incapax principle in the judicial process. (shrink)