Why is it often difficult for the advantages of female managers in emerging economy firms (EEFs) to be fully realized, and why do they sometimes become entangled in the whirlpool of bribery? How can their strengths be better leveraged? Drawing on a sample of listed companies in China, this study reaches the following conclusions. First, there is a significant positive association between the proportion of female managers and the level of bribery in EEFs. Second, this positive relationship is significantly weakened (...) when EEFs receive more favorable performance feedback. Further analysis yields additional insights. First, the proportion of female managers in EEFs is positively associated with the firm's inclusive value-sharing performance toward its internal and external stakeholders, yet this beneficial effect is substantially undermined by bribery. Second, government subsidies received by EEFs can significantly weaken the positive relationship between the proportion of female managers and bribery. Third, the central government's anti-corruption initiatives have led to a decline in bribery. Overall, our findings suggest that performance pressure may erode the potential advantages female managers could otherwise bring in emerging markets. Based on these insights, we offer recommendations for both firm management and policymakers in emerging markets: fostering a more equitable environment for female managers can enhance the firm's broader, stakeholder-oriented outcome and promote sustainable corporate success. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by a disconnection between brain regions. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a non-invasive brain intervention technique that can be used as a new and safe treatment option for patients with schizophrenia with drug-refractory symptoms, such as negative symptoms and cognitive impairment. However, the therapeutic effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation remain unclear and would be investigated using non-invasive tools, such as functional connectivity. A longitudinal design was adopted to investigate the alteration in FC dynamics using (...) a dynamic functional connectivity approach in patients with schizophrenia following high-frequency repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation with the target at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Two groups of schizophrenia inpatients were recruited. One group received a 4-week high-frequency rTMS together with antipsychotic drugs, while the other group only received antipsychotic drugs. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and psychiatric symptoms were obtained from the patients with schizophrenia twice at baseline and after 4-week treatment. The dynamics was evaluated using voxel- and region-wise FC temporal variability resulting from fMRI data. The pattern classification technique was used to verify the clinical application value of FC temporal variability. For the voxel-wise FC temporary variability, the repeated measures ANCOVA analysis showed significant treatment × time interaction effects on the FC temporary variability between the left DLPFC and several regions, including the thalamus, cerebellum, precuneus, and precentral gyrus, which are mainly located within the cortico-thalamo-cerebellar circuit. For the ROI-wise FC temporary variability, our results found a significant interaction effect on the FC among CTCC. rTMS intervention led to a reduced FC temporary variability. In addition, higher alteration in FC temporal variability between left DLPFC and right posterior parietal thalamus predicted a higher remission ratio of negative symptom scores, indicating that the decrease of FC temporal variability between the brain regions was associated with the remission of schizophrenia severity. The support vector regression results suggested that the baseline pattern of FC temporary variability between the regions in CTCC could predict the efficacy of high-frequency rTMS intervention on negative symptoms in schizophrenia. These findings confirm the potential relationship between the reduction in whole-brain functional dynamics induced by high-frequency rTMS and the improvement in psychiatric scores, suggesting that high-frequency rTMS affects psychiatric symptoms by coordinating the heterogeneity of activity between the brain regions. Future studies would examine the clinical utility of using functional dynamics patterns between specific brain regions as a biomarker to predict the treatment response of high-frequency rTMS. (shrink)

Research has independently highlighted the roles of semantic memory and associative abilities in creative thinking. However, it remains unclear how these two capacities relate to each other, nor ho...

Previous literature has demonstrated that ethical leadership could predict employees’ voice behavior. However, it’s not clear how to heighten these positive effects of ethical leadership on employees’ voice behavior. Building on the AET and moral disengagement studies, we developed an integrated model. A three-wave field study investigated the relationship between ethical leadership and voice behavior by focusing on the mediating role of employees’ affective commitment and the moderating role of employees’ moral disengagement. Our matched data analysis results indicated that: employees’ (...) affective commitment partly mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and employees’ voice behavior. In addition, employees’ moral disengagement moderated the effect of ethical leadership on employees’ affective commitment and the effect of employees’ affective commitment on voice behavior, similarly, the indirect effect of ethical leadership on employees’ voice behavior via employees’ affective commitment. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Presently, the State Grid Corporation of China has accumulated a large amount of maintenance records for power primary equipment. Unfortunately, most of these records are unstructured data which lead to difficultly analyze and utilize them. The emergence of natural language processing technology and deep learning methods provide a solution for unstructured text data. This paper proposes a progressive multitype feature fusion model to recognize Chinese named entity of unstructured maintenance records for power primary equipment. Firstly, the textual characteristics and word (...) separation difficulties of maintenance records are analyzed, then 7 main entity categories of power technical terms from unstructured maintenance records are chosen, and 3452 maintenance records are labeled by these categories, which is so called EPE-MR training dataset. Secondly, the standard test reports, standard maintenance, and fault analysis reports for three types of power primary equipment are employed as corpus to train character embedding in order to obtain certain words representation ability of maintenance records. After that, progressive multilevel radicals feature extraction module is designed to get detailed and fine semantic information in a hierarchical manner. Further, radicals feature representation and character embedding are concatenated and sent to BiLSTM module to extract contextual information in order to improve Chinese entity recognition ability. Moreover, CRF is introduced to handle the dependencies among prediction labels and to output the optimal prediction sequence, which can easily obtain structured data of maintenance records. Finally, comparative experiments on public MSRA dataset, China People’s Daily corpus, and EPE-MR dataset are implemented, respectively, which show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)

This book presents for the first time a translation of the complete Expository Commentary to the Daode jing written by the Daoist Cheng Xuanying in the 7th century CE. This important commentary is representative for Tang Dynasty Daoist philosophy and Daoist Twofold Mystery philosophy, also called chongxuanxue. Following the philosophical tradition of xuanxue authors like Wang Bi, Cheng Xuanying read the Daode jing using a framework of the then current Daoist religion. His conceptual framework included the assumption that (...) Laozi had written the Daode jing to guide the beings to unite with the Dao and thereby reach ultimate salvation. Salvation is interpreted as a metaphysical form of immortality, reached by overcoming the dichotomy of being and non-being, and thus also life and death. He thus connects epistemological concerns with soteriological concerns. The process proposed to overcome these dichotomies relies on reasoning along the lines of tetralemma logic, a form of reasoning that had become known in China mainly through the Buddhist Madhyamika ṡ́astras. One of Cheng Xuanying's prominent commentarial strategies is therefore the consistent application of tetralemma logic in his reading of the Daode jing. His philosophical outlook ties together the ancient text of the Daode jing and the more recent developments in Daoist thought, which to a rather large extent occurred under the influence of an intense interaction with Buddhist ideas. (shrink)

This study investigates the integration of drama performance methods into business ethics education through a mixed-methods approach. A quasiexperimental design was employed to compare the effects of drama-based pedagogy and traditional lecture-based methods on undergraduate business students’ ethical decision-making, critical thinking, and empathy. The quasiexperiment aimed to test whether drama-based pedagogy enhances these competencies more effectively than traditional approaches do. Complementing this, a qualitative study was conducted to explore the mechanisms through which emotional engagement in drama-based activities influences these learning (...) outcomes. The findings from both studies provide comprehensive insights into the efficacy and underlying processes of drama-based pedagogy in fostering essential ethical skills. (shrink)

Photovoltaic power forecasting can provide strong support for the safe operation of the power system. Existing forecasting methods are ineffective for grid scheduling decisions or risk analysis. The novel multicluster interval prediction method is proposed to consider the volatility and randomness of PV power output. First, this method utilizes the sparse autoencoder and Bayesian regularized NARX network for point forecasting of PV power. Second, density peak clustering improved by kernel Mahalanobis distance is applied to classify the dataset into multiple clusters, (...) including forecasting error and meteorological factors. Finally, the joint probability density is established by multivariate kernel density estimation to accomplish the PV power interval prediction. The proposed hybrid method is applied for the interval prediction of PV power at Yulara, Australia. Comparative research of point forecasting is implemented to evaluate the machine learning and deep learning methods, with the proposed SAE-BRNARX under four different periods. Results shows that the average values of nRMSE, MRE, nMAE, and R2 for the four periods are 4.45%, 0.90%, −0.15%, 3.39%, and 95.93%, respectively. Moreover, the results of interval prediction obtained by the other interval prediction approaches are compared with the proposed KMDDPC-MKDE. It shows that the average values of PICP, PINAW, ACE, and nMPICD for four periods are 93.93%, 9.50%, 3.93%, and 7.10% at 90% confidence level, respectively. Outcomes demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain more accuracy, a higher coverage rate, narrower average bandwidth, and a closer distance between the middle of interval and actual value than other methods. (shrink)

AimOur study aimed to investigate the effect of social responsibility on the subjective well-being of volunteers for COVID-19 and to examine the mediating role of job involvement in this relationship.BackgroundNowadays, more and more people join volunteer service activities. As we all know, volunteer work contributes to society without any return. Volunteers often have a strong sense of social responsibility and reap subjective well-being in their dedication. Although research shows that social responsibility will drive them to participate in volunteer work actively, (...) it is less clear whether job involvement will impact their subjective well-being.MethodsThe data were collected in the precaution zone in Shanghai, China, from April to May 2022. A sample of 302 volunteers for COVID-19 completed the social responsibility scale, subjective well-being scale and job involvement scale in the form of an electronic questionnaire on their mobile phones. A structural equation model was adopted to verify the research hypotheses.ResultsSocial responsibility was significantly and positively related to volunteers’ subjective well-being and job involvement. Job involvement fully mediates the relationship between volunteers’ social responsibility and subjective well-being.ConclusionSocial responsibility is critical to predicting volunteers’ subjective well-being. Job involvement plays an intervening mechanism in explaining how social responsibility promotes volunteers’ subjective well-being. (shrink)

There has been some research conducted regarding nurses’ career success aimed at exploring its influencing factors, but there is no research on the mechanism of self-identity on the career success of infection control nurses. In order to further explore the formation mechanism of career success of nurses, we conducted our study using the Kaleidoscope Career Model to explore the chain-mediating effects of cognitive emotion regulation and social support between self-identity and career success. Five hundred forty-seven infection control nurses from nine (...) different hospitals participated in the study and completed questionnaires on the self-identity, cognitive emotion regulation, social support, and career success scales. The results from structural equation modeling reveal that self-identity has a positive effect on positive emotion regulation and social support and a negative impact on negative emotion regulation. Positive emotion regulation has a positive effect on social support. All antecedents have a positive impact on career success except negative emotion regulation, which has a negative one. Bootstrap analysis shows that the relationship between self-identity and career success is partially mediated by the chain of cognitive emotion regulation and social support. Overall, our research sheds light on the mechanism of self-identity on career success of nurses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

John McDowell's philosophical ideas are both influential and comprehensive, encompassing philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and the history of philosophy. This book is a much-needed systematic overview of McDowell's thought that offers a clear and accessible route through the main elements of his philosophy. Arguing that the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent, the book examines and critically engages with McDowell's views on naturalism of second nature, the inner space model, intentionality, personhood and practical (...) wisdom. The book presents novel discussions on the debates between McDowell and other key philosophers, including Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Brandom, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Immanuel Kant, amongst others. Demonstrating a thorough understanding of McDowell's work, Tony Cheng makes connections to both the phenomenological tradition and cognitive sciences to show the wider relevance of McDowell's philosophy. In doing so, he sheds light on how influential McDowell's thought is to the analytic tradition. (shrink)

Ben shu ji yu Wang Chuanshan zhe xue wen ben, can zhao "nei zai quan shi" de li lu yi ji quan shi zhi "dao" "shu" de ce lüe ji qiao, dui wang chuan shan zhe xue jin xing yan jiu, ti chu zhu ru Song Ming ru xue "san xi shuo", "wu zhong shi" ji xian shi shi jie de yu zhou lun, "tai ji" ben ti lun, xing zhi qian zai yu shi xian, liang ge ceng mian de (...) gong fu lun, ji yu "jin hua" de xun huan li shi guan, jun quan de "he fa xing" "zheng dang xing"yi ji "zi zhi lun" deng yi xie xin de guan dian, bing ti chu ru xue "shi cun dao de miao shu" "xing shang xue" "xing shang dao de shi jian" san zhong xing tai, tong guo jiang Wang Chuanshan yu Huang Zongxi deng tong shi dai de ru zhe yi qi zhi yu Ming mo Qing chu ru xue "xing shang dao de shi jian" xing tai, dui Wang Chuanshan zhe xue jin xing ru xue shi ding wei, wei Qing dai yi hou ru xue bao kuo xian dai xin ru xue dian ding ji ben fang xiang. (shrink)

中道思想在我国源远流长, 自上古尧、舜开始, 一脉相承于禹、汤、文、武、周公、孔子、孟子、以及汉唐、宋、明、清乃至近代, 延续了几千年, 有着极为丰富的内涵, 可以说, 历代社会的治乱兴衰, 均逃不出执政者的得中与失中的因果规律. 因此, 认真探索一下中国古代的中道即中和思想的产生与发展及其在各方面的表现形式, 不仅具有重要的学术价值, 同时也对于当今构建和谐社会具有重大的现实意义.

本书试图以若干具体问题为例,在现代性的视域下审视儒家传统的"如何是好"之问题.本书主要在现代性与儒学传统的视域融合下讨论儒家若干观念,主要涉及儒家的伦理与生活,生活理想,在世情绪,生活境界,选择理论, 认知与行动,知识与价值,政治关怀,生死观以及地方性与世界性等问题.

Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass, 1982 ) rejected a naturalistic dispositional account of meaning (hereafter semantic dispositionalism) in a skeptical argument about rule-following he attributes to Wittgenstein (Philosophical investigation. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958 ). Most philosophers who oppose Kripke’s criticisms of semantic dispositionalism take the stance that the argument proves too much: semantic dispositionalism is similar to much of our respected science in some important aspects, and hence to discard the (...) former would mean to give up the latter, which is obviously wrong. In this paper, I shall discuss and reject a recent defense of Kripke by Kusch (Analysis 65(2):156–163 2005 ; Sceptical guide to meaning and rules: defending Kripke’s Wittgenstein. McGill-Queen’s, London, 2006 ). Kusch attempts to show that semantic dispositionalism differs from the sciences, and consequently, Kripke’s attack can only target semantic dispositionalism, but not the sciences. Specifically, Kusch identifies some important features of the sciences with regard to how it employs idealization and ceteris paribus clauses, and argues that the ways in which semantic dispositionalism uses them are dramatically different. I argue that, upon close examination, the two are more similar than otherwise in each of those features. (shrink)

Kynismus und Zynismus waren schon zu Nietzsches Zeit zwei unterschiedliche Begriffe. Kynismus bezeichnet die antike Schule der Kyniker und Zynismus eine moderne Verfallsform der politischen Indifferenz. Aber bei Nietzsche kommt allein das Wort Cynismus vor. Außerdem bezeichnet er sich selbst als einen Cyniker. Was ist damit gemeint? Ist er ein Kyniker oder ein Zyniker? Oder kommt er über beide hinaus? Der Autor führt eine philologische und eine philosophische Untersuchung durch. Die philologische widmet sich Nietzsches Rezeption des Kynismus und Zynismus während (...) seiner Basler Professur. Die philosophische arbeitet zuerst heraus, dass Nietzsche mit seiner Umwertung der Werte in der Nähe des Protokynikers Diogenes von Sinope steht. Dann stellt sie dar, dass die Umwertung der Werte von dem Kynismus ausgeht, mit der Radikalisierung in den Zynismus und Nihilismus verfällt und endlich durch die Überwindung der décadence zum Cynismus avanciert ist. (shrink)

Cellular reprogramming can manipulate the identity of cells to generate the desired cell types1– 3. The use of cell intrinsic components, including oocyte cytoplasm and transcription factors, can enforce somatic cell reprogramming to pluripotent stem cells4– 7. By contrast, chemical stimulation by exposure to small molecules offers an alternative approach that can manipulate cell fate in a simple and highly controllable manner8– 10. However, human somatic cells are refractory to chemical stimulation owing to their stable epigenome2,11,12 and reduced plasticity13,14; it (...) is therefore challenging to induce human pluripotent stem cells by chemical reprogramming. Here we demonstrate, by creating an intermediate plastic state, the chemical reprogramming of human somatic cells to human chemically induced pluripotent stem cells that exhibit key features of embryonic stem cells. The whole chemical reprogramming trajectory analysis delineated the induction of the intermediate plastic state at the early stage, during which chemical-induced dedifferentiation occurred, and this process was similar to the dedifferentiation process that occurs in axolotl limb regeneration. Moreover, we identified the JNK pathway as a major barrier to chemical reprogramming, the inhibition of which was indispensable for inducing cell plasticity and a regeneration-like program by suppressing pro-inflammatory pathways. Our chemical approach provides a platform for the generation and application of human pluripotent stem cells in biomedicine. This study lays foundations for developing regenerative therapeutic strategies that use well-defined chemicals to change cell fates in humans. (shrink)

abstract: Anaxagoras is notorious for his view that every perception is accompanied by pain but that not all concurrent pains are distinctly felt by the perceiving subject. This thesis is reported and criticized by Aristotle's heir Theophrastus in his De Sensibus. Traditionally, scholars believe that Theophrastus rejects Anaxagoras's thesis of the ubiquity of pain as counterintuitive, with the appeal to unfelt pain looking like a desperate category mistake given that pain is nothing but a feeling. Contra the traditional view, this (...) paper argues that Theophrastus neither aims to defend ordinary phenomenology nor is bothered by the concept of unfelt pain; instead, he develops a series of new Aristotelian arguments to defend a controversial, optimistic picture about the distribution of affective qualities in animal life. More than a supplement to Aristotle's psychology, his engagement with Anaxagoras reveals an important yet often ignored ethical concern behind the Peripatetic philosophy of perception. (shrink)

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. “瘟疫”是否具有傳染性，在中國的傳統文化認知中並不僅關乎純粹的醫學事實，而是與道德人倫、社會禮教和國家王政聯繫在一起的複雜的問題。南宋理學家程迥在《醫經正本書》中，分別從醫學理論和社會危害兩個方面，力 證疫疾並無人際傳染性。之後朱熹批判了這個論點，認為更應該告知民眾：雖然疫疾會傳染，但以恩義出發則不應迴避。他們做出如此論證的原因，是在現實的抗疫手段效果有限的情況下，將注意力集中在解決瘟疫所帶來的社會 倫理問題這個點上。但他們對瘟疫傳染性的觀點上，都採取了根據論證的需要而因應詮釋的立場，由於理學觀念上的差異，程迥的重點是如何克服外部因素的不利影響，朱熹則更關注如何從內部推動個人道德品質的精進。 In traditional Chinese culture, whether a “plague” is considered contagious is not only a matter of medical fact but a complex issue related to morality, social ethics, and national royal power. Cheng Jiong, a neo-Confucianist scholar in the Southern Song Dynasty, argued in Reserved Copy of Medical Classics that, based on both medical theory and the principle of social harms, an epidemic disease should not be considered contagious. (...) Zhu Xi later criticized this argument; he suggested that the public should be informed that an epidemic disease is contagious but should also be advised not to avoid it for the sake of kindness. This paper speculates on the possible reasoning behind their positions: When anti-epidemic measures had limited practical effect, they focused on addressing the ethical issues brought about by the plague rather than solving the problem of the plague itself. They then chose to construct their arguments as a response to the question of whether the plague was contagious. With their divergent interpretations of neo-Confucianist concepts, Cheng Jiong focused on how to overcome the effects of external adversities, whereas Zhu Xi focused more on how an individual might promote moral character from within. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Editor's comment: A prevalent viewpoint in the study of ethics holds that in the consideration of morality, one should confine oneself to the discussion of obligations, and that the subject of rights belongs to the realm of law. This article by Comrade Cheng Lixian proposes an alternate view; in it he suggests that rights and obligations are inseparable from one another, and to discuss moral obligations without discussing moral rights would be partial and incomplete. We surmise that such a (...) discussion of a problem related to the fundamental categories of ethics will lead to quite vigorous interest and debate. (shrink)

This study aims to provide a coherent new interpretation of the notorious anti-hedonism of Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and the second scholarch of the Academy, by reconsidering all the relevant sources concerning his attitude toward pleasure—sources that seem to be in tension or even incompatible with each other. By reassessing Speusippus’ anti-hedonism and Aristotle’s response, it also sheds new light on the Academic debate over pleasure in which he and Aristotle participated: This debate is not merely concerned with the truth and (...) credibility of the arguments for or against hedonism; there are also notable differences among the participants in their understanding of the practical significance of evaluating hedonic experiences. This new interpretation allows us to better understand Aristotle’s selective representation of the intra-school debate and some neglected features of his responses to different interlocutors. (shrink)

Speaking of fictional characters, the pretense theorist denies the existence of these entities, while the creationist maintains that they are abstract artefacts created by fiction writers. By interpreting fictional characters as trans-world individuals, we develop an alternative account in which fictional characters and real persons are treated uniformly. In particular, neither fictionalizing discourse nor internal discourse about fictional characters involves pretense, and neither external discourse nor non-existence claim about fictional characters concerns abstract artefacts. A fictional character is, after all, a (...) person; to be fictional, he or she needs to be written about in a fictional work. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Theophrastus’ Metaphysics 11a18–26, an obscure testimony about Speusippus, the second head of the Platonic Academy. As opposed to the traditional interpretation, which takes this passage as Theophrastus’ polemic against Speusippus’ doctrine of value, I argue that he here dialectically takes advantage of, rather than launches an attack on, the Platonist. Based on this new reading, I further propose a revision and a reassessment of the ‘gloomy metaphysics’ of Speusippus which will shed new light on his ethics.

Wang Yangming (October 31, 1472-January 9, 1529), a Ming Dynasty Chinese philosopher, inherited the teachings of Confucius and Mencius from antiquity and integrated them with the Neo-Confucian thought of the Song and Ming eras. Building on these foundations, he developed their core principles and established Xinxue (The Philosophy of Mind). To this day, scholars worldwide continue to engage in extensive research and debate on Xinxue, yet systematic exploration of its theoretical framework remains limited. This article addresses this gap by proposing (...) a systematic framework that synthesizes the key tenets of Xinxue into a coherent structure. The framework consists of three hierarchical layers: the Tao layer (“Mind is Principle.”), the Morals layer (“Reaching Conscience”), and the Doing layer (“Unity of Knowledge and Action”). Organized sequentially as “Tao No. 1, Morals No. 2, Doing No. 3.”, this structure aligns with the principle of systemic progression—moving from the top layer to the middle and lower layers—and is thus termed the “Xinxue System”. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. Section (...) 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

In the present article, I attempt to relate Saul Kripke's “sceptical paradox” to some issues about the self; specifically, the relation between the self and its mental states and episodes. I start with a brief reconstruction of the paradox, and venture to argue that it relies crucially on a Cartesian model of the self: the sceptic regards the Wittgensteinian “infinite regress of interpretation” as the foundation of his challenge, and this is where he commits the crucial mistake. After the diagnosis, (...) I attempt to sketch my own model of the self and its mental states and episodes. This tentative picture binds meaning and the self together, stressing the subjective aspect of meaning without committing the same fallacy. The solution ventured here is relatively independent of the secondary literatures on the sceptical paradox of following rules, for it aims to provide a new angle to understand and meet the challenge presented by the sceptic. (shrink)

The Law Reform Association came in the wake of the Catholic Relief Act of April 1829, a period of mounting opinions for further constitutional change. Through the Law Reform Association, Bentham wanted to mobilise people to support the application of his philosophy in Britain and beyond. He argued that the English legal profession had a sinister interest in manipulating other members of society, and that only codification based on utilitarianism would rectify the defects of the common law. By August 1830, (...) 41 people had been contacted, and their attitude towards the prospect of Bentham’s Law Reform Association and his philosophy reflects the extent to which Bentham kept the hopes of the Enlightenment – for a rational basis for social organisation – alive. Although most law reformers maintained certain reservations towards Bentham’s criticism of the common law, many accepted his analytical empiricism and viewed him as an important cultural icon of the Enlightenment. They also used him to support their own versions of law reform schemes, especially in the case of Henry Brougham’s Law Amendment Society from 1844. (shrink)

The term “consciousness” is very often, though not always, interchangeable with the term “awareness,” which is more colloquial to many ears. We say things like “are you aware that...” often. Sometimes we say “have you noticed that...?” to express similar thoughts, and this indicates a close connection between consciousness (awareness) and attention (noticing), which we will come back to later in this chapter. Ned Block, one of the key figures in this area, provides a useful characterization of what he calls (...) “phenomenal consciousness.” For him, phenomenal consciousness is experience. Experience covers perceptions, e.g., when we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, we typically have experiences, such as seeing colors and smelling odors. It also covers bodily awareness, e.g., we typically have experiences of our own bodily temperature and positions of limbs. Consciousness is primarily about this experiential aspect of our mental lives. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits has been highly influential since the beginning of this century. It can be read as a systematic response to scepticism. One of the most important notions in this response is the notion of «evidence,» which will be the focus of the present paper. I attempt to show primarily two things. First, the notion of evidence invoked by Williamson does not address the sceptical worry: he stipulates an objective notion of evidence, but this begs the (...) question against his opponent. Second, his related thesis «Evidence equals Knowledge» does not sit well with his own content externalism: he promises to relate epistemology to philosophy of mind, but he fails to live up to this commitment in his crucial chapter on scepticism. Other minor problems concerning evidence will also be discussed in due course. (shrink)

Rowlands’s case for attributing personhood to lower animals is ultimately convincing, but along the way he fails to highlight several distinctions that are crucial for his argument: Personhood vs. personal identity; the first person vs. its mental episodes; and pre- reflective awareness in general vs. one specific case of it.

This paper is about compositionality, belief reports, and related issues. I begin by introducing Putnam’s proposal for understanding compositionality, namely that the sense of a sentence is a function of the sense of its parts and of its logical structure (section 1). Both Church and Sellars think that Putnam’s move is superfluous or unnecessary since there is no relevant puzzle to begin with (section 2). I will urge that Putnam is right in thinking that there is indeed a puzzle with (...) a discussion of translation and belief individuation (section 3). Later Salmon (2001/ 2007) reinforces Church’s position, but I will argue that it is still possible to make my case by clarifying the nature of my proposal, i.e., understanding explanations of action from the third-person point of view (section 4). Now, Fine (2007) agrees with Putnam that there is indeed a puzzle to be solved, but he argues that Putnam’s solution of it is problematic, and that his own semantic relationism is a better view. In response to this, I will recast the notion of compositionality based on a certain conception of belief individuation, namely that the semantic content of a sentence is a function of the semantic contents of its parts and of the structure of intensional discourses (sections 3 and 5). Finally the paper will end with a reconsideration of the recalcitrant Kripke’s puzzle about belief (1979/1988), since it might seem to put some pressure on my account. It turns out that my understanding of this puzzle is again different from Fine’s perspective (section 6). (shrink)

In a series of works Hubert Dreyfus argues that phenomenological considerations can show the falsity of John McDowell’s claim that ours actions are permeated with rationality. Dreyfus changes the details of his objections several times in this debate, but I shall argue that there is an implicit false assumption lurking in his thinking throughout his exchanges with McDowell. Originally Dreyfus proposed a distinction between “detached rule-following” and “situation-specific way of coping,” and later he replaces it with the distinction between “subjectivity” (...) and “absorbed coping.” He then uses this framework to interpret some examples, attempting to show that they cannot be accommodated by McDowell’s position. I shall argue that in doing so Dreyfus presupposes too narrow conceptions of “rationality” and “mindedness,” and if these notions are understood appropriately, we can see that phenomenological considerations can be good supplements, rather than objections, to McDowell’s claim that our mindedness is pervasive in actions. (shrink)

Despite tributes paid to Fuller as an intellectual father of ADR, little attention has been paid within the ADR field to the broader interactionist vision that underlies Fuller’s discussion about process. A closer reading of Fuller’s study of mediation, however, reveals that he intended that study to substantiate his interactionist thesis about the nature of social ordering. He understood ordering to be generated by and to reflect a particular experience of social interaction. Fuller’s interactionist vision recognizes the creative, choice-making and (...) purposive dimensions of human reality, emphasizes participation as a normative criterion for institutional design, and gives rise to a pluralistic notion of power arrangements. It appears in Fuller’s thinking about process as a kind of dialectic and integrative mindset that pervades his means-ends analysis, functional analytical approach and his emphasis on institutional design. This interactionist vision has particular relevance for the practice and research of ADR, for example, in helping to develop a more integrative approach to process pluralism. (shrink)

T he nine papers of this Supplement on these significant issues and important ideas are closely accentuated and critically discussed by well-established specialists, philosophers and historians, from various relevant disciplines of study.