1. Kuan Chung's Naive Materialist View of Nature Kuan Chung was an outstanding practical politician of ancient China whose philosophical thought is infused and interwoven with his political theories. On the basis of his extant writings, we know that Kuan Chung did not put special emphasis on discussion of the "view of nature." But at the time he lived, the serious question of whether or not Heaven was "purposeful" [i.e., responded to human affairs by means of "visitations" (...) or "prodigies"] did have a direct bearing on his political essays and the actual political measures he carried out. Moreover, this question had a direct bearing on production. (Kuan Chung put special emphasis on production. He considered the development of production as the essential element of government.) Thus, Kuan Chung could not help but supply an answer. Although Kuan Chung never wrote a special essay concerning his view of nature, his political essays are permeated with a clearly recognizable "simple materialist" interpretation of nature. His answer to the question of whether or not Heaven was purposeful is clear. (shrink)

Selection of author's works on Svātantrika Madhyamika philosophy and logic.

Teaching business ethics is a formidable task. The lingering question of whether we can teach business ethics has plagued educators and scholars. Unlike a typical competence-based module that quantitatively reflects a student's performance through their grades, grades alone cannot represent a student's ethical conviction. The business ethics module aims to transform a student's moral disposition, instill moral virtues in them, and reduce their capitalistic tendencies. The inculcation of these intangible moral virtues requires a breakaway from traditional teaching methods. This paper (...) discusses the potential for fostering business ethics through sensemaking anthropological elements in case studies. I argue that instead of an instructional delivery method of case study delivery, students that study the anthropology of a corporate crisis and sensemake its moral change may experience a deeper level of moral response. This paper, reflecting on a postgraduate task inspired by the Volkswagen Dieselgate crisis, delves into how this task enables students to comprehend Volkswagen's deconstruction process, ultimately leading to a moral transformation and reinvention. Towards the end of the paper, I delved into some "unusually sentimental" student feedback, which resonated with deeper reflexive responses when using this new approach. (shrink)

Der Fachbereich der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) hat ideelle und finanzielle Höhen und Tiefen erlebt. Wissenschaftler prognostizieren immer wieder den Untergang der Menschen durch die von ihnen entwickelte Technik – ein Paradigma, das die Grundlage eines konstanten Narrativs innerhalb der Menschheitsgeschichte darstellt. Während die Furcht vor der technologischen Singularität in heutiger Zeit Fiktion bleibt, stellen sich realistischere, maschinenethisch hoch relevante Fragen: Mit welchen moralischen Ansprüchen werden Maschinen entwickelt? Wie werden diese Entwicklungen moralisch bewertet? Und wer trägt die Verantwortung für moralische Probleme?

Two studies are reported in which participants’ reports of altered states of consciousness (ASC) were manipulated using priming methods. Study 1 used both subtle and blunt supraliminal priming methods, while Study 2 used a subliminal priming method. Across the two studies, two different methods for inducing ASC were used. In both studies a direct and an indirect measure of ASC was employed in order to separate the more nonconscious and spontaneous (indirect) from the more conscious and directive (direct) reports of (...) ASC. As predicted, results indicated that the indirect measures of ASC were consistent with the ASC primes participants received. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Der tschechischen Autors Karel Čapek, der den Grundstein für den Einzug des Wortes „Roboter“ in die Alltagssprache legte, zeichnet ein Bild von Robotern und der Interaktion dieser mit Menschen, das ein zentrales Motiv beinhaltet, die Angst des Menschen, durch Roboter ersetzt zu werden. Der Beitrag diskutiert, wie diese „prometheische Scham“ (Günther Anders), die auch als Superioritätsproblem bezeichnet werden kann, maschinenethisch beurteilt werden kann. Die Frage „Brauchen Maschinen Ethik?“, stellt sich in diesem Kontext also anders: „Welche Ethik brauchen Menschen, die mit (...) Maschinen umgehen?“. (shrink)

McKay & Dennett (M&D) identify positive illusions as fulfilling the criteria for an adaptive misbelief, but could there be other types of beliefs that may qualify as adaptive misbeliefs? My commentary addresses this and other questions through identifying belief in free will as a potential candidate as an adaptive misbelief.

Author David Skrbina argues that all of technology is metaphysically driven by a panpsychic force called the Pantechnicon.

Mark Coeckelbergh argues that Romanticism and the Enlightenment philosophies are not that far apart when it comes to philosophy of technology.

Mark Edmundson explores and defends the value of ideals in contemporary culture, focusing on courage, contemplation and compassion. In his argument, he explicates the ideas of authors and thinkers such Homer, Plato, and the Christian and Eastern religious traditions. Shakespeare and Frued are seen as detractors of the Soul.

English summary: The conference papers collected in this volume focus on Platonism in the Byzantine Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance. Authors considered are Maximos and Psellos, as well as Nicolas Cusanus, the Florentine Platonics of the 15th century, up to Pico della Mirandola. German description: Zu den charakteristischen Aspekten der italienischen Renaissance gehort ein esoterisch gepragter Platonismus, der wesentlich auf Vorlaufern im byzantinischen Mittelalter beruht. Von besonderer Bedeutung sind dabei die Chaldaeischen Orakel und der Hermetismus; weiterhin treten neben die Hinwendung (...) zur Weisheit des alten Agypten vielfaltige Varianten des Interesses an Platonismus und Esoterik. Diese Themen, dazu Phanomene der spateren Rezeptionsgeschichte bis in die Zeit der Aufklarung, waren Gegenstand einer Tagung, die vom 19. bis 23. Juli 2010 in Frankfurt am Main stattfand. Die im vorliegenden Sammelband enthaltenen Beitrage gehen auf diese Veranstaltung zuruck. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei aus byzantinischer Zeit Schriften des Maximos und des Psellos, aus der Renaissance Texte von Nikolaus von Kues und den Florentiner Platonikern des fruhen 15. Jahrhunderts bis zu Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Weitere Beitrage gelten Malerei (Benozzo Gozzoli), Architektur (Leon Battista Alberti, Filarete) und dem Interesse an magischen Gemmen. Auf die spatere Rezeptionsgeschichte zielen Artikel zu Jean Le Clerc und den Freimaurern bis ins 18. Jahrhundert. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists criticise the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement for being non-commutative with conditionalisation, path dependent and does not preserve the independence between propositions. Failing to commute with conditionalisation, one may switch the order between conciliating and conditionalising and obtain different outcomes. Failing to be path independent, the outcome of conciliation varies with the order of the acquisition of new testimonies. Failing to preserve the independence between propositions, one may suffer from a sure-loss and hence be deemed irrational. The three (...) formal deficiencies urge people to abandon the Conciliatory View. This paper aims to show that one may save the Conciliatory View by conciliating with nonlinear functions. Research in the study of opinion pooling shows that the three deficiencies are not problems of the Conciliatory View, but problems of linear averaging. Hence, one can get rid of these formal deficiencies by making conciliation with nonlinear averaging functions. After showing how the three deficiencies can be avoided, I will explore the features of nonlinear averaging functions and argue that they have properties that correctly capture people’s intuition concerning disagreement. The conclusion, therefore, is to suggest epistemologists develop a more fine-grained taxonomy for cases of disagreement. With a deliberate categorisation of different kinds of disagreement, epistemologists can pick the proper averaging rule to apply in each specific case, and get rid of possible formal deficiencies. (shrink)

There is growing concern that decision-making informed by machine learning (ML) algorithms may unfairly discriminate based on personal demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Scholars have responded by introducing numerous mathematical definitions of fairness to test the algorithm, many of which are in conflict with one another. However, these reductionist representations of fairness often bear little resemblance to real-life fairness considerations, which in practice are highly contextual. Moreover, fairness metrics tend to be implemented in narrow and targeted toolkits that (...) are difficult to integrate into an algorithm’s broader ethical assessment. In this paper, we derive lessons from ethical philosophy and welfare economics as they relate to the contextual factors relevant for fairness. In particular we highlight the debate around acceptability of particular inequalities and the inextricable links between fairness, welfare and autonomy. We propose Key Ethics Indicators (KEIs) as a way towards providing a more holistic understanding of whether or not an algorithm is aligned to the decision-maker’s ethical values. (shrink)

: This paper explores vicarious responsibility and circumstantial luck from a first-person perspective, drawing on ethnographic research on parenting in Reform Era China. The paper focuses on how informants drew boundaries between what they could and could not control in raising a child who might thrive in a hypercompetitive society. In doing so, the paper engages the question, “What kind of moral agent do we want?” by proposing that we also ask, “What kind of moral agent do we find?” In (...) contrast to the hypothetical figure of a walled-off agent who must be convinced of the duty to take on responsibilities in a circumstance of moral luck, empirical research finds instead a vulnerable agent who has taken on ‘too much’. (shrink)

To address the rising concern that algorithmic decision-making may reinforce discriminatory biases, researchers have proposed many notions of fairness and corresponding mathematical formalizations. Each of these notions is often presented as a one-size-fits-all, absolute condition; however, in reality, the practical and ethical trade-offs are unavoidable and more complex. We introduce a new approach that considers fairness—not as a binary, absolute mathematical condition—but rather, as a relational notion in comparison to alternative decisionmaking processes. Using US mortgage lending as an example use (...) case, we discuss the ethical foundations of each definition of fairness and demonstrate that our proposed methodology more closely captures the ethical trade-offs of the decision-maker, as well as forcing a more explicit representation of which values and objectives are prioritised. (shrink)

Of the four complete Āgama collections, the Ekottarika Āgama (EĀ) has generated the most controversy about whether it can be attributed to any early Buddhist school and, if so, which school it could belong to. This paper examines the various hypotheses about the sectarian affiliation(s) of the EĀ. It shows that a considerable part of this corpus is likely to be of Mahāsāṃghika derivation, and that the EĀ contains numerous salient features of Mahāsāṃghika doctrine, particularly the transcendence of Buddhas and (...) Bodhisattvas. This study also argues that the seeming affinity between several legends in the EĀ and those in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya is likely to have resulted from Mahāsāṃghika influence on the Mūlasarvāstivādins. The Mahāsāṃghika hypothesis for the school affiliation of the EĀ is substantially strengthened in this inquiry while the others are shown to be probably untenable. (shrink)

The Apadāna of the Pali canon contains a terse and obscure verse account of the Buddha’s headache associated with the Sakyas’ massacre by Viḍūḍabha. While alluding to the fishermen episode in their past lives, it provides no lucid karmic backstory for the tragedy. This Theravāda account can be traced back to a Mahāsāṃghika text preserved in Chinese translation, T199 (Fo wubai dizi zishuo benqi jing), where we find a verse account almost identical to that in the Apadāna. The verse account (...) is so condensed and vague that it seems to presuppose a more complete story. After examining relevant stories in Pali and Chinese, I identify two Mahāsāṃghika texts (in T125 and T197) as the source of the full karmic backstory, which is not intact in Pali literature. The T125 (Ekottarika Āgama) version is especially important in that sūtra 2 of Chapter 34 in T125 is a full-fledged avadāna, which provides karmic explanations for the Buddha’s headache and the Sakyas’ massacre in a three-part narrative structure. This avadāna tale was incorporated into the Kṣudraka-vastu of the Mūla-Sarvāstivāda Vinaya. Apart from this wholesale insertion, the relevant Mahāsāṃghika story as found in T125 and T197 (Xingqi xing jing) was borrowed in pieces by the Theravādins and the Mūla-Sarvāstivādins; these pieces were adapted and inserted into various texts of the two schools. Since these interpolations are taken out of context, they are incapable of fully conveying the original Mahāsāṃghika message. (shrink)

Some people are more prone to experience and value nostalgia – an emotion that often reminds us of important relationships – than others. In this research, we propose that this propensity may not only influence how we remember our social ties, but also directly affect the structure of our social network. Across three studies involving undergraduate students, online panel participants, and a population-based longitudinal sample (N = 1,467), we found that trait-like nostalgia was associated with increased motivation to maintain social (...) networks, which in turn predicted the number of close social ties. In other words, those who value nostalgia and experience it more frequently are more motivated to strengthen important relationships, which helps mitigate the loss of these bonds over the life span. These findings contribute to our understanding of the social nature of nostalgia and highlight its role in regulating our social networks. (shrink)

A comparison of late nineteenth-century British and Chinese evolutionism unravels the modern conceptualization of “science” and “community” in diverse sociopolitical contexts and distinct modes of philosophical argumentation. This article addresses how—in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1894) and Yan Fu’s Chinese translation Tianyan lun (1895)—“self-restraint” can facilitate the cooperation and evolution of society and can be justified as a communal duty. While Huxley uses bees’ self-restraint and hive to propound a cooperation-centered mechanism of social evolution to dispute Spencer’s competition-centered mechanism, (...) he also considers the despotism of the general interest and cannot derive the “self-restraint as a communal duty” from the “self-restraint as an evolutionary mechanism.” Instead, he legitimatizes the communal duty of self-restraint through individuals’ “mutual indebtedness” in society. By contrast, Yan Fu unifies the abovementioned two levels of questions through Song-Confucian metaphysics, arguing that the actualization of the moral tendencies inherent in the heaven-endowed essential nature is at once the mechanism of social evolution and the duty to the community, thereby metaphysicalizing both natural laws and the ethical axiom. Comparative research foregrounds Huxley’s empirical-verification-based and Yan Fu’s metaphysical-argumentation-based approaches to science and unearths their distinct views of the individual-community relation and the rational for the communal duty. (shrink)

Epistemologists seek a rule that agents can use to update their credence upon receiving evidence. While Conditionalization has been widely accepted as the standard norm for updating credence, it can be difficult to apply in situations involving opinion reports. This paper explores an alternative approach to updating credence through pooling functions. These functions, originally used for generating collective credence for a group, offer a promising method for agents to update credence with opinion reports. Although the formal properties of these functions (...) have been extensively studied, few attempts have been made to explore the consequences of adopting them, especially how they shape epistemic communities. Using the Zollman effect as the primary test case, we can employ network models to examine the formal properties of each pooling function and their effects on an epistemic community, thereby gaining insights into the appropriate rule to adopt. (shrink)

This paper interprets Buddhist meditation from perspectives of Western psychology and explores the common grounds shared by the two disciplines. Cognitive operations in Buddhist meditation are mainly characterized by mindfulness and concentration in relation to attention. Mindfulness in particular plays a pivotal role in regulating attention. My study based on Buddhist literature corroborates significant correspondence between mindfulness and metacognition as propounded by some psychologists. In vipassanā meditation, mindfulness regulates attention in such a way that attention is directed to monitor the (...) ever-changing experiences from moment to moment so that the practitioner attains the ‘metacognitive insight’ into the nature of things. In samatha meditation, mindfulness picks an object as the focus of ‘selective attention' and monitors whether attention is concentrated on the chosen object so as to attain the state of ‘concentration’. Nimitta that appears in a deep state of concentration resembles ‘imagery’ in psychology. Mindfulness consists in the wholesome functioning of saññā. A finding by psychologists supports my view that saññā can act as perception on the one hand and, on the other hand, it can produce nimitta ‘imagery’ in deep meditation where perception is suspended. (shrink)

General opinion holds that the Abhidhamma treats the Buddha’s teachings in terms of ultimate realities, i.e. dhammas, and that conventional constructs such as persons fall outside the primary concern of the Abhidhamma. The present paper re-examines this ultimate-conventional dichotomy drawn between dhammas and persons and argues that this dichotomy does not hold true for the canonical Abhidhamma in Pali. This study explores how various types of persons are interpreted and approached by the Abhidhamma material, including Abhidhamma texts such as the (...) Puggalapaññatti and a number of suttas in the Aṅguttara Nikāya that are identified in this paper as proto- Abhidhamma. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists criticise the Conciliatory View of peer disagreement for being non-commutative with conditionalisation, path dependent and does not preserve the independence between propositions. Failing to commute with conditionalisation, one may switch the order between conciliating and conditionalising and obtain different outcomes. Failing to be path independent, the outcome of conciliation varies with the order of the acquisition of new testimonies. Failing to preserve the independence between propositions, one may suffer from a sure-loss and hence be deemed irra- tional. The (...) three formal deficiencies urge people to abandon the Conciliatory View. This paper aims to show that one may save the Conciliatory View by conciliating with nonlinear functions. Research in the study of opinion pooling shows that the three deficiencies are not problems of the Conciliatory View, but problems of linear averaging. Hence, one can get rid of these formal deficiencies by making conciliation with nonlinear averaging functions. After showing how the three deficiencies can be avoided, I will explore the features of nonlinear averaging functions and argue that they have properties that correctly capture people’s intuition concerning disagreement. The conclusion, therefore, is to suggest epistemologists develop a more fine-grained taxonomy for cases of disagreement. With a deliberate categorisation of different kinds of disagreement, epistemologists can pick the proper averaging rule to apply in each specific case, and get rid of possible formal deficiencies. (shrink)

Bakhtin’s carnival theory highlights a folk-rooted “universal human spirit.” Postmodernist influences have diversified and deconstructed carnival in online spaces. Ding Zhen’s rise, driven by media promotion and commercialization, shaped three carnival spaces and four dimensions of thought, symbolizing satire and resistance. However, escalating negative energy risks collective bewilderment, fragmenting culture and spiraling carnival out of control.

Ths historical legacy inherited by thinkers of the Ch'un-ch'iu period comprised, briefly speaking: (1) a religious world outlook characterized by ancestor worship; (2) the ethical concept of filial piety and brotherliness, which was linked to ancestor worship, or derived therefrom; (3) the concept of a ritual system; (4) the conditions of aristocratic politics and scholar bureaucracy. These were things shaped on the basis of the blood ties in a patriarchal and racial society, and they were passive, from the standpoint of (...) progress, being the obstacle that hindered people from making big strides forward. Next, there were (5) the tendency toward simple materialism and dialectics, which was born from the bowels of religious world outlook; (6) the materialist philosophy of complaint against and hatred and cursing of Heaven; (7) the belief in things and in laws; and (8) Shih Po's doctrine of "Things are produced when matter combines." These were positive things, especially the last three, which emerged at a time when the slave system had begun to collapse, and which formed the premise of their ideological advance. Who among the thinkers of the Ch'un-ch'iu period would inherit and develop (or preserve) these things, what questions would be raised, probed, discussed, or argued on the common basis of their traditional thought, and what specific forms would be used to answer these questions had to be determined by their class stand and by the characteristics of the period in which they lived. (shrink)

This thesis is a collection of three self-contained papers on related themes in the area of formal and social epistemology. The first paper explores the possibility of measuring the coherence of a set with multiplicative averaging. It has been pointed out that all the existing probabilistic measures of coherence are flawed for taking the relevance between a set of propositions as the primary factor which determines the coherence of the set. What I show in this paper is that a group (...) of measures, namely the confirmation-based ones, can be saved from this problem if we adopt a nonlinear averaging function to measure the coherence of a set. The second paper discusses how people should conciliate in disagreements. Some epistemologists take linear averaging as the only way of conciliating and claim that conciliating leads to fallacious results. In the paper, I show that the problem is not conciliating, but taking linear averaging as the only way to conciliate. Since there is no reason for us to insist on conciliating with linear averaging, we can adopt nonlinear averaging functions for conciliating and thereby avoid the formal deficiencies. The third paper focuses on the pragmatic results of taking conciliating as a general strategy in disagreements. There is a potential dilemma about conciliating: if everyone always conciliates, it is likely for an epistemic bubble to arise. If everyone refuses to conciliate, an epistemic echo chamber may appear. A possible way of solving the dilemma is to develop a diachronic strategy which tells people how to both conciliate and update their estimate of their interlocutors’ reliability. Although the three papers differ in the subject, they jointly offer some unifying reflections on the way we approach philosophical problems with formal tools. From 5 the first two papers, we see that a formal analysis of a philosophical position is incomplete if philosophers fail to consider a sufficiently wide range of formal tools. The third paper, on the contrary, shows that we should change the ordinary way of modelling a notion if required. This thesis concludes by proposing a pluralistic view of formal methods in formal epistemology. (shrink)

Recent studies support a model in which the progeny of SOX9+ epithelial progenitors at the distal tip of lung branches undergo cell allocation and differentiation sequentially along the distal‐to‐proximal axis. Concomitant with the elongation and ramification of lung branches, the descendants of the distal SOX9+ progenitors are distributed proximally, express SOX2, and differentiate into cell types in the conducting airways. Amid subsequent sacculation, the distal SOX9+ progenitors generate alveolar epithelial cells to form alveoli. Sequential cell allocation and differentiation are integrated (...) with the branching process to generate a functional branching organ. This review focuses on the roles of SOX9+ cells as precursors for new branches, as the source of various cell types in the conducting airways, and as progenitors of the alveolar epithelium. All of these processes are controlled by multiple signaling pathways. Many mouse mutants with defective lung branching contain underlying defects in one or more steps of cell allocation and differentiation of SOX9+ progenitors. This model provides a framework to understand the molecular basis of lung phenotypes and to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of lung patterning. It builds a foundation on which comparing and contrasting the mechanisms employed by different branching organs in diverse species can be made. (shrink)

Seemingly contrary ideas of Nirvana are found in early Buddhist literature. Whereas some texts describe one who attains Nirvana as being conscious of everything, others depict Nirvana as a state in which consciousness has no object but emptiness or Nirvana. In this paper I deal with this paradox of Nirvana consciousness by exploring the correlations between several statements in early Buddhist texts. A number of sutta passages are cited to show that they contain doctrinal elements which, when considered collectively, may (...) cast valuable light on how to reconcile this paradox. Two pivotal notions are ‘non-abiding consciousness’ and ‘consciousness that is infinite, pervasive all around’. These two notions are connected to each other and seem to subsume or bridge the two strikingly distinct forms of Nirvana consciousness mentioned above. Nirvana consciousness said to be ‘non-abiding’, which is analogous to ‘without object’, does ‘not abide’ in any objects in the sense that it does not cling to them or rest on them. The ‘infinite, all-pervasive’ consciousness, based on stopping normal consciousness, does not depend on any sense objects, and hence it is unconditioned by them and operates unhindered. Nirvana consciousness thus constitutes the infinite realization free from all conditioning and hindrance. This resonates with the idea that one who attains Nirvana is conscious of everything. (shrink)