Critical realism, championed by its proponents as the most promising post-positivist social science paradigm, has gained significant influence in the last few decades. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the critical realism movement in the hope of facilitating more fruitful dialogues between its proponents and rivalling schools of sociologists. Two concerns are raised about contemporary critical realism. First, critical realism is not the only philosophical school against positivism and not necessarily the best. Second, critical realists exaggerate the importance of (...) critical realism to social science and conflate philosophy of science with sociological theories. (shrink)

Weber's 'science as a vocation' has often been viewed as a therapeutic concept with no functional significance in the fully bureaucratized and professionalized modern science. However, development in the philosophy of science in the last century, especially the Kuhn thesis of the discontinuity of scientific progress and the Duhem-Quine thesis of underdetermination, shows that Weber's distinction between science as a vocation and science as a profession (career) can potentially answer one of the oldest questions in science studies: What makes scientific (...) breakthroughs possible? (shrink)

Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. Similar to (...) the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

This article presents a theodicy based on a revision of the popular concept of God’s benevolence. If we follow the Protestant tradition by assuming that God is the exclusive source of virtue, the benevolence of God has to be radically different from the benevolence of a human being. A benevolent and almighty God who wishes to reward virtue and punish evil would design the world order similar to that in the allegory of the long spoons. Divine punishment is unforgiving, merciless, (...) individually non-retributive, holistically retributive, and quantitatively unpredictable. All sufferings are divine punishment. Several popular arguments from evil, including animal suffering, victims of evil deeds, natural disasters, and children’s diseases, can be resolved within this framework. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.

Worldwide populations are aging with economic development as a result of public health initiatives and advances in therapeutic discoveries. Since 1850, life expectancy has advanced by 1 year for every four. Accompanying this change is the rapid development of anti‐aging science. There are three schools of thought in the field of aging science. One perspective is the life course approach, which considers that aging is a good and natural process to be embraced as a necessary and positive aspect of life, (...) where the aim is to improve the quality of existing lifespan and “compress” morbidity. Another view is that aging is undesirable, and that rejuvenation and indeed immortality are possible since the biological basis of aging is understood, and therefore, strategies are possible for engineering negligible senescence. Finally, a hybrid approach is that life span can be extended by anti‐aging medicines but with uncertain effects on health. While these advances offer much promise, the ethical perspectives are seldom discussed in cross‐disciplinary settings. This article discusses some of the key ethical issues arising from recent advances in biogerontology. (shrink)

The graph tong同and its associated concepts, such as da-tong (Great tong大同) and xuan-tong (mystic or dark tong玄同), have played important roles in the development of Chinese philosophy. Yet tong has received scant attention from either western or eastern scholarships. This paper is a first attempt to remedy such regret. Unlike usual understandings of tong as sameness or unity, this paper presents a nuanced account from early China, that is, ‘difference to one,’ a definition from the Mozi墨子. (...) This definition can be supported from etymological, textual, and lexical evidence. ‘Difference to one’ should not be solely attributed to a Mohist understanding; it in fact represents a common understanding of tong across philosophical streams in early China. This nuanced account provides new insights into the concept of tong in early philosophical texts, and furthermore breaks solid grounds for further studies of tong and its associated concepts. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarships on various accounts of the concept of harmony in Chinese philosophy have produced fruitful outcomes by examining the term he. A standard use of he to account for harmony comes from the Analects, and this account sets up disjunctions not just between he and tong but also between harmony and tong. Such disjunctions are even more conspicuous in the political discourses from the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, and hence, has led scholars to overlook the more nuanced resonances (...) between tong, he, and harmony that can be identified from other canonical texts, such as in shangtong of the Mozi, in hetong of the Guanzi, and in datong of the Liji. This article aims to present nuanced relations between harmony, he, and tong, and proposes tong as another viable option to express harmony, thereby correcting the imbalance that the predominant scholarships recognize he and neglect tong. (shrink)

Tong Shijun holds a concept of dialectics which can also be found in Mao’s writings and in classical Chinese philosophy. Tong, however, is ambivalent in his attitude to dialectics in this sense, and for this reason he recommends Chinese philosophy to focus more on formal logic. My point will be that with another concept of dialectics Tong can have dialectics without giving up on logic and epistemology. This argument is given substance by an analysis of texts by (...) Mao, Tong and Hegel. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 47-61, Spring 2022.

The concept of tong played an important role in early Chinese political thought, as in the “Shangtong” chapter of the Mozi and the “Liyun” chapter of the Liji. Nevertheless, tong as a political thought has received little scholarly attention. In this article, I diverge from the common understandings of tong as sameness or unity and call on etymological and textual evidence to suggest that tong fundamentally refers to “difference to one.” In light of this understanding of (...) tong as “difference to one,” I focus on the “Shangtong” and the “Liyun” and compare the two visions of political tong that the two chapters present. With this research, I argue that the “Shangtong” and “Liyun” represent two different political streams as to how to unite a society with early China’s differences and divisions. (shrink)

This text constitutes a radical rupture with the *Analects* and its millennial hermeneutic tradition. It asserts that the “Confucian Dao-Tong” (the orthodox transmission of the Way), constructed through layers of historical commentary, is a distortion of Confucius’s original intent—an ossified accumulation of intellectual “nightsoil.” The true Confucian path, it argues, resides not in textual authority but within the immanent praxis of life-as-existence; “the Dao is in the nightsoil,” flowing through the most visceral and immediate layers of lived experience. Proceeding (...) from the ground of lived existence, the essay rejects all exegetical mediation, returning directly to the life-contexts behind “The Master said.” It redefines learning as the intrinsic joy of the unity of knowing and acting, deconstructs humaneness as unconditional respect for radical difference, and reconceives teaching as mutual illumination among fellow travelers. Through critical analysis, it demonstrates that—with Yan Hui as the sole exception—each major disciple initiated a fundamental deviation: Zeng Shen (曾子) toward textual idolatry, Bu Shang (子夏) toward utilitarian scholarship, and Mencius toward a moral-metaphysical systematization of mind and nature. This, the essay contends, marks the pivotal mutation that gave rise to the rigid “orthodox transmission of the Way.” The philosophical critique culminates in a diagnosis of the present: an education system that eliminates doubt in pursuit of standardized answers, and an academic industry sustained by citation and conceptual patchwork, are identified as the living extensions of that same stagnant Dao-Tong logic. Offering no program for reform, the text commits itself instead to a decisive break—a burning of bridges. It is a manifesto announcing the end of the “Dao-Tong” and an invitation: to turn toward the generative source of “life-praxis,” and to embody, within the fertile decay of inherited thought, that wordless, ceaselessly unfolding vitality of existence itself. (shrink)

在当今全球化的高等教育体系中，大学排名已成为衡量大学优劣的主要标准。各类世界大学排行榜，如QS世界大学排名、泰晤士高等教育排名、US News排名、上海交通大学学术排名等，几乎主导了公众对大学的认知，并影响政府政策、企业招聘、学生择校乃至科研经费的分配。然而，在这些排名指标的引导下，大学正在从知识与智慧的殿堂，逐步沦为追名逐利的竞争 者，学术独立性、思想自由、教育初心逐渐被功利主义所侵蚀。 -/- 本文将分析大学排名体系如何影响高等教育的发展，揭示其潜在的危害，并探讨大学应如何摆脱对排名的依赖，回归其真正的使命——追求真理与智慧。 -/- In today’s globalized higher education system, university rankings have become the primary standard for assessing the quality of institutions. Various world university rankings—such as QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education Rankings, U.S. News Rankings, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking—dominate public perceptions of universities and influence government policies, corporate recruitment, student choices, and even the allocation of research funding. However, under the influence of these ranking criteria, universities are gradually shifting from being (...) temples of knowledge and wisdom to becoming competitors in a race for fame and profit. Academic independence, intellectual freedom, and the fundamental mission of education are increasingly eroded by utilitarianism. -/- This article examines how university ranking systems impact higher education, reveals their hidden dangers, and explores how universities can break free from their dependence on rankings to return to their true mission—the pursuit of truth and wisdom. (shrink)

The present article presents Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619-1692 C.E.)’s reading of the eighteenth chapter of the Zhuang-Zi 莊子 (ZZ) by looking at his entry from Zhuang-Zi-Tong 莊子通 and other key glosses from Zhuang-Zi-Jie 莊子解. The philosophical upshot, I aim to show, is that Wang takes ZZ as presenting the consummation of “the greatest joyousness” (zhi-le 至樂) as requiring getting rid of joyousness as one’s desideratum. Using Derek Parfit’s work as a point of reference, I aim to show that this (...) is not paradoxical or even inconsistent or even (directly or indirectly) self-defeating but is instead an interesting instance of a self-effacing theory. (shrink)

This article explores the implicit theories of morality, or the conceptions regarding the patterns of stability, continuity and change in moral dispositions, both in lay and academic discourses. The controversies surrounding these conceptions and the fragmentation of the models and perspectives in metaethics and moral psychology endangers the pursuit of adequate operationalizations of morally relevant constructs. The current debate between situationists, who deny that character is an useful concept for understanding human behavior, which is better explained by contextual factors (Doris (...) 1998; Harman 1998) and dispositionists, who advocate the cross-situational stability of traits, is also present in the lay discourse, through the existence of competing commonsense ontological assumptions regarding the mutability or alterability of moral features, namely the implicit theories perspective (Chiu, Dweck, Tong, & Fu 1997). These personal theories are primary suspects in the affective and cognitive reactions to transgressions: the type of attended information in formulating evaluative judgments, the calibration of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, the assignment of retribution or reparatory recommendations to transgressors. In the second part of the study we attempt to advance toward a more fine-grained inspection of these lay beliefs, arguing that the construct of implicit theories of morality, as it is currently treated and measured, tends to be restrictive and oversimplifying. (shrink)

This research aims to analyze the term Philosophy of Local History, which is conducted using secondary sources, in addition to primary sources in the form of data from informants domiciled in Bone Regency. This research is also conducted to find out about Kajaolaliddong as a role model who are honest, intelligent, and brave. Kajaolaliddong is known as a scholar, statesman, and a reliable diplomat, whose thoughts became the concept of pangadereng, which then metamorphoses into a basic pattern of royal government (...) in Bugis and Makassar. Those three characteristics are equipped by other qualities. Lempu’E nasibawai tau’ (honesty, which is accompanied by devotion), Acca nasibawaii Ada tonging namatike (intelligence, which is accompaniedby truthfulness in speakingwith caution). (shrink)

R Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Supplement to Occipital and left temporal instantaneous amplitude and frequency oscillations correlated with access and phenomenal consciousness. Occipital and left temporal instantaneous amplitude and frequency oscillations correlated with access and phenomenal consciousness move from the features of the ERP characterized in Occipital and Left Temporal EEG Correlates of Phenomenal Consciousness (Pereira, 2015) towards the instantaneous amplitude and frequency of event-related changes correlated with a (...) contrast in access and in phenomenology. Occipital and left temporal instantaneous amplitude and frequency oscillations correlated with access and phenomenal consciousness proceed as following. In the first section, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) with post processing (Xie, G., Guo, Y., Tong, S., and Ma, L., 2014. Calculate excess mortality during heatwaves using Hilbert-Huang transform algorithm. BMC medical research methodology, 14, 35) Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (postEEMD) and Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT). In the second section, calculated the variance inflation factor (VIF). In the third section, partial least squares regression (PLSR): the minimal root mean squared error of prediction (RMSEP). In the last section, partial least squares regression (PLSR): significance multivariate correlation (sMC) statistic. (shrink)