Empirical Propositions and the Change of Language-Games

People unavoidably provide reasons for their words and deeds when reasoning in a language-game.Wittgenstein thinks that when people in different language-games argue with one other,they insist on adopting a doubtful attitude toward the reasons provided by the other side.His use of the term "language-game" here is a metaphor,and implies that people in different cultures can scarcely reason with one another.Indeed,according to Wittgenstein's consideration of concepts of logic in On Certainty,language-games are incompatible with one another because their internal logic and reasons are different from each other.However,in his discussion of empirical propositions Wittgenstein has also shown us the possibility that the intemal reasons of one language-game can transmit beyond its own borders and be valid in another language-game.     

The Emergence and Irreducibility of Scientific Knowledge： A Multi-Synergic-Holism

The world possesses a hierarchical structure and evolves through emergence. Its levels are the result of emergence, and possess unique properties and functions which their components and emergent bases do not. Each of these levels also possesses basic laws or rules which cannot be logically deduced from other levels, and evince downward causation. Therefore, there are non-linear causal networks among the levels of complex systems in which causal reductionism does not hold. The hierarchical structure is formed in accordance with the increasing organized complexity of the objects, so that different levels give birth to different disciplines, and different disciplines have their own theoretical autonomy and independence. Therefore, theories across different levels are essentially irreducible, and any apparent case of reduction may only be so in the sense of a partial reduction. Emergence-evolution-hierarchy ontology and multi-synergic holism is compatible with reductionism even as it transcends it.     

The Enjoyment of the Sage and the Common People: A New Perspective on the Cosmology of the Laozi

The Laozi laughs at the joy of those who violate the Dao and praises the suffering of those who attain it,yet this does not mean that the political philosophy of the Laozi does not encompass a notion of happiness,a notion that is grounded in the "enjoyment of something together" (gong le共樂) by the sag and the common people.The philosophical foundation of the Laozi's view of happiness is its cosmology,of which there are two sequences:one is generation and the other is growth.With the influences of Wei/Jin-era metaphysics and Western philosophy,Chinese scholars used to overemphasize generation,tracing only the origin.But in the cosmology of the Laozi,both generation and growth are indispensable,and this is part of the reason why the Dao and the De are equally important in the Laozi.The happiness of the common people does not come from a psychological dependence on or attachment to certain form of domination,but from the full development of each individual's initiative and action affected by Mysterious De.     

On the Academic Differences between Xihe School and Zhusi School

Ever since Han Fei proposed that “Confucianism has divided into eight schools,” the divisions among Confucius’ followers have been a complicated puzzle in Chinese academic history. After the demise of Confucius, two schools, Xihe 西河 School and Zhusi 洙泗 School, founded by Zixia and Zengzi respectively, had the biggest influence. Inheriting and developing Confucianism, these two schools each had their own unique insights. If we compare their thoughts, the development of early Confucianism can be found has two different approaches: (1) Zixia attached great importance to study. He practiced Confucianism by means of learning comprehensively and belonged to the school of knowledge seeking. On the other hand, Zengzi valued one’s perfect inner personality. He paid much more attention to searching inwardly, and honored “morality” at all times. (2) Zixia paid special attention to the ritual system, emphasizing the external ritual specifications of human behavior, and advocating cultivating one’s morality from outside to inside. Zengzi maintained cultivating one’s morality from inside to outside, especially through self- reflection. (3) Zixia emphasized self-cultivating and being harmonious to others, therefore he focused on external achievements, while Zengzi paid more attention to moral integrity. (4) While Zixia rarely discussed filial piety, Zengzi regarded filial piety as the most important virtue. Since filial piety is applicable universally, Zengzi’s philosophy is a filial piety-rooted philosophy. Broadly speaking, Zengzi and Zixia’s main difference lies in their different approaches to learning. Despite these differences, as firm Confucians they are “the same in Dao and different in methods.”     

A Zero-Relationship Justification of Rights： A Contractual Approach Based on Rawls＇ Device of the ＂Original Position＂

In contemporary moral and political philosophy, there are two leading approaches to the justification of rights. These could be broadly identified as deontological theories and consequential theories. These two schools of theories each have their own strengths and weakness, while there is also a third contractual approach that is under represented. Because Rawls＇ and Scanlon＇s well-known contractual theories are designed for purposes other than the justification of rights, the purpose of this paper is to establish a principle of rights on the basis of Rawls＇ justification device of the ＂original position.＂ First, it supplies a criterion based on human conduct or action. Second, based on this account of human conduct, different types of relationships are constructed and presented to the parties in the ＂original position.＂ Third, it will show that the parties in the ＂original position＂ would choose one of these relationships as the principle of rights. Finally, Rawls＇ first principle of justice will be reformulated. The procedure of choosing a principle of rights in this paper could also be viewed as a demonstration that, when properly situated and motivated, human beings exhibit their potential as rational beings.     

An Eco-Ethical Interpretation of Confucian Tianren Heyi

Opposed to a commonly held interpretation that Confucian discourse regarding tianren heyi (天人合一) is simply a human-centred philosophical fusion of humanity and nature, this article argues that the Confucian discourse is in fact composed of two contradictory orientations, one ren-centred (roughly equivalent to “anthropocentric”) and the other tian-centred (“nature-centric” in a specific sense), which generally correspond to the two major camps of environmental philosophy in the West in the twentieth century. It will be further argued that the two orientations of the Confucian view have different yet related functions with regard to environmental protection and conservation: the tian-centred understanding establishes a metaphysical and religious framework for Confucian eco-ethical norms, in which ecological prohibitions and policies are built into the political and religious infrastructure, while the ren-centred orientation adds practical values and meanings to the ontological care of the human relation to the environment. In modern times, the two orientations of Confucian eco-ethics are under further development, moving away from being dualistic philosophies and converging on the eco-ethical way of life. Contemporary Confucians are investigating how the two traditional “orientations” can be unified as one holistic perspective which could provide theoretical and practical guidance for our understanding of the human position in the universe, the harmony between humans and nature, and the value of environmental protection and conservation.     

Love and Identity： Unconditional Concern and Particularity

Love for a person involves an idea of the other＇s particularity, or ＂irreplaceability＂： an idea that is linked with a fine grained attention to, and affection for, very specific features of the other. This attention is largely a consequence of--or manifestation of--my love, rather than its ground. What I see in the other is partly conditioned by an ＂unconditional＂ concern for her as an individual. A consideration of the importance of the face and of personal names in my interactions with another may bring into focus crucial aspects of the particularity and unconditionality that are characteristic of love.     

马克思主义哲学与自然科学

There are closely dialectical relationships between Marxist philosophy and natural sciences,but as two different fields,they all have the characteristics of the one can not be replaced by the other.The great progress of natural sciences is the prerequisite of Marxist philosophy’s formation and development,and Marxist philosophy is the guiding principle in the world conception and methodology for the developments of natural sciences.Natural sciences shouldn’t stray from or reject Marxist philosophy’s guiding...     

Conjunctions and/or Disjunctions： Radical Empiricism in the History of Philosophy

William James challenged the traditions of British Empiricism （Hume） on one hand and German Idealism （Kant and Hegel） on the other. James＇ ＂Radical Empiricism＂ is a via media （＂middle road＂） between these divergent positions. His central points of contention are the ontological status of relationships and the correct analysis of experience. British Empiricism leaves us with a world of separate, particular facts, based on atomic sense impressions. Idealists, on the other hand, claim that all worldly phenomena are conjoined by one rational principle. According to James＇ account, neither side recognizes that both conjunctive and disjunctive relations are integral to experience. Furthermore, James＇ critique proved to influence A. N. Whitehead＇s philosophy of experience and orientation toward Hume and Kant. This essay situates James＇ philosophy in this polemical and historical context.     

Memory,Rite, and Tradition： A Comparative Confucian-Christian Literary Analysis

I The Confucian Classics and Christian Scriptures speak often about the role ＂the past＂ plays in shaping individual and communal character, life, perception, morality and purpose. In both Christianity and classical Confucianism, memory, rite and tradition are each accorded a central place in preserving and interpreting the past as a dynamic force in the present. The first part of this paper studies points of thematic similarity in Christian and Confucian interpretation of memory, rite and tradition. In the second part of the paper, however, critical points of divergence are addressed; for behind the formal similarities lie deeper intellectual, relational and moral differences in understanding the nature and function of ＂the past＂ in determining both the present and the future. Comparative literary analysis provides a rich resource for contemporary application of the Confucian Classics and Christian Scriptures to discussion of cultural memory and global harmony. The comparative reading of ＇texts＇ also provides an important point of access for understanding the role literature itself plays in determining the form, content and power of memory, ritual and tradition in both Confucianism and Christianity.     

Kari Weil,Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

"Animal Studies" is the name given to an area of study that in the last several decades has proliferated across the disciplines.In contrast to much of the history of philosophy,which sought to define the human as other than animal,animal studies generally problematizes neat categories and distinctions separating humans and other animals.And while there is often an ethical dimension to work in animal studies,it is quite different in tone from the projects of Peter Singer,Tom Regan,and some other philosophers,whose primary task,when addressing animals,is to argue that nonhuman animals have moral standing or ought to be the bearers of significant rights,such as the right not to be harmed.Instead,animal studies,or,sometimes "human-animal studies," poses questions about the meaning and representation of animals in art and literature,politics,history,sociology,anthropology,agriculture,medicine,and science.Engaging work in the natural sciences,social sciences,humanities,and the arts,animal studies seeks to understand the meaning and pervasive role of animals in our lives.     

Growth,Experience and Nature in Dewey's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy

Growth is an important concept in Dewey's philosophy,and,indeed,its ultimate focus.It is not,however,an easy task to posit growth as an ethical ideal,for here Dewey immediately faces a metaphysical dilemma:whether to offer us an objective standard of growth,which becomes a type of absolutism,or to inevitably fall into relativism.This paper explores how Dewey avoids this dilemma with his concept of experience,which is interrogated through the relationship between human beings and nature.Still,human growth in nature involves the cultivation of virtuosities (de德) in accordance with the rhythm of nature,and requires a completely different way of life other than our technological one.For this reason,I use Chinese philosophy,specifically ideas from the Yijing,to show how growth can be illustrated through the interaction between humans and the natural world.     

A Philosophical Analysis of the Concept of Crisis

In our times, philosophy has been suffering from a spiritual crisis that takes the forms of the crisis of culture, the crisis of meaning, and the crisis of way of life. As the soul of culture, philosophy should contribute valuable responses to the problems of our times. Thus understood, this paper intends to analyze the concept of crisis in a phenomenological approach. The concept of crisis is concerned with the philosophical themes of time and death, and the crises of our times are primarily the crises of life-meaning and the life-world. Drawing sources from Husserl and other phenomenologists, as well as experiences from Chinese culture, I argue that a philosophy of crisis should find its point of departure from the crisis of philosophy.     

Parallelism in the Early Moist Texts

Parallelism is present everywhere in the early Moist texts: at the syntactic level, at the semantic level, between sentences, between sets of sentences, between argumentative structures. The present article gives many examples of the phenomenon: parallelism of insistence, insistence from top to bottom, insistence from bottom to top, parallelism with symmetry, parallelism involving negation, subcontraries and negation at deeper levels, parallelism of the argumentative structures. Logic is particularly applied to the study of parallelism involving negation. From the point of view of argumentation, it is shown that many of those constructions have an important role in supporting arguments such as: arguments of generalization, a fortiori arguments, arguments of exemplarity, consequentialist arguments, arguments by comparison. This study draws the attention to the importance of argumentation in the study of Moism and gives a new light on the argument by parallelism (mou 侔) in the “Xiaoqu”: It is a natural extension of what we call “parallelism involving negation,” already very common in the early Moist texts.     

Was John Stuart Mill a Pluralist?

In his Autobiography,John Stuart Mill,the 19th-century British political philosopher,portrayed his On Liberty as being "a kind of philosophic text-book" dedicated to a single truth,that is,"the importance,to man and society,of a large variety in types of character,and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions." The Mill of On Liberty may seem to be a pluralist who tends to prefer difference per se to goodness of a uniform pattern,many-sidedness to conformity,and eccentricity to mediocrity.This paper seeks to challenge this argument by paying close attention to the text.It argues that the Mill of On Liberty was far from a single-minded pluralist.Two divergent positions are found throughout his reasoning:one is a pluralist idea that an individual's own plan of life is the best,no matter how base or licentious it might be;the other is the belief that there exist a limited number of ideal ways of life which define what the good life is.The two positions are,if not mutually exclusive,at least in important aspects indicative of some profound tension at the center of Mill's thought.     

An Interview with David Alderson

<正>Wang Jie:Here are some questions that I think are very important to China's research on Marxism,so I'd like to know your opinions.I'd like to start with the research on Terry Eagleton.As far as I know,you are the first to have written a book on Terry.In China,there are also many scholars who are researching Terry and a group of articles are recently coming out in China's most important core journal,Theory and Criticism of Literature and Art.When I talked with Terry at the University of Manchester,he specially mentioned that he was a Marxist,instead of a Post-marxist.Later,he wrote me a letter to add that it was a matter of principle.For the relationship between Marxism and Postmarxism, there are still confusions among scholars in China,so can you make further clarifications in combination with Terry's situation? David:I would say that Terry is without doubt a Marxist,not a Post-Marxist. That is very clear to me.At a recent conference about Terry's career at Manchester University,there was discussion about the extent to which his thought had changed over years,and one of the comments that he made was that he believes roughly the same things as he used to believe in the 1960s.From having read and studied his work,I would say that there's overwhelmingly a sense of continuity through the work.     

民族本质论对民族认同和刻板印象的影响

The simple understanding of ethnicity by lay people is called the lay people’s theory of ethnicity, two theories are used to interpret the ethnicity by lay people in their everyday life. One of the theories contends that ethnicity is determined by nonmalleable, deep-seated essence and the essence would give rise to stable personality traits and abilities across situations, this is called the essentialist theory of ethnicity. The other theory, however, denies the real existence of ethnic essence, ethnicity is a social construction that is arbitrarily created due to social and political reasons in historical contexts, which is termed the social constructivist theory. Some western studies have shown that people have different interpretation about ethnicity cause different group perceptions and group relations. It is necessary to test and extend these results in another social background, like the Chinese one. First, 351 students from different ethnic groups participated in Study 1. They completed a questionnaire aimed at assessing their attitudes towards inter-group perception, ethnic identity, lay people’s theory of ethnicity, and out-group contact attitude. The results showed that: (1) the stronger essentialist belief a participant has, the more sensitive he or she is about group difference; (2) essentialist theory affects people’s inter-group identity, i.e. the deeper one believes in essentialism, the tenser he or she feels about in-group identity and bias, the more passive attitude is hold towards out-group contact. Second, 104 Han students participated in Study 2. An experimental method was used to test stereotyping differences against the minorities in relationship to lay people’s ethnic theories. Participants were randomly assigned to read the article advocating the essentialist view of ethnicity or the article advocating the social constructionist view of ethnicity. The result illustrates that: participants in the essentialist ethnicity condition showed stronger stereotyped impressions, especially negative stereotyping than did those in the social constructionist condition, but participants in the two conditions did not differ significantly on their positive stereotyping. In conclusion, the essentialist theory of ethnicity has a great influence on ethnic identity and ethnic stereotyping. Practical implications of these results imply that lay people’s theory of ethnicity can be used as a vehicle for reducing prejudice. Specifically, we can teach people to hold more social constructivist belief and less essentialist belief.     

进化心理学：心理科学的未来发展

“Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind” (Cosmides & Tooby, 2001, p.1). The approach can be used to study and to provide broad theoretical framing of nearly all of the     

The Multilingual Condition of Philosophy in China

1 Current Sittings Modem philosophers are usually multilingual.The combinations of multilingualism are various:German-French-English trilingualism,for example,is different from Chinese-Korean-Japanese trilingualism,and English-German bilingualism is different from Chinese-German bilingualism.The Chinese language is remote from the Indo-European language family,in particular from the Germanic and Romance groups.