Hume on presentation and philosophy

Most philosophers agree that an argument's presentation is relevant to its philosophical merit. This paper explains why David Hume considered presentation philosophically important. On Hume's epistemology, presentation is closely connected with two principal aims of philosophical arguments: persuasion and epistemic justification. Hume's views imply that presentation is a factor determining an argument's persuasiveness and that, by philosophical standards of justification, presentation is also a factor determining the extent to which an argument's conclusion is justified.     

"不可或缺性论证"与反实在论数学哲学

The indispensability argument for abstract mathematical entities has been an important issue in the philosophy of mathematics. The argument relies on several assumptions. Some objections have been made against these assumptions, but there are several serious defects in these objections. Ameliorating these defects leads to a new anti-realistic philosophy of mathematics, mainly: first, in mathematical applications, what really exist and can be used as tools are not abstract mathematical entities, but our inner representations that we create in imagining abstract mathematical entities; second, the thoughts that we create in imagining infinite mathematical entities are bounded by external conditions. __________ Translated from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Researches), 2006, (8): 74–83     

Strategic Maneuvering through Persuasive Definitions: Implications for Dialectic and Rhetoric

Persuasive definitions – those that convey an attitude in the act of naming – are frequently employed in discourse and are a form of strategic maneuvering. The dynamics of persuasive definition are explored through brief case studies and an extended analysis of the use of the “war” metaphor in responding to terrorism after September 11, 2001. Examining persuasive definitions enables us to notice similarities and differences between strategic maneuvering in dialectical and in rhetorical argument, as well as differences between the role of strategic maneuvering in normatively ideal argument and in actually existing argument. This will avoid the double standard of comparing ideal dialectic with actual rhetoric, or vice versa. The results of the analysis suggest possibilities for a rapprochement between dialectical and rhetorical approaches to argumentation.     

Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Twenty-First Century

The paper presents a historical overview of some characteristic differences between rhetoric and dialectic in the pre-modern tradition. In the light of this historical analysis, some current approaches to dialectic are characterized, with special attention to Ralph Johnson's concept of dialectical tier.     

新生儿科临床基本观念与辩证法

新生儿科学相对于儿科学具有特殊性,其临床应把握好可能性和现实性、原因和结果、现象与本质,内容与形式、量变和质变、偶然性和必然性、普遍性和特殊性的辨证关系,树立预防、全局、精确和先天等四个基本观念。     

On Naturalism in Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit

In recent years, philosophers have become increasingly interested in a Hegelian approach to Aristotelian non-reductive naturalism. This paper points out a challenge faced by naturalist readings of Hegel's conception of spirit. For Hegel, spirit and nature are essentially distinct and even related in an antagonistic way. It is difficult to do full justice to this thought while at the same time reading Hegel as a naturalist. The paper also seeks to suggest a response to this challenge. Drawing on Hegel's account of mechanism in his philosophy of spirit, it shows that processes which can count as natural – such as mechanical processes – constitute for Hegel an integral and indispensable part of spiritual activity. Against this background, it is possible to develop a form of Hegelian naturalism which does not lose sight of the essential distinction, even opposition of spirit and nature.     

Switched-words skepticism: A case study in semantical anti-skeptical argument

Conclusion Semantically based arguments play a crucial role in responding to a certain sort of skeptical strategy, a strategy that is widely generalizable, and which is otherwise peculiarly difficult to answer. The anti-skeptical arguments we have been studying do this while avoiding reliance on the insupportable linguistic claims of co-optionism. Instead, they rely on the prevalence of a certain plausible general feature of the semantics of our language. Not surprisingly, this epistemologically important feature is itself frankly epistemological: in essence, we must (typically) be able to tell what a word refers to, in a way independent of the beliefs we use the word to express. In addition to rendering valuable anti-skeptical service, then, the arguments we have been studying display an additional dimension of interest, for they help to illuminate the ways in which our knowledge of the world at large is bound up with our knowledge of a particular part of that world — the language we use to describe it.I would like to thank Joseph Almog, Richard Healey, David Kaplan, Hilary Kornblith, Arthur Kuflik, William E. Mann, Derk Pereboom, George Sher, and a referee forPhilosophical Studies for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts.     

肿瘤转移形成中癌细胞与基质之间的辩证关系

人们认识肿瘤的内在本质主要是通过它的表面形式即病理生物学行为来进行的,但因客观条件的限制,对其瘤细胞的内在特性和瘤细胞与胞外基质相互影响的认识还有限。因为肿瘤细胞在浸润与转移过程中有时并非与间质的反应情况相平行。由此要求我们正确认识肿瘤浸润转移过程中的对立统一规律,揭示隐蔽在其内部联系的本质和外部表现。     

Rhetoric and Dialectic: Some Historical and Legal Perspectives

The thesis is defended that rhetoric is not, as is often said, a discipline which is hierarchically subordinate to dialectic. It is argued that the modalities of the links between rhetoric and dialectic must be seen in a somewhat different light: rhetoric and dialectic should be viewed as two complementary disciplines. On the basis of a historical survey of the views of various authors on the links between rhetoric and dialectic, it is concluded that efforts to establish clear boundaries or unequivocal conceptual or moral hierarchical relationships between the two disciplines have failed and that therefore, they must be conceived as being mutually dependent.     

抑郁焦虑共病研究及其辩证思维

抑郁、焦虑障碍是临床上很常见的两种疾病,两者之间的症状具有重叠性,共病率很高;目前由于两者的病因和发病机制不太明了,很难做出全面系统的判断。对抑郁、焦虑共病现象采取辩证的思维方法、科学的研究方法,以期探讨共病现象的本质及其规律,为临床诊断、治疗、预防提供更全面、更有效的措施与方案。     

Rhetoric and Dialectic from the Standpoint of Normative Pragmatics

Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation.     

Meeting in the House of Callias: Rhetoric and Dialectic

The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe and compare the original goals and perspectives of both rhetoric and dialectic in theory and in practice. Dialectic is the practice and theory of conversations; rhetoric that of speeches. For theory of dialectic, this paper will turn to Aristotle's Topics and Sophistical Refutations; for theory of rhetoric, to his Rhetoric. Thus it will appear that rhetoric and dialectic are pretty close. Yet, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of mutual antagonism. The paper tries to summarize the common features of, as well as the differences between, the two. To get a taste of both dialectic and rhetoric in practice the reader is invited to enter the House of Callias, as we know it from Plato's Protagoras. After this visit there remains no doubt that rhetoric and dialectic are intertwined on the level of practice. Moreover, we may look forward to their integration on the level of theory.     

Scepticism and the Development of the Transcendental Dialectic

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic.     

宿主和寄生物的辩证关系

寄生物（包括寄生虫,细菌,真菌,立克次体,病毒等）虽依赖宿主而生存,却不一定对宿主致病,有的反而对宿主有益,根据达尔文的进化论,“自然选择”要求生物在进化中要不断适应环境,适应是生存最重要的条件,不能适应必将死亡,据此,本文对一些常见的自然因素对于宿主和寄生物两方面进行了初步分析,包括寄生物在宿主体内的繁殖速度,寄生物所引起的宿主的症状,其生现象的出现等,并对晚近发现的朊病毒,发生“星际传染性”的     

Acquiring and processing verb argument structure: distributional learning in a miniature language

Adult knowledge of a language involves correctly balancing lexically-based and more language-general patterns. For example, verb argument structures may sometimes readily generalize to new verbs, yet with particular verbs may resist generalization. From the perspective of acquisition, this creates significant learnability problems, with some researchers claiming a crucial role for verb semantics in the determination of when generalization may and may not occur. Similarly, there has been debate regarding how verb-specific and more generalized constraints interact in sentence processing and on the role of semantics in this process. The current work explores these issues using artificial language learning. In three experiments using languages without semantic cues to verb distribution, we demonstrate that learners can acquire both verb-specific and verb-general patterns, based on distributional information in the linguistic input regarding each of the verbs as well as across the language as a whole. As with natural languages, these factors are shown to affect production, judgments and real-time processing. We demonstrate that learners apply a rational procedure in determining their usage of these different input statistics and conclude by suggesting that a Bayesian perspective on statistical learning may be an appropriate framework for capturing our findings.     

Reasons for Conflict: Political Implications of a Definition of Terrorism

This essay analyzes the U.S. political situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ties this conflict to the events of 9/11. The guiding thread of the discussion is the definition of “terrorism” that has led to George W. Bush's declared “war on terrorism.” By means of Hegel's dialectic logic, the essay exposes the problem offered by the category of causality involved in the definition of terrorism: Is terrorism the original “cause” of the war declared on it by the United States (as the Bush administration claims) or is terrorism rather the very “consequence” of that war?