Reconsidering theological exchange between China and the West

ABSTRACT

By reviewing the Chinese theological publications in the twentieth century, especially during the 1920s–1930s and after the 1980s, this article aims to show that it is not a zero-sum game between the translation of western theological works into Chinese and the publication of original Chinese theological works. The selection of the western works for translation exhibited a certain creativity from the Chinese side, and in turn, the translated works also inspired original Chinese theological works. In the twenty-first century, the Chinese studies of Christianity developed rapidly. Many Chinese Christian theologians published pro-actively in western languages. Due to the recognition of the importance of Christianity in contemporary China and the awareness of the global context for Christian theology, there was a growing interest among western theologians in non-western Christian theology, including Chinese Christian theology. The exchange and collaboration between Chinese and western theologians were particularly prominent on global and public issues.     

Desecularizing Secularism

Animated by a profound sense of complacency about history, rights and law, secularism has reached a dead end of political despair today. Thinking about this dead end will demand giving up certain cherished historicist claims to law and justice. The task of desecularizing secularism is one of dehistoricizing history. To relieve secularism of its appeal to the innocence of history, we need a conceptualization of time that folds the Nietzschean idea of active forgetfulness of history into the Derridian notion of the spectral present that is ‘out of joint with itself’. Such a notion of time/history may help us do the im-possible1 ?1. Throughout this paper I will use the words possibility and im-possibility interchangeably. Thus, when I say the possibility of non-juridical justice or active forgetting of history I also mean its im-possibility, because such a practice is not simply present out there, as an example or a case, under a sign. I am simply trying to imagine such an im-possibility. As will be clear, for Derrida the word im-possibility, as he wrote it, is irreducible to possibility or impossibility. work of thinking of inheriting the futures of democracy and justice irreducible to law and rights. The futures of the irreducible political, where we can neither forget our pasts nor remain bound to them, haunted by their ghosts, cannot be dictated by the apparatuses of the state or the politics of some non-state community. The futures are made possible by the very the non-contemporaneity of our living present, where historical disconnections defy ‘explanation’, opening up new political spaces of becoming.     

Reply to Commentaries

In our response, we address four themes arising from the commentaries. First, we discuss the distinction between cognition and metacognition and show how to draw it within our framework. Next, we explain how metacognition differs from social cognition. The underlying mechanisms of metacognitive development are then elucidated in terms of interaction patterns. Finally, we consider measures of metacognition and suitable methods for investigating it. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transfer to intermediate forms following concept discrimination by pigeons: chimeras and morphs

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In Experiment 2, the training stimuli were sets of images of heads of dogs and cats, and the intermediate stimuli were computer-generated morphs. In both experiments, pigeons learned the concept discrimination quickly and generalized with some decrement to novel instances of the categories. In both experiments, transfer tests were carried out with intermediate forms generated from both familiar and novel exemplars of the training sets. In Experiment 1, the pigeons' transfer performance, unlike that of human infants exposed to similar stimuli, was best predicted by the body part of the stimulus when the chimeras were formed from familiar exemplars. Spatial frequency analysis of the stimuli showed that the body parts were richer in high spatial frequencies than the head parts, so these data are consistent with the hypothesis that categorization is more dependent on local stimulus features in pigeons than in humans. There was no corresponding trend when the chimeras were formed from novel exemplars. In Experiment 2, when morphs of training stimuli were used, response rates declined smoothly as the proportion of the morph contributed by the positive stimulus fell, although results with morphs of novel stimuli were again less orderly.     

Fairness heuristic theory is an empirical framework: a reply to Arnadóttir

In this article on fairness heuristic theory, we point out some important flaws in Arnadóttir's (2002) claim that fairness heuristic theory is "not empirical," by which Arnadóttir meant that theory's predictions are knowable a priori, and are not contingent upon circumstances. To this end, we demonstrate that empirically testing effects predicted by fairness heuristic theory was and is important because this showed that the theory's propositions are not necessarily knowable a priori and are contingent upon circumstances. This implies that, according to Arnadóttir's definition, fairness heuristic theory clearly is an empirical framework. It would have been helpful if Arnadóttir had studied the fairness literature more thoroughly (as this would have easily revealed fairness heuristic theory to be not knowable a priori and to be contingent upon circumstances) and also if she had pointed out which of our studies fail to follow her line of reasoning. Our reply was written not as an attempt to defend fairness heuristic theory as we applaud, indeed are honored by, attempts to scrutinize our work in progress. Our only aim here was to point at some important flaws in the Arnadóttir article, because we think these will hamper rather than advance the science of psychology of justice.     

The Idea of Public Justification in Rawls’s Law of Peoples

The article examines Rawlss Law of Peoples as an attemptto extend the conception of public justification originallydeveloped in Political Liberalism to the internationaldomain. After briefly sketching the main elements of Rawlssconception of public justification, the article examineshow this is developed in Law of Peoples, pointingout the main differences with the domestic case. The articlethen tries to show that Rawlss justificatory strategy containsa number of inconsistencies which undermine the persuasivenessof the conception of international justice he advocates. Thisin turn can be traced back to the failure fully to addressthe constituency problem facing theories ofpublic justification.     

Responsibility for Global Health

There are several reasons for the current prominence of global health issues. Among the most important is the growing awareness that some risks to health are global in scope and can only be countered by global cooperation. In addition, human rights discourse and, more generally, the articulation of a coherent cosmopolitan ethical perspective that acknowledges the importance of all persons, regardless of where they live, provide a normative basis for taking global health seriously as a moral issue. In this paper we begin the task of translating the vague commitment to doing something to improve global health into a coherent set of more determinate obligations. One chief conclusion of our inquiry is that the responsibilities of states regarding global health are both more determinate and more extensive than is usually assumed. We also argue, however, that institutional innovation will be needed to achieve a more comprehensive, fair distribution of concrete responsibilities regarding global health and to provide effective mechanisms for holding various state and nonstate actors accountable for fulfilling them.     

Age, memory load, and individual differences in working memory as determinants of class-inclusion reasoning.

We studied the effects of individual differences in speak-span scores and variations in memory demands on the class-inclusion performance of 10-, 13-, and 15-year-old children. The speak-span task was an age-appropriate modification of Daneman and Carpenter's (1980) reading-span task and was considered to be a measure of global resources. The age variable was assumed to be a global index of skill development, and some of the specific skills hypothesized to be important in class-inclusion reasoning were estimated using a mathematical model. The results from both regression analyses and the mathematical model indicated that differences in age, speak span, and memory load all affected performance. Surprisingly, the effects of speak span and memory load were independent. However, the effects of each of these variables depended on the age level of the participants. Based on these findings, we argued that (a) resources vary continuously with age, (b) both skill level and global resources should be varied in developmental studies of problem solving, and (c) resource theories (e.g., Norman & Shallice, 1986) should be modified to account for developmental change.     

Reasonable Impartiality and Priority for Compatriots. A Criticism of Liberal Nationalism’s Main flaws

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between priority for compatriots versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders of priority for compatriots: (i) Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. (ii) They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special (contractual, reparative) obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. (iii) They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. (iv) The design of supra-national and global mediating institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partialitys bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartialitys bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design.