Mutual gaze and social cognition

I examine the role of mutual gaze in social cognition. I start by discussing recent studies of joint visual attention in order to show that social cognition is operative in infancy prior to the emergence of theoretical skills required to make judgments about other people's states of mind. Such social cognition depends on the communicative potential inherent in human bodies. I proceed to examine this embodied social cognition in the context of Merleau-Ponty's views on vision. I expose some inner difficulties within Merleau-Ponty's position as well as to point out the ways of resolving them by means of combined insights from developmental psychology and the analyses of self-other relations from philosophies of dialogue.     

Probabilistic Cause and the Thirsty Traveler

In this paper I start by briefly presenting an analysis of token cause and of token causal relevance that I developed elsewhere, and then apply it to the famous thirsty traveler riddle. One general outcome of the analysis of causal relevance employed here is that in preemption cases (early or late) the preempted cause is not a cause since it is causally irrelevant to the effect. I consider several variations of the thirsty traveler riddle. In the first variation the first enemy emptied the canteen and the second enemy threw it away. On this variation, the act of neither enemy comes out, on the analysis employed here, as causally relevant to, and thus not as a cause of, the fact that the traveler died, but the conjunction of the two acts is a cause of it. This version is a case of mutual preemption. I argue that it has the same structure as the voting paradox, which thus has an analogous solution. In the standard version, in which the first enemy added poison to the water in the traveler's canteen, the act of the second enemy (who threw the canteen away) comes out, on the analysis used here, as causally relevant to and as a cause of the fact that the traveler died, but the act of the first enemy comes out as neither. I also make a comparison with Lewis' accounts, and discuss alternative treatments of the puzzle such as those of Hart and Honore and of Gavison, Margalit, and Ullmann-Margalit.     

Enactivism and predictive processing: a non-representational view

This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information, it does not establish a sufficient measure of representational content. We argue that this follows from the fact that the KL-divergence is a measure of relative entropy, which can be shown to be the same as covariance (through a set of additional steps). It is well known that facts about covariance do not entail facts about representational content. So there is no reason to think that the KL-divergence is a measure of (mis-)representational content. This paper thus provides an enactive, non-representational account of Bayesian belief optimisation in hierarchical PP.     

中国传统医德义利观探新

谈及传统医学道德中的义利观,学界常以重义轻利为内容进行认识和把握,仅以此来理解义利观有失简单。实际上,传统义利观具有较为丰富的内涵,可以从三个方面来把握这些内容。首先是不能贪利忘义,其次是义利并进,最后是舍利取义。这三项内容比较全面地说明了传统义利观的内涵,展现了重义轻利的价值立场。义利观是传统医学道德思想的重要组成部分,完整理解义利观,影响着对传统医学道德整个思想的认识,也是探讨传统医学道德现代价值的一项基础工作。

     

小学儿童的尊重观念与同伴关系

采用开放式尊重观念问卷考察了502名三到六年级小学生的尊重观念,探讨儿童的尊重观念与其友伴关系的联系。结果表明,双向尊重的儿童比单向尊重的儿童具有更多的友伴数和更好的友谊质量,但双向尊重的儿童不一定是受欢迎儿童;在不同社交地位的儿童中,被拒绝儿童比其他类型的儿童在一般尊重观念和对朋友的尊重观念上更多地具有单向尊重观念（主要是自我取向尊重观念）。因此,同伴关系的不同侧面——友谊关系和群体社交地位与儿童尊重观念具有不同的联系     

A Case Study of Ethics and Mutual Funds Mismanagement at Putnam

This case study examines the failure of top management at Putnam to exercise ethical behavior in the face of their clear knowledge of corruption in the company. Market timing by employees was expressly forbidden by Putnam. Six employees, including two portfolio managers, repeatedly engaged in market timing activities from 1998 to 2003, garnering over a million dollars in personal profit. The CEO and key senior executives had factual knowledge of the abuses. Management failed to stop the abuses or to discipline those involved until faced with charges from government regulators. By failing to do so, top management breached ethical duties to its shareholders and inflicted serious damage on the organization. The end results of top management's failure to address ethical violations were significant outflow of assets from Putnam's funds, payment of penalties, and loss of trust among investors. This case raises awareness about ethical issues surrounding mutual fund trading practices and the impact that top management can have on the ethical behavior of employees.     

智旭对天台佛学与《周易》之会通

宋代以降,融会佛教诸宗已成佛教界主流,继而又与"三教合一"思潮相互激荡.明代的智旭,他既"究心于台部",又倡导融会诸宗、儒佛会通,他的<周易禅解>一书即是这种思想的产物.书中智旭把天台的无情有性与周易之铺天匝地、天台的止观并重与周易之乾坤刚柔、天台的四悉檀与周易的训蒙之道加以会通,并以周易的<井>卦解天台六即果位,以周易之<大有>卦解天台之"十界互俱"说.     

Am I You?

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.     

Walking Together,Serving Justice and Peace

As the World Council of Churches (WCC) marks its 70th anniversary, this article focuses on the challenges it faces in its commitment to work for the unity of the church and for common service and witness for justice and peace in the world. Looking back on the experiences in the Reformation year 2017, it argues that it is time for the fellowship of churches to be accountable for what it has achieved and received from ecumenical dialogue, and to grow together in mutual accountability. At the same time, the statement by the WCC's 10th Assembly at Busan that “We intend to move together” emphasizes that ecumenism is not a static reality, but dynamic, involving the cooperation of the various churches and in interaction with people of good will of other communities.