My task in this paper is to study Sartre’s ontology as a godless theology. The urgency of defending freedom and responsibility in the face of determinism called for an overarching first principle, a role that God used to play. I first show why such a principle is important and how Sartre filled the void that God had left with a solipsist consciousness. Then I characterize Sartre’s ontology of this consciousness as a “dualist monism”, explaining how it supports his radical conception (...) of freedom. Then, by assessing Sartre’s dualist monism through a theological lens, I disclose an inconsistency in his thought concerning the idea that the in-itself is a deterministic plenitude, which presumes a theos different from consciousness and hence threatens monism. Finally I argue that his inconsistency originates from the finitude of Sartre’s first principle and analyze this finitude by examining the modes of temporality it implies. The entire trajectory problematizes the practice of theo-logy, the idea that a theos stands at the origin of the “logic” (organization or intelligibility) of everything such that all must be conceived under the logos of the theos. While Sartre forcefully criticized the theology of the infinite, his was nonetheless a theology of finitude. (shrink)

Emotion terms such as “sad”, “happy” and “joyful” apply to a wide range of entities. We use them to refer to mental states of sentient beings, and also to describe features of non-mental things such as comportment, nature, events, artworks and so on. Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of emotion descriptions. It argues that emotion terms are polysemous and distinguishes seven related senses. In addition, the paper applies the analysis to shed light on (...) a long-standing debate in philosophy of music concerning emotion descriptions of music. (shrink)

Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests (...) on terminological choices about terms such as 'intention', 'prediction', and 'belief'. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce's Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT) is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called 'transparency' of first-person present-tensed reflection on one's own mental states. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

In "Experience as a Way of Knowing" (this journal), the author tries to create some troubles for philosophers who believe in "qualia" or "what it is like". I think the author has underestimated the complexity of the issues, and I will voice my concerns in five sections. Besides presenting my interpretation of the author's position and challenging it, I will (1) challenge the author's treatment of the knowledge argument, especially the author's treatment of "this is what it is like to (...) see red", (2) challenge the author's interpretation of "what-it-is-like" talk and the author's view that phenomenal properties are theoretical postulates, (3) challenge the author's rejection of "apparent properties", and (4) point out some issues with the author's interpretation of several authors who write about the knowledge argument. (shrink)

The paradox of pain refers to the idea that the folk concept of pain is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily states. By taking a close look at our pain terms, this paper argues that there is no paradox of pain. The air of paradox dissolves once we recognize that pain terms are polysemous and that there are two separate but related concepts of pain rather than one.

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...) related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Recent research in psycholinguistics suggests that language processing frequently involves mental imagery. This paper focuses on visual imagery and discusses two issues regarding the processing of polysemous words (i.e. words with multiple related meanings or senses) – co-predication and sense-relatedness. It aims to show how mental imagery can illuminate these two issues.

As the aim of the responsible robotics initiative is to ensure that responsible practices are inculcated within each stage of design, development and use, this impetus is undergirded by the alignment of ethical and legal considerations towards socially beneficial ends. While every effort should be expended to ensure that issues of responsibility are addressed at each stage of technological progression, irresponsibility is inherent within the nature of robotics technologies from a theoretical perspective that threatens to thwart the endeavour. This is (...) because the concept of responsibility, despite being treated as such, is not monolithic: rather this seemingly unified concept consists of converging and confluent concepts that shape the idea of what we colloquially call responsibility. From a different perspective, robotics will be simultaneously responsible and irresponsible depending on the particular concept of responsibility that is foregrounded: an observation that cuts against the grain of the drive towards responsible robotics. This problem is further compounded by responsible design and development as contrasted to responsible use. From a different perspective, the difficulty in defining the concept of responsibility in robotics is because human responsibility is the main frame of reference. Robotic systems are increasingly expected to achieve the human-level performance, including the capacities associated with responsibility and other criteria which are necessary to act responsibly. This subsists within a larger phenomenon where the difference between humans and non-humans, be it animals or artificial systems, appears to be increasingly blurred, thereby disrupting orthodox understandings of responsibility. This paper seeks to supplement the responsible robotics impulse by proposing a complementary set of human rights directed specifically against the harms arising from robotic and artificial intelligence technologies. The relationship between responsibilities of the agent and the rights of the patient suggest that a rights regime is the other side of responsibility coin. The major distinction of this approach is to invert the power relationship: while human agents are perceived to control robotic patients, the prospect for this to become reversed is beginning. As robotic technologies become ever more sophisticated, and even genuinely complex, asserting human rights directly against robotic harms become increasingly important. Such an approach includes not only developing human rights that ‘protect’ humans but also ‘strengthen’ people against the challenges introduced by robotics and AI [This distinction parallels Berlin’s negative and positive concepts of liberty ], by emphasising the social and reflective character of the notion of humanness as well as the difference between the human and nonhuman. This will allow using the human frame of reference as constitutive of, rather than only subject to, the robotic and AI technologies, where it is human and not technology characteristics that shape the human rights framework in the first place. (shrink)

He drove a taxi. Now he drives a truck. So, must he be driving the truck right now? Must he, as long as he's working as a truck driver, keep driving his truck all day and all night? What do we speak of, when we speak of "now"? In this talk, some popular conceptions in the philosophy of time will be put under critical scrutiny: (1) The present (the "now") is an instant, a time point with no length; (2) the (...) "content" of the present is always an event, a happening, which constitutes a segment of a larger process; (3) what (time) is now, is determined by the passage of time (itself). The following points will be defended respectively: (1) The present may be a time period. "Now" is not an indivisible time-atom in the substantival sense. (2) What is now can be an event, a process, or a state. "Driving a truck now" – in the sense of being a truck driver – is neither an event nor something happening to him. (3) "Now", among other temporal concepts, is not a name for any thing, but schemata under which we understand ways things being themselves. There are variety of ways of being, and accordingly there are multiple aspects of now-ness. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and descriptive ineffability. This paper proposes an illocutionary force indicator theory of slurs: they are derogatory terms because their use is to perform the illocutionary act of derogation, which is a declarative illocutionary act to enforce norms against the target. For instance, calling a Chinese person “chink” is an act of derogation (...) to enforce racist norms that license exclusion of the Chinese, deny their rights to dignity, etc. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a more comprehensive explanation of the features of slurs than earlier speech act approaches. Second, it provides a theory that is immune to the problems faced by existing theories, such as wrong predictions of truth-conditions, explaining unacceptability to non-bigots, and explaining slurs against the dominant groups. (shrink)

A frequent caveat in online dating profiles – “No fats, femmes, or Asians” – caused an LGBT activist to complain about the bias against Asians in the American gay community, which he called “racial looksism”. In response, he was asked that, if he himself would not date a fat person, why he should find others not dating Asians so upsetting. This response embodies a popular attitude that personal preferences or tastes are simply personal matters – they are not subject to (...) moral evaluation. In this paper, I argue, against this popular attitude, that a personal preference like racial looksism is indeed wrong. A preference like racial looksism is wrong because it is an overgeneralization that disrespects individuality by treating people as exchangeable tokens of one type, and such disrespect denies its objects appreciation that their dignity entitles them to. As it turns out, there is on my account a relevant moral difference between racial looksism and simple looksism. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative locutions, such as (...) ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Poetry evokes mental imagery in its readers. But how is mental imagery precisely related to poetry? This article provides a systematic treatment. It clarifies two roles of mental imagery in relation to poetry—as an effect generated by poetry and as an efficient means for understanding and appreciating poetry. The article also relates mental imagery to the discussion on the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. It argues against the orthodox view that the imagistic effects of poetry cannot be captured by prosaic paraphrase, but (...) points to features of poetry that can shape aspects of mental imagery that are liable to be lost in paraphrase. (shrink)

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic (...) literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on explaining the intuition of revelation, an issue that Chalmers (2018) raises in his paper. I first sketch how the truth of revelation provides an explanation for the intuition of revelation, and then assess a physicalist proposal to explain the intuition that appeals to Derk Pereboom’s (2011, 2016, 2019) qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis.

In recent literature on the metaphysics of consciousness, and in particular on the prospects of physicalism, there are two interesting strands of discussion. One strand concerns the so-called ‘thesis of revelation’, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience. The other strand concerns the intuition of dualism, the intuition that consciousness is nonphysical. With a particular focus on the former, this paper advances two main arguments. First, it argues that the thesis of revelation is intuitive; it (...) is part of our ordinary, implicit conception of experience. Second, it brings the two strands of discussion together and puts forward a rational explanation of the intuition of dualism in terms of the intuitiveness of the thesis of revelation. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of finite versus countable additivity in Bayesian probability and decision theory -- in particular, Savage's theory of subjective expected utility and personal probability. I show that Savage's reason for not requiring countable additivity in his theory is inconclusive. The assessment leads to an analysis of various highly idealised assumptions commonly adopted in Bayesian theory, where I argue that a healthy dose of, what I call, conceptual realism is often helpful in understanding the interpretational value of (...) sophisticated mathematical structures employed in applied sciences like decision theory. In the last part, I introduce countable additivity into Savage's theory and explore some technical properties in relation to other axioms of the system. (shrink)

He drove a taxi. Now he drives a truck. So, must he be driving the truck right now? Must he, as long as he's working as a truck driver, keep driving his truck all day and all night? What do we speak of, when we speak of "now"? In this talk, some popular conceptions in the philosophy of time will be put under critical scrutiny: (1) The present (the "now") is an instant, a time point with no length; (2) the (...) "content" of the present is always an event, a happening, which constitutes a segment of a larger process; (3) what (time) is now, is determined by the passage of time (itself). The following points will be defended respectively: (1) The present may be a time period. "Now" is not an indivisible time-atom in the substantival sense. (2) What is now can be an event, a process, or a state. "Driving a truck now" – in the sense of being a truck driver – is neither an event nor something happening to him. (3) "Now", among other temporal concepts, is not a name for any thing, but schemata under which we understand ways things being themselves. There are variety of ways of being, and accordingly there are multiple aspects of now-ness. (shrink)

Philosophers debate over the truth of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the thesis that there is a morally significant difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm to happen. Deontologists tend to accept this doctrine, whereas consequentialists tend to reject it. A robust defence of this doctrine would require a conceptual distinction between doing and allowing that both matches our ordinary use of the concepts in a wide range of cases and enables a justification for the alleged moral difference. (...) In this article, I argue not only that a robust defence of this doctrine is available, but also that it is available within a consequentialist framework. (shrink)

In the philosophy of mind, revelation is the claim that the nature of qualia is revealed in phenomenal experience. In the literature, revelation is often thought of as intuitive but in tension with physicalism. While mentions of revelation are frequent, there is room for further discussion of how precisely to formulate the thesis of revelation and what it exactly amounts to. Drawing on the work of David Lewis, this paper provides a detailed discussion on how the thesis of revelation, as (...) well as its incompatibility with physicalism, is to be understood. (shrink)

This study used a flame atomic absorption spectrometer (FAAS) and atomic fluorescence spec-trophotometer (AFS) to detect the concentrations of chromium (Cr), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), hy-drargyrum (Hg) and arsenic (As) in soils and three genotypes of vegetables in greenhouse, as well as analyzed the physical and chemical properties of soils, including soil pH, soil organic matter (OM), basic nutrients, electrical conductivity (EC) and cation exchange capacity (CEC) in Guan- zhong areas, Shaanxi province, China. The results showed that comparing to subsoil, (...) the sampled topsoil is enriched in Cr, Cd, Pb, As and Hg. Cd (0.83 - 3.17 mg·kg-1) and Hg (0.40 - 1.44 mg·kg-1) are exceeding the limited value stated in “the 2006 Greenhouse Vegetable Producing Environmental Quality Evaluation Standards” of 0.40 mg·kg-1 and 0.35 mg·kg-1 respectively. However, Nanzhuang greenhouse soil is within the limits. The heavy metal pollution index (HPI) of soil in Sanyuan (8.10) is the highest and in Dongzhang (4.23) is the lowest. The contents of Pb (0.201 - 0.376 mg·kg-1) were exceeding the limited value (0.20 mg·kg-1) in vegetables species, and Cd (0.0363 - 0.0572 mg·kg-1) in some place were also exceeding the limited value (0.05 mg·kg-1). Greenhouse soils were becoming acidified year after year; the ratios of N, P and K in soil were seriously imbalanced. According to the impacting factors, OM, pH, available P, EC and CEC have obviously effected the accumulation of Cr and Hg. However, there was not enough evidence for the effects of available nitrogen and available potassium. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to improve the practical argument for beliefs in God. Some theists, most famously Kant and William James, called our attention to a particular set of beliefs, the Jamesian-type beliefs, which are justified by virtue of their practical significance, and these theists tried to justify theistic beliefs on the exact same ground. I argue, contra the Jamesian tradition, that theistic beliefs are different from the Jamesian-type beliefs and thus cannot be justified on the same ground. I (...) also argue that the practical argument, as it stands, faces a problem of self-defeat. I then construct a new practical argument that avoids both problems. According to this new argument, theistic beliefs are rational to accept because such beliefs best supply us with motivation strong enough to carry out demanding moral tasks. (shrink)

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...) argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

Since the early nineteenth century a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and (...) reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to nonliving chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter. (shrink)

The Quantum Economics Intelligence Initiative, spearheaded by Quantum Economist PhDs. Kaiola M Liu integrates insights from seminal thinkers like Einstein, Archimedes, Adam Smith, Nick Land, and Sun Tzu. By applying principles of quantum mechanics, this forward-looking project aims to redefine economic modeling, exploring real-world applications and potential benefits. The initiative encompasses foundational studies, economic model applications, incorporation of quantum computing, and analysis of contemporary economic philosophies. Keywords - Quantum Mechanics, Economics, Technological Advancements, Philosophy.

This paper offers a fine analysis of different versions of the well known sure-thing principle. We show that Savage's formal formulation of the principle, i.e., his second postulate (P2), is strictly stronger than what is intended originally.

Paintings of music are a significant presence in modern art. They are cross-modal representations, aimed at representing music, say, musical works or forms, using colors, lines, and shapes in the visual modality. This article aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding paintings of music. Using examples from modern art, the article addresses the question of what a painting of music is. Implications for the aesthetic appreciation of paintings of music are also drawn.

It is often thought that sensible qualities such as colours do not exist as properties of physical objects. Focusing on the case of colour, I discuss two views: the Galilean view, according to which colours do not exist as qualities of physical objects, and the naive view, according to which colours are, as our perception presents them to be, qualities instantiated by physical objects. I argue that it is far from clear that the Galilean view is better than the naive (...) view. Given the arguments in this paper, the naive view ought to be taken seriously. The discussion here appeals especially to theorists who, like Goff, are already convinced that the quantitative language of physical science fails to capture all qualities. (shrink)

Ignorance is commonly assumed to be a lack of knowledge in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. I challenge that assumption. In the Protagoras, ignorance is conceived to be a substantive, structural psychic flaw—the soul’s domination by inferior elements that are by nature fit to be ruled. Ignorant people are characterized by both false beliefs about evaluative matters in specific situations and an enduring deception about their own psychic conditions. On my interpretation, akrasia, moral vices, and epistemic vices are products or forms of (...) ignorance, and a person who lacks knowledge is not necessarily ignorant. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the token derogatory force (...) come apart. Because of the distinction, an adequate theory of slurs must be plausible for both the type and the token derogatory force. However, I will argue that many theories fail to be plausible for both. In particular, Hom’s combinatorial externalism and the conventional implicature theory offer implausible accounts of the token derogatory force, whereas the prohibitionist theory is insufficient to explain the type derogatory force. (shrink)

It is often said that there is no appearance/reality distinction with respect to consciousness. Call this claim ‘NARD’. In contemporary discussions, NARD is closely connected to the thesis of revelation, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience, though the connection between the two requires clarification. This paper distinguishes different versions of NARD and homes in on a particular version that is closely connected to revelation. It shows how revelation and the related version of NARD pose (...) a threat to physicalism. Responses from physicalism and their limitations are also considered. (shrink)

Today, the lipid bilayer structure is nearly ubiquitous, taken for granted in even the most rudimentary introductions to cell biology. Yet the image of the lipid bilayer, built out of lipids with heads and tails, went from having obscure origins deep in colloid chemical theory in 1924 to being “obvious to any competent physical chemist” by 1935. This chapter examines how this schematic, strictly heuristic explanation of the idea of molecular orientation was developed within colloid physical chemistry, and how the (...) image was transformed into a reflection of the reality and agency of lipid molecules in the biological microworld. Whereas in physical and colloid chemistry these images considered secondary to instrumental measurement and mathematical modeling of surface phenomena, in biology the manipulable image of the lipid on paper became an essential tool for the molecularization of the cell. (shrink)

Dạo gần đây mưa nhiều, cây cối tốt tươi, cá tôm đầy ao. Chim ở các nơi tấp nập kéo đến sinh sống.

This paper begins with Thomas Nagel's (1970) investigation of the possibility of altruism to further examine how to motivate altruism. When the pursuit of the gratification of one's own desires generally has an immediate causal efficacy, how can one also be motivated to care for others and to act towards the well-being of others? A successful motivational theory of altruism must explain how altruism is possible under all these motivational interferences. The paper will begin with an exposition of Nagel's proposal, (...) and see where it is insufficient with regard to this further issue. It will then introduce the views of Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi, and see which one could offer a better motivational theory of altruism. All three philosophers offer different insights on the role of human reason/reflection and human sentiments in moral motivation. The paper will end with a proposal for a socioethical moral program that incorporates both moral reason and moral sentiments as motivation. (shrink)

《政治宗教》是沃格林学术生涯早期的代表作，通过“政治宗教”的理论视角考察了纳粹德国的历史根源、符号特征与世俗宗教本质。学术界围绕“政治宗教”的理论内涵与学术价值展开了大量的争论。然而，若要恰当地评估“ 政治宗教”则需要澄清该理论所遵循的理论基础及其所体现的特征与性质。首先，“政治宗教”的特征体现在其“符号 — 经验”的分析模式中；其次，该理论是沃格林探究纳粹德国政治危机的新视角，也是沃格林“精神政治学”的理论雏形。在明确“政治宗教”的特征与性质之后，进而可以恰当地阐明该研究对当今学界诊断社会政治危机与探索良 善秩序的启迪意义。.

This paper defends an approach to modeling and models in science that is against model fictionalism of a recent stripe (the “new fictionalism” that takes models to be abstract entities that are analogous to works of fiction). It further argues that there is a version of fictionalism on models to which my approach is neutral and which only makes sense if one adopts a special sort of antirealism (e.g. constructive empiricism). Otherwise, my approach strongly suggests that one stays away from (...) fictionalism and embraces realism directly. (shrink)

This paper presents a human-computer interaction model with a three layers learning mechanism in a pervasive environment. We begin with a discussion around a number of important issues related to human-computer interaction followed by a description of the architecture for a multi-agent cooperative design system for pervasive computing environment. We present our proposed three- layer HCI model and introduce the group formation algorithm, which is predicated on a dynamic sharing niche technology. Finally, we explore the cooperative reinforcement learning and fusion (...) algorithms; the paper closes with concluding observations and a summary of the principal work and contributions of this paper. (shrink)

Aim: Low professional help-seeking intention (PHSI) hinders effective treatment of mental illness. PHSI among Chinese students is still understudied and under-recognized. This study aimed to evaluate the status of PHSI and its associated risk factors among Chinese medical students. -/- Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Hainan province, South China, between January 1, 2021, and May 31, 2021. A total of 2182 medical students were recruited and surveyed via an anonymous structured questionnaire. Logistic regression analyses were performed to identify (...) the factors associated with PHSI. -/- Results: Among the 2182 medical students (mean age 21.0 years (SD = 3.70), 61.5% females), those with and without PHSI were 72.0% and 28.0%, and 16.4% with moderate to severe depression. Male students, those with a high level of depression stigma, serious family dysfunction, and heavy dependence on mobile phones were significantly less likely to seek professional mental health help, with odds ratios (ORs) of 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, and 1.7, respectively. -/- Conclusion: A significant proportion of Chinese medical students demonstrate low PHSI, influenced by factors such as gender, depression stigma, family dysfunction, and mobile phone dependence. Future interventions aimed at increasing medical students’ PHSI should prioritize reducing depression stigma, mitigating reliance on mobile phone use, and enhancing family function to address these key barriers to seeking professional mental health support. (shrink)

Philosophically expanding upon the workings of Chris Land and other notable figures in the field of philosophy, the ideology of Xenoaccelerationism is rooted in the spirit of hermeneutics which supports the holistic nuanced approach to understanding the functionality of the Xenoaccelerationist. In the name of accelerationism “Xeno” meaning alien refers to the use of outside viewpoints and expertise to transcend the limitations of methodological thought processes. Through the successful application of accelerationism given the lens of alienation draws upon abstract methods (...) to pursue economic expansion initiatives. The ideal Xenoaccelerationist is thought to have the characteristics of non-partisan affiliation, diverse thought processes, and a rigorous academic understanding of the world and its various functions. (shrink)

In his classic book “the Foundations of Statistics” Savage developed a formal system of rational decision making. The system is based on (i) a set of possible states of the world, (ii) a set of consequences, (iii) a set of acts, which are functions from states to consequences, and (iv) a preference relation over the acts, which represents the preferences of an idealized rational agent. The goal and the culmination of the enterprise is a representation theorem: Any preference relation that (...) satisfies certain arguably acceptable postulates determines a (finitely additive) probability distribution over the states and a utility assignment to the consequences, such that the preferences among acts are determined by their expected utilities. Additional problematic assumptions are however required in Savage's proofs. First, there is a Boolean algebra of events (sets of states) which determines the richness of the set of acts. The probabilities are assigned to members of this algebra. Savage's proof requires that this be a σ-algebra (i.e., closed under infinite countable unions and intersections), which makes for an extremely rich preference relation. On Savage's view we should not require subjective probabilities to be σ-additive. He therefore finds the insistence on a σ-algebra peculiar and is unhappy with it. But he sees no way of avoiding it. Second, the assignment of utilities requires the constant act assumption: for every consequence there is a constant act, which produces that consequence in every state. This assumption is known to be highly counterintuitive. The present work contains two mathematical results. The first, and the more difficult one, shows that the σ-algebra assumption can be dropped. The second states that, as long as utilities are assigned to finite gambles only, the constant act assumption can be replaced by the more plausible and much weaker assumption that there are at least two non-equivalent constant acts. The second result also employs a novel way of deriving utilities in Savage-style systems -- without appealing to von Neumann-Morgenstern lotteries. The paper discusses the notion of “idealized agent" that underlies Savage's approach, and argues that the simplified system, which is adequate for all the actual purposes for which the system is designed, involves a more realistic notion of an idealized agent. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a deflationist view that as representational vehicles symbols and models do their jobs in essentially the same way. I argue that symbols are conventional vehicles whose chief function is denotation while models are epistemic vehicles whose chief function is showing what their targets are like in the relevant aspects. It is further pointed out that models usually do not rely on similarity or some such relations to relate to their targets. For that referential relation (...) they reply instead on symbols (names and labels) given to them and their parts. And a Goodmanian view on pictures of fictional characters reveals the distinction between symbolic and model representations. (shrink)

With the rapid development of information technology, the electricity consumption of Internet Data Centers (IDCs) increases drastically, resulting in considerable carbon emissions that need to be reduced urgently. In addition to the introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), the joint use of the spatial migration capacity of IDC workload and the temporal flexibility of the demand of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCSs) provides an important means to change the carbon footprint of the IDC. In this paper, a sustainability improvement strategy (...) for the IDC carbon emission reduction was developed by coordinating the spatial-temporal dispatch flexibilities of the IDC workload and the EVCS demand. Based on the Minkowski sum algorithm, a generalized flexible load model of the EVCSs, considering traffic flow and Road Impedance (RI) was formulated. The case studies show that the proposed method can effectively increase the renewable energy consumption, reduce the overall carbon emissions of multi-IDCs, reduce the energy cost of the DCO, and utilize the EV dispatching potential. Discussions are also provided on the relationship between workload processing time delay and the renewable energy consumption rate. (shrink)

Weakly Aggregative Modal Logic (WAML) is a collection of disguised polyadic modal logics with n-ary modalities whose arguments are all the same. WAML has some interesting applications on epistemic logic and logic of games, so we study some basic model theoretical aspects of WAML in this paper. Specifically, we give a van Benthem-Rosen characterization theorem of WAML based on an intuitive notion of bisimulation and show that each basic WAML system Kn lacks Craig Interpolation.

It is widely taken that the first-order part of Frege's Begriffsschrift is complete. However, there does not seem to have been a formal verification of this received claim. The general concern is that Frege's system is one axiom short in the first-order predicate calculus comparing to, by now, the standard first-order theory. Yet Frege has one extra inference rule in his system. Then the question is whether Frege's first-order calculus is still deductively sufficient as far as the first-order completeness is (...) concerned. In this short note we confirm that the missing axiom is derivable from his stated axioms and inference rules, and hence the logic system in the Begriffsschrift is indeed first-order complete. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

This book examines some possible ethical principles to resolve moral dilemmas involving water. Existing problems in current water management practices are discussed in light of these principles. Transformation of human water ethics has the potential to be far more effective, cheaper and acceptable than some existing means of “regulation”, but transformation of personal and societal ethics need time because the changes to ethical values are slow.

Background -/- Previous literature suggests that those with reading disability (RD) have more pronounced deficits during semantic processing in reading as compared to listening comprehension. This discrepancy has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies showing abnormal activity in RD during semantic processing in the visual but not in the auditory modality. Whether effective connectivity between brain regions in RD could also show this pattern of discrepancy has not been investigated. Methodology/Principal Findings -/- Children (8- to 14-year-olds) were given a semantic (...) task in the visual and auditory modality that required an association judgment as to whether two sequentially presented words were associated. Effective connectivity was investigated using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Bayesian Model Selection (BMS) was used separately for each modality to find a winning family of DCM models separately for typically developing (TD) and RD children. BMS yielded the same winning family with modulatory effects on bottom-up connections from the input regions to middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus(IFG) with inconclusive evidence regarding top-down modulations. Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) was thus conducted across models in this winning family and compared across groups. The bottom-up effect from the fusiform gyrus (FG) to MTG rather than the top-down effect from IFG to MTG was stronger in TD compared to RD for the visual modality. The stronger bottom-up influence in TD was only evident for related word pairs but not for unrelated pairs. No group differences were noted in the auditory modality. Conclusions/Significance -/- This study revealed a modality-specific deficit for children with RD in bottom-up effective connectivity from orthographic to semantic processing regions. There were no group differences in connectivity from frontal regions, suggesting that the core deficit in RD is not in top-down modulation. (shrink)

Since its emergence in the 1950s, analytic aesthetics has become the mainstream approach to aesthetics in the English-speaking world, and it has subsequently spread throughout most of the world, including mainland China. Although it was introduced into the Chinese academic world at an early time, around the late 1950s, and has been disseminated and researched in China over the past three decades, analytic aesthetics remains underdeveloped in China. Chinese academics tend to have little familiarity with, and exposure to, analytic approaches (...) to aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, given this situation, Chinese contributions to analytic aesthetics have had a marginal impact on the international academic discussion. This paper aims at providing a picture of the development of analytic aesthetics in China. In section 1, I clarify the scope of the paper. Section 2 briefly introduces aesthetics in China so as to outline the context for our discussion about analytic aesthetics. In section 3, I first offer a brief historical narrative of the dissemination and reception of analytic aesthetics in China, and then explore how analytic aesthetics has been researched and taught in China. -/- . (shrink)

There have been constant and multiple endeavours to argue for Darwin's both epistemic and practical debt to Romanticism. Almost all of these arguments emphasise Darwin's theoretical and aesthetic associations with Alexander von Humboldt, who, from a prevailing Darwin-centred perspective, is in turn usually oversimplified as an undisputed incarnation of Romanticism. The antagonistic view, however, develops nothing other than another stereotype of Humboldt as an anti-idealistic, pro-French, and even highly Anglophone empiricist naturalist, and accordingly rejects the claim of a romantic Darwin (...) in terms of his Humboldtian inheritance. In this paper, I will first portray a balanced figure of Humboldt in terms of both his critical incorporation of romantic philosophy and the idiosyncratic history of his science. Then, I will thematically compare Darwin with Humboldt and other romantics so as to elucidate Darwin's peculiar appropriation of romantic tenets. Three interrelated romantic themes are examined, along with a discrimination of different senses in which the term romanticism is used: a) the literature-science relation, b) the pursuit of the unity in and through multiplicity, and c) the epistemic role of imagination. On the basis of this triadic dissection, both Humboldt's and Darwin's adherence to and departure from romanticism are reevaluated. (shrink)