This paper calls for a paradigm shift in studying academic dependency, towards the paradigm of brokered dependency. Using Chinese academia as an example, I demonstrate how the neocolonial condition of academic dependency is always mediated through blockage-brokerage mechanisms. The two most salient blockage-brokerage mechanisms of dependency in the Chinese context are linguistic barrier and authoritarian malepistemization, and the effects of the latter consist of three layers: institutional, informational and incorporational. On top of their domestic impacts, those mechanisms jointly exacerbate spectacularized (...) postcoloniality in anglophone-hegemonic global academic publishing. The paradigm of brokered dependency not only represents a more nuanced approach to the study of academic dependency, but also underscores the fact that the dismantling of the neocolonial condition cannot be conceived and pursued in isolation from comprehending and confronting the authoritarian condition, especially when the latter pertains under the disguise of anticolonialism. (shrink)

The philosophy of historical sciences investigates their distinct objects of study, epistemic challenges, and methodological solutions. Rethinking astronomy in this light offers a contribution. First, the methodology of historical sciences adds to a more adequate description of how astronomers study and utilize token events. Second, astronomy faces a typical difficulty in identifying traces of some past events and has developed a delicate solution. This enriches the idea of trace and suggests a methodology that relies on iterations between data-driven approaches and (...) theory-driven approaches, together with the cross-validation between multiple relevant historical events or datasets. (shrink)

While I find Huaping Lu-Adler’s excavation of Kant’s long-overlooked linguistic Orientalism both enlightening and thought-provoking, I disagree with her diagnosis of its theoretical and practical relevance. On the one hand, while I agree that Kant’s positionality renders all his writings and teachings presumptively impactful, there is reason to doubt that his peculiar construction of the linguistic Oriental Other had much actual impact on his disciples. On the other hand, while I agree that the Kantian ideal of public reason is inapt (...) for rectifying the linguistic-epistemic injustices of global knowledge production, I disagree on why it is so. In particular, I argue for a shift in theoretical and practical focuses, from linguistic biases and prejudices, to the structural epistemic constraints of linguistic diversity, as well as to other political-structural conditions shaping global knowledge production. (shrink)

In “Confucianism and Same-Sex Marriage,” published recently in Politics and Religion, Professor Tongdong Bai argues for a “moderate Confucian position on same-sex marriage,” one that supports its legalization and yet endeavors “to use public opinion and social and political policies to encourage heterosexual marriages, and to prevent same-sex marriages from becoming the majority form of marriages” (Bai 2021:146). Against the backdrop of downright homophobia prevalent among vocal Confucians in mainland China today, Bai claims that his pro-legalization rendition “show[s] a different (...) version of Confucianism that challenges the received perception of Confucianism that it is deeply conservative, a perception that often lies at the core of the rejection of its contemporary relevance, especially by the so-called ‘liberals’ in China and elsewhere” (Bai 2021:133). Furthermore, Bai claims that his moderate Confucianism is normatively preferrable to “the typical liberal or individualist position” of a marriage equality supporter, because the specter of polygamy – the conservative trope of invoking polygamy as a reductio ad absurdum against same-sex marriage – imposes “a serious challenge” to liberals but not to moderate Confucians (Bai 2021:146, 153). -/- Both of Bai’s claims falter upon scrutiny, however. Granted, it is applaudable that Bai tries to dissuade his more conservative Confucian colleagues from opposing the legalization of same-sex marriage. But as Section 1 of this Response will show, the alternative rendition of Confucianism he presents, along with the way he presents it, is premised on a highly contested conception of what shared Confucian values are; does injustice to Confucians who embrace marriage equality more unreservedly (i.e., without caveats à la Bai); fails to produce new arguments that “enrich the theoretical basis for same-sex marriage” (Bai 2021:133); and, ironically, reinforces – rather than “challenges” – the “received perception” of Confucianism as deeply conservative. Meanwhile, Section 2 will show that Bai’s comparison between liberalism and moderate Confucianism relies both upon an apparent unfamiliarity with the extensive and nuanced liberal discussions on polygamy, and upon fallacious methods of assessing comparative normative valence. -/- Finally, Section 3 will offer some concluding thoughts from the perspective of decolonial theory, examining the dynamic of spectacularized postcoloniality that propels the production and consumption of dubious theoretical projects like Bai’s. As it turns out, this case serves not only as a cautionary tale of how not to conduct comparative normative theorizing, but also as a cautionary tale of how not to let the spectacle of postcoloniality derail the pursuit of academic decolonization. (shrink)

Parmenides expelled nonbeing from the realm of knowledge and forbade us to think or talk about it. But still there has been a long tradition of nay-sayings throughout the history of Western and Eastern philosophy. Are those philosophers talking about the same nonbeing or nothing? If not, how do their concepts of nothing differ from each other? Could there be different types of nothing? Surveying the traditional classifications of nothing or nonbeing in the East and West have led me to (...) develop a typology of nothing that consists of three main types: 1) privative nothing, commonly known as absence; 2) negative nothing, the altogether not or absolute nothing; and finally 3) original nothing, the nothing that is equivalent to being. I will test my threefold typology of nothing by comparing the similarities and differences between the conceptions of nothing in Heidegger, Daoism and Buddhism. With this study, I hope that I will clarify some confusion in the understanding of nothing in Heidegger, Daoism and Buddhism, and shed light on the central philosophical issue of “what there is not”. (shrink)

According to an attractive conception of love as attention, discussed by Iris Murdoch, one strives to see one’s beloved accurately and justly. A puzzle for understanding how to love another in this way emerges in cases where more accurate and just perception of the beloved only reveals his flaws and vices, and where the beloved, in awareness of this, strives to escape the gaze of others - including, or perhaps especially, of his loved ones. Though less attentive forms of love (...) may be able to render one’s continued love coherent and justifiable in these cases, they risk further alienating the beloved precisely because they are less attentive and because of the operations of the beloved’s shame. I argue that attentive love is well-suited to alleviate this problem of alienation, but that in order to do so, it must be supplemented with grace. I propose a conception of gracious love as an affectionate love for the qualities of human nature, distinguishing this from a love of humanity, and show how this complex emotion, in being responsive to the complexities of shame, is able to alleviate the problem of alienation. (shrink)

Philosophers are now wary of conflating the “fittingness” or accuracy of an emotion with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, who originally cautioned against this “conflation”, also warned philosophers not to infer that an emotion is inaccurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally inappropriate, or that it is accurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally appropriate. Such inferences, they argue, risk committing “the moralistic fallacy”, a mistake they (...) claim is widespread throughout the work of contemporary and historical moral philosophers. I argue that many basic and familiar forms of moral assessment of the emotions are not subject to these arguments. I illustrate this by reconsidering the idea that to assess an emotion as “fitting” is to assess it as what a virtuous person would feel. After showing how assessments akin to this “virtue-theoretical” notion of fit may be prevalent even outside of the Aristotelian tradition, I suggest some more charitable and philosophically productive interpretations of the philosophical views of the emotions that D’Arms and Jacobson criticize, and argue that we cannot coherently theorize about the fittingness conditions of the emotions in a morally neutral way. (shrink)

L.A. Paul argues that “transformative experiences” challenge our hopes to live up to an ideal that she believes is upheld within western, wealthy cultures. If these experiences reveal information to us about the world and ourselves that is in principle unavailable to us before we undergo them, it seems that there is no hope for us to be rational, authentic and autonomous masters of our own lives. Supposing that Paul is right about this, how concerned should we be? Here, I (...) challenge the ideal of "rational mastery" that guides Paul’s project, and which must be granted in order to motivate the philosophical challenge purportedly generated by experiences that drastically change who we are and what we know. (shrink)

On one predominant conception of virtue, the virtuous agent is, among other things, wholehearted in doing what she believes best. I challenge this condition of wholeheartedness by making explicit the connections between the emotion of boredom and the states of continence and akrasia. An easily bored person is more susceptible to these forms of disharmony because of two familiar characteristics of boredom. First, that we can be – and often are – bored by what it is that we know would (...) be best to do, and second, that occurrent states of boredom tend to give rise to positive interest in performing actions that we know are bad to perform. Moreover, while a person’s susceptibility to boredom can indicate a lack of attentiveness or acuity, or be evidence of a vice such as ingratitude or shallowness, it can in others indicate positive qualities of character, such as perspicacity, liveliness, and certain forms of intelligence. Upon imagining certain bored akratics without the psychological qualities that give rise to their boredom, we will either imagine them without these positive qualities, or with others that – though perhaps psychologically possible – are not clearly better. This yields the result that a person who is continent or even akratic because of her susceptibility to boredom may have a character no less excellent than that of the wholehearted agent. (shrink)

The present paper discusses some concepts and materials that may be linked to Īśvarasena’s theory of non-cognition. These include the concept of feiliang 非量 as found in the writings of Dharmapāla, Asvabhāva, Jinaputra and their Chinese counterparts, and apramāṇatā (or apramāṇatva), as found in the works of Dharmakīrti and his commentators. I shall demonstrate that the two concepts in many ways mirror the theory of three pramāṇas, proposed by Īśvarasena. As most of these materials are from the sixth to eighth (...) century, they are extremely helpful for clarifying the early development of the theory of non-cognition and filling gaps in our understanding of the early development of this theory. (shrink)

In the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) and The Legend of Korra (LOK) —let’s call it the Bending World—some people (“benders”) are endowed with telekinetic superpowers to maneuver surrounding objects without physical interaction, by mentally steering (“bending”) one of the four classical “elements of nature” composing the objects: air, fire, water, and earth. Perhaps, in a world where the fundamental laws of nature are radically different from those of our world, the fundamental conditions and manifestations of politics should (...) be radically different too. That, of course, is not to deny that political bodies familiar to us are depicted in ATLA and LOK: tribes, monarchies, autonomous townships, city-states, loose federations, colonial empires, and democracies. Despite those familiar depictions, however, it’s worth contemplating how the existence of supernatural power might fundamentally alter the norms and rationales of politics—and how it might in turn help us better understand our own political reality. (shrink)

The present paper explores some pre-Vibhāṣika sources including the Kathāvatthu, *Śāriputrābhidharma, and Vijñānakāya. These sources suggest an early origin of the concept of the cognition of nonexistent objects (asad-ālambana-jñāna) among the Mahāsāṃghikas and some of its sub-schools. These scattered sources also indicate some different aspects of this theory from that held by the Dārṣṭāntikas and the Sautrāntikas. In particular, some Mahāsāṃghika arguments for the cognition of nonexistent objects reveal how a soteriologically-oriented issue gradually develops into a sophisticated philosophical concept.

As with certain other self-reflexive emotions, such as guilt and shame, our understanding of self-hatred may be aided by views of the mind which posit an internalized other whose perspective on oneself embodies and focuses a set of concerns and values, and whose perspective one is in some sense vulnerable to. To feel guilt for some transgression is not solely to feel the anger that one would feel toward another’s trespasses, now directed back onto oneself as an object of that (...) anger; it is at the same time to react to that anger – perhaps, for example, to accept it as deserved, or to welcome the lashing of one’s bad conscience. To feel shame before oneself is not just to see oneself in some compromising way, it is to feel compromised by one’s own gaze. Likewise, the person who hates herself does not feel the hatred that she might have for another, simply taking herself as object of that attitude. She is not merely the seat of an internalized hostile voice and perspective that she may, for example, react to with indifference. She does not only tell herself that she is “worthless” but, will typically feel herself so in response. And her suffering may not just result from pain she is inclined to inflict, but suffering that, in some sense, she is inclined to suffer. But how is this so? How, in self-hatred, does one become not only subject to, but vulnerable and even receptive to one’s own hostility? (shrink)

The guise of the good thesis can be understood as an attempt to distinguish between human motivations that are intelligible as desires and those that are not. I propose, first, that we understand the intelligibility at stake here as the kind necessary for the experience of reactive attitudes, both negative and positive, to the behavior and motivations of an agent. Given this, I argue that the thesis must be understood as proposing substantive content restrictions on how human agents perceive objects (...) of their desires; it cannot be a purely formal constraint. Moreover, while proponents of the guise of the good thesis who posit substantive content restrictions on human desire are right to do so, they are mistaken to claim that we always desire the apparently good. Instead, I propose a different limit: the naturally attractive. This alternative to the guise of the good thesis nonetheless captures the compelling idea that human desires are intelligent, quasi-perceptual responses to the world. (shrink)

Among the most popular strategies for justifying political obligations are those that appeal to the principle of fairness. These theories face the challenge, canonically articulated by Robert Nozick, of explaining how it is that persons are obligated to schemes when they receive goods that they do not ask for but cannot reject. John Simmons offers one defense of the principle of fairness, arguing that people could be bound by obligations of fairness if they voluntarily accept goods produced by a cooperative (...) scheme. Simmons, however, thinks that such a theory will do little work in justifying political obligations, since virtually no one voluntarily accepts state goods. This paper attempts to advance just such a theory by arguing that states are in fact genuine cooperative schemes and that Simmons is overly pessimistic in his appraisal of whether the majority of citizens accept the goods provided by their states. (shrink)

Very little attention has been paid towards examining John Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy as a self-standing theory. Nevertheless, it offers a highly original way of thinking about state legitimacy. In this paper, I will offer a sketch of what such an account might look like. At its heart is the idea that the legitimacy of the state resides not in the consent of the governed, nor in the state’s conformity with the appropriate principles of justice, but rather in citizens’ (...) endorsement of the state and its underlying constitutional principles on the basis of their own comprehensive conceptions of justice. Such an account offers a stable middle ground between popular alternatives, and has a way of not just solving, but dissolving, the problem of legitimacy. (shrink)

To act akratically is to act, knowingly, against what you judge is best for you to do, and it is traditionally assumed that to do this is to be weak-willed. Some have rejected this identification of akrasia and weakness of will, arguing that the latter is instead best understood as a matter of abandoning one's reasonable resolutions. This paper also rejects the identification of akrasia and weakness of will, but argues that this alternative conception is too broad, and that weakness (...) of will is best understood in relation to certain kinds of pain and pleasure. Moreover, the phenomenon of strong-willed akrasia, cases in which a person must exhibit strength of will to do precisely what she judges she should not do, suggests that strength of will is an executive virtue, and that being weak-willed is just one way (among others) in which a person can fail to manifest this virtue. (shrink)

This study deals with the tensions between old and new Yogācāra, as seen in the Huayan sources, which, in turn, reflect discontinuity between Indian Yogācāra and its reception in China. Its particular focus is on the concept of karmic appearance , as developed in the Awakening of Faith and further elaborated on by many Huayanmasters. This concept illustrates the sudden arising of deluded thoughts and provides us with a paradigm for the approach to the problem of delusion, a problem that (...) is deeply rooted in Tathāgatagarbha Thought and addresses the origin of deluded thoughts against the backdrop of the pure mind. This Huayan solution resembles the concept of free will, as developed in mainstream Christian theology after Augustine attempted to solve the problem of evil, and the concept of playfulness found in Indian Vedānta theology to explain the creation of the illusory world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What is the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals? For many, the answer is simple. Such suffering has clear moral significance: nonhuman animal suffering is suffering, suffering is something bad, and the fact that it is bad gives us reason to alleviate or prevent it. The practical problem that remains is how to do this most efficiently or effectively. I argue that this does not exhaust the ethical significance of certain evils, once we consider how the existence (...) of those evils may detract from the meaning of human life, even on fully “naturalistic” conceptions of meaning in life. I will draw a distinction between what I will call “spiritual” problems and “moral” problems and consider why moral philosophers may be well suited to addressing both problems, as long as the domain of the ethical is not taken to be exhausted by the domain of the moral. Finally, I will elaborate on why marking a distinction between these problems—the moral and the spiritual—may help illuminate some disagreements between Utilitarians and their opponents about the ethical significance of the suffering of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in implicit bias. Driving this concern is the thesis, apparently established by tests such as the IAT, that people who hold egalitarian explicit attitudes and beliefs, are often influenced by implicit mental processes that operate independently from, and are largely insensitive to, their explicit attitudes. We argue that implicit bias testing in social and empirical psychology does not, and without a fundamental shift in focus could not, establish this startling thesis. We suggest (...) that implicit bias research has been conducted in light of inadequate theories of racism and sexism. As a result, such testing has not sufficiently controlled for subjects’ prejudiced explicit beliefs and emotions, and has not ruled out the possibility that explicit prejudice best explains test subjects’ discriminatory associations and behavior. (shrink)

Among various opinions in the controversy over the the cognition of non-existent objects (asad-ālambana-vijñāna) among various Buddhist and Indian philosophical schools or in the debate on the objectless presentations (gegenstandslose Vorstellungen) happened in the early development of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, I find that Dharmakīrti and Husserl hold similar views. Both of them have less interest in redefining the ontological status of nonexistent objects than Russell and Meinong. Rather they engage themselves in analyzing the experiential structure of negative cognition and (...) come up with a similar conclusion that negative judgments presuppose affirmative perceptions. This study will enrich our understanding of both thinkers. (shrink)

With the increasing degrees A.I.s and machines are applied across different social contexts, the need for implementing ethics in A.I.s is pressing. In this paper, we argue for a pluralist hybrid model for the implementation of moral A.I.s. We first survey current approaches to moral A.I.s and their inherent limitations. Then we propose the pluralist hybrid approach and show how these limitations of moral A.I.s can be partly alleviated by the pluralist hybrid approach. The core ethical decision-making capacity of an (...) A.I. based on the pluralist hybrid approach consists of two systems. The first is a deterministic algorithm system that incorporates different moral rules for making explicit moral decisions. The second is a machine learning system that calculates the value of the variables required by the application of moral principles. The pluralist hybrid system is better than the existing proposals as (i) it better addresses the moral disagreement problem of the top-down approach by including different moral principles, while (ii) it reduces the opacity of ethical decision-making compared with a bottom-up system by implementing explicit moral principles for moral decision making. (shrink)

Democracy is rule by the demos, but by what criteria is the demos constituted? Theorists of democracy have tended to assume that the demos is properly defined by national boundaries or by the territorial boundaries of the modern state. In a recent turn, many democratic theorists have advanced the principles of affected interests and coercion as the basis for defining the boundaries of democracy. According to these principles, it is not co-nationals or fellow citizens but all affected or all subjected (...) to coercion who constitute the demos. In this paper, I argue that these recent approaches to the boundary problem are insufficiently attentive to the conditions of democracy. Democracy is not merely a set of procedures; it also consists of substantive values and principles. Political equality is a constitutive condition of democracy, and solidarity is an instrumental condition of democracy. The affected interests and coercion principles create serious problems for the realization of these conditions – problems of size and stability. Building on this critique, this paper presents democratic considerations for why the demos should be bounded by the territorial boundaries of the state, grounded in the state’s role in (1) securing the constitutive conditions of democracy, (2) serving as the primary site of solidarity conducive to democratic participation, and (3) establishing clear links between representatives and their constituents. I examine and reject a third alternative, a global demos bounded by a world state, and conclude by considering some practical implications of my argument. (shrink)

While cosmopolitans are right to think that state sovereignty is derived from individuals, many cosmopolitan accounts can be too demanding in their expectations for illiberal regimes because they do not account for the attitudes of the persons with who will subject to the intervention. These ‘objectivist’ accounts suggest that sovereignty is wholly a matter of a state’s conformity to the objective demands of justice. In contrast, for ‘subjectivist’ accounts, the attitudes of citizens do matter. Subjectivist cosmopolitans do not deny the (...) objective demands of liberal justice, but argue that state sovereignty is at least partly a matter of the subjective attitude of citizens toward their state. This paper will highlight the reasons why such coercive impositions are troubling, and diagnose why objectivist theories characteristically fail to recognize them. It seeks to articulate a moderate kind of subjectivist cosmopolitanism that balances a liberal concern for rights with a worry about the imposition of political institutions or practices on a people that does not accept them. (shrink)

For the political naturalist, skepticism about political obligations only arises because of a basic confusion about the necessity of the state for human well-being. From this perspective, human beings are naturally political animals and cannot flourish outside of political relationships. In this paper, I suggest that this idea can be developed in two basic ways. For the thick naturalist, political institutions are constitutive of the best life. For the thin naturalist, they secure the basic background conditions of peace and stability (...) that are necessary for any minimally decent human life. Both approaches, however, are problematic, and while political institutions might have a special kind of value for human well-being, it is difficult to convert this claim into a justification for political obligations. (shrink)

A one-stop resource on the current developments in word order research, this comprehensive survey provides an up-to-date, critical overview of this widely debated topic, exploring and evaluating research carried out in four major ...

The boundaries of democracy are typically defined by the boundaries of formal status citizenship. Such state-centered theories of democracy leave many migrants without a voice in political decision-making in the areas where they live and work, giving rise to a problem of democratic legitimacy. Drawing on two democratic principles of inclusion, the all affected interests and coercion principles, this article elaborates this problem and examines two responses offered by scholars of citizenship for what receiving states might do. The first approach (...) involves expanding the circle of citizenship to include resident noncitizens. A second approach involves disaggregating the rights conventionally associated with citizenship from the legal status of citizenship and extending some of those rights, including voting rights, to resident noncitizens. This article argues that both approaches fall short of satisfying the democratic principles of inclusion, which call for enfranchising individuals not only beyond the boundaries of citizenship but also beyond territorial boundaries. (shrink)

In this article, we apply the notion of interval neutrosophic sets to ideal theory in BCK/BCI-algebras.

This article brings Gillian Brock and Alex Sager's recently published books into conversation with my book, Immigration and Democracy. It begins with a summary of the main normative arguments of my book to set the stage for critical engagement with Brock and Sager's books. While I agree with Brock's Justice for People on the Move that state power must be justified to both insiders and outsiders, I think she gives too little weight to the value of collective self-determination. I distinguish (...) between justice and collective self-determination and argue that each is an important component of legitimacy. Sager's Against Borders focuses on immigration enforcement and contends that violence is inherent in border controls. Every legal system is backed by the threat of the use of force; the question is whether the use of force by state agents is justified. In contrast to Sager, I argue that the proper response to the injustices of current immigration enforcement is reform, not abolition, of the immigration system. (shrink)

Nutrient losses from sloping farmland in karst areas lead to the decline in land productivity and nonpoint source pollution. A specially tailored steel channel with an adjustable slope and underground hole fissures was used to simulate the microenvironment of the "dual structure" of the surface and underground of sloping farmland in a karst area. The artificial rainfall simulation method was used to explore the surface and underground runoff characteristics and nutrient losses from sloping farmland under different rainfall intensities. The effect (...) of rainfall intensity on the nutrient loss of farmland on karst sloping land was clarified. The results showed that the surface was the main route of runoff and nutrient loss during the rainy season on sloping farmland in karst areas. The influence of rainfall intensity on the nutrients in surface runoff was more substantial than that on underground runoff nutrients. Nutrient loss was more likely to occur underground than on the surface. The losses of total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and total potassium in surface and underground runoff initially increased and then gradually stabilized with the extension of rainfall duration and increased with increasing rainfall intensity and the amount of nutrient runoff. The output of nutrients through surface runoff accounted for a high proportion of the total, and underground runoff was responsible for a low proportion. Although the amount of nutrients output by underground runoff was small, it could directly cause groundwater pollution. The research results provide a theoretical reference for controlling land source pollution from sloping farming in karst areas. (shrink)

Issues of academic authorship pose few problems for philosophers or those in the humanities, yet raise a host of issues for medical researchers, engineers and scientists, where multiple authors is the norm and journal articles sometimes list hundreds of authors. At issue here are abstract questions about desert, as well as practical problems regarding the distribution of goods attached to authorship—tenure, prestige, research grants, etc. This paper defends a version of the author/contributor model, where the specific contributions of authors are (...) described in a footnote, against other models of authorial attribution. Such a model offers the best guarantee that authors will get their due, as well as providing the most reliable protection against misconduct and fraud. The paper also arguesthat it is important for this model to be institutionalized across disciplinary boundaries as the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research will inevitably bring discipline-specific authorial norms into conflict. (shrink)

Immigrant legalization policies pose an ethical dilemma between justice and the rule of law. On the one hand, liberal democracies aspire to the principles of individual liberty and equality. Building on liberal ideals of justice, compelling arguments have been made for granting legal status and a path to citizenship to unauthorized migrants by virtue of the social ties they have developed, their contributions to the host society, and their vulnerability to exploitation. On the other hand, legalization poses a challenge to (...) another important value, the rule of law, which requires government to operate within a framework of law in accordance with well-established public norms. Immigrant legalization programmes are said to undermine the rule of law because they reward lawbreaking, allow queue-jumping, and incentivize further unauthorized migration. This article clarifies each horn of the dilemma, focusing on rule of law arguments. We offer a critical reappraisal of immigrant legalization policies by reflecting on the normative meaning of the rule of law and by examining empirical evidence assessing the effects of legalization. Our central contention is that legalization policies can enhance the rule of law. We offer five rule of law arguments in support of legalization, which help to mitigate the dilemma between justice and the rule of law. We conclude by discussing some policy implications of our analysis. (shrink)

Saturated free fatty acids-induced hepatocyte lipoapoptosis plays a pivotal role in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. Theactivation of endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress isinvolved in hepatocyte lipoapoptosis induced by thesaturated free fatty acidpalmitate (PA). However, the underlying mechanismsof the role of ER stress in hepatocyte lipoapoptosis remain largely unclear.In this study, we showed that PA and tunicamycin (Tun), a classic ER stress inducer, resulted in differential activation of ERstress pathways. Our data revealed that PA inducedchronic and persistent ER stress response, but Tuninduced acute and (...) transientER stress response. (shrink)

This research explores the “ History of Vietnamese Vocational Educational and Training (VET) since 1954”. It provides policymakers, educators, and administrators with a review of Vietnam’s VET models through three significant periods, 1954 to 1975, 1976 to 1985, and 1986 to the present. The research was conducted at 13 vocational schools of 13 provinces and cities in Vietnam. Data were collected from documentary and interview data. Participants were former and current MOLISA policymakers and managers, current and former DOLISA officials, former (...) and current principals and head teachers of vocational schools from 13 provinces and cities of Vietnam. They were selected using the snowball method, where initial participants recommend the potential subsequent participants. Findings show that the informal VET model originating from the ancient past in the form of the traditional vocational village undeveloped to establish the formal VET model in Vietnam. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century when the French invaded Vietnam and set up the first vocational school system, that the formal VET model was formed. Since 1954 Vietnamese VET has experienced three different models. From 1955 to 1975 Vietnam was divided into two different political areas: in South Vietnam, the VET system was based on the French VET model. Whereas, the VET system of North Vietnam followed the model of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). After Vietnam was unified in 1975, the VET model of North Vietnam was applied across the country and the VET model of South Vietnam was replaced. Since 1986, the Vietnamese government has implemented a Doi Moi policy (the renewal policy), and the Vietnamese VET system has transferred from the USSR’s VET model to the German dual model. -/- The Vietnam government has been faced challenges in implementing this model. Findings show that these challenges partially came from the history of the Vietnamese VET development. It was not until 1969 when the Vietnamese government established the General Department of Technical Workers Training (GDTWT) to design and manage the VET system, that the public VET system in Vietnam was officially founded. During the period of 1975 to 1986, under the support of the USSR, the Vietnamese VET system was influenced by the USSR’s VET style, which was subsidised and attached to the plans of the state economy. Although the Vietnamese government implemented a Doi Moi policy (the renewal policy) in 1986, which transitioned from a subsidised to market economy, the VET system was not reformed to meet the demands of market economy. It was not until 1991, the Vietnamese government VET policies aimed to modernise its VET system to meet the needs of a market economy. It was further delayed until 2006 when the law of VET was issued, and the public VET system in Vietnam was standardised. Since 2016, to modernise the VET system, the Vietnamese government has cooperated with the Australian government to develop a dual model in Vietnam. This study provides an overall look of Vietnamese VET development through its three historical periods, 1954 to 1975, 1976 to 1985, 1986 to the present. (shrink)

This essay examines Susan Moller Okin’s writing on conflicts between religious freedom and sex equality, and her criticism of ‘political liberal’ approaches to these conflicts, which I take to be a part of her lifelong critique of the public–private distinction. I argue that, while Okin ultimately accepted a version of the distinction, she was much less hopeful than most liberal theorists that private actions could be made just without a great deal of public coercion. This comes through especially in her (...) writing on religion. I suggest an approach to addressing these conflicts that seeks to respect religious liberty more than Okin’s prescriptions suggest she did but which, in my view, is more consistent with Okin’s own liberal commitments. (shrink)

While virtually everyone recognizes the moral permissibility of whistleblowing under certain circumstances, most theorists offer relatively conservative accounts of when it is allowed, and are reluctant to offer a full recommendation of the practice as an important tool towards addressing ethical failures in the workplace. We think that accounts such as these tend to overestimate the importance of professional or personal obligations, and underestimate the moral obligation to shine light on severe professional malfeasance. Of course, a whistleblower, even an anonymous (...) one, often faces serious threats of retaliation and harm to their professional livelihoods and well-being. To address these challenges we argue in favor of a practice that we will call Preemptive Anonymous Whistleblowing (PAW). Such whistleblowing is preemptive in that a whistleblower provides information about malfeasance to a party in a position to do something about it without first raising the worry to one’s immediate superiors. At first blush, such preemption may seem unsettling, and PAW admittedly raises a number of worrisome issues. We defend PAW, however, as part of a larger argument that whistleblowing is morally required more often than is commonly thought. The availability of PAW as an option provides a method for allaying the concern that whistleblowing can be overly burdensome due to the risks of job and career. Insofar as that concern can be allayed, it is feasible for there to be substantial moral requirements to engage in whistleblowing in cases where severe harms can be prevented. With high enough stakes, there is a moral requirement for whistleblowing. (shrink)

Professionalization, career development prospects, and social value are the three basic components of the status and prospects of community education workers, which influence their choice to continue their careers or not. In China, these problems are complex and lacking in systematic research, and the current situation does not meet the needs of community education. This study interviewed 24 community workers regarding their salaries, working conditions, and training and career advancement opportunities to evaluate this situation in Ningbo City. The findings highlight (...) challenges in the evaluation processes and work motivations of community education workers, including teams without professional knowledge, lack of training opportunities, unsupportive policies, and low salaries. These findings can be used by governments and community workers to find collaborative ways to facilitate community education processes, including the provision of adult education for community educators. New legal policies to raise the status of community educators are also suggested. (shrink)

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging technology that enables computing directly at the edge of the cloud computing network. Therefore, it is important that MEC is applied with reliable transmission. The problem of reaching consensus in the distributed system is one of the most important issues in designing a reliable transmission network. However, all previous protocols for the consensus problem are not suitable for an MEC paradigm. It is the first time an optimal protocol of reaching consensus is pro- (...) posed for MEC paradigm. The protocol makes all fault-free nodes communicate with each other and collect the exchanged messages to decide a common value. Based on the common value, the protocol ensures all fault-free nodes reach consensus without the influence of unreliable transmission. Finally, we proved theoretically that the proposed protocol can tolerate the maximum number of faulty components and using only two rounds of message exchanges. (shrink)

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this (...) article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

Recent studies show that racism still exists in the American medical profession, the fact of which legitimizes the historically long-legacy of mistrust towards medical profession and health authorities among African Americans. Thus, it was suspected that the participation of black patients in end-of-life care has always been significantly low stemmed primarily from their mistrust of the medical profession. On the other hand, much research finds that there are other reasons than the mistrust which makes African Americans feel reluctant to the (...) end-of-life care, such as cultural-religious difference and genuine misunderstanding of the services. If so, two crucial questions are raised. One is how pervasive or significant the mistrust is, compared to the other factors, when they opt out of the end-of-life care. The other is if there is a remedy or solution to the seemingly broken relationship. While no studies available answer these questions, we have conducted an experiment to explore them. The research was performed at two Philadelphia hospitals of Mercy Health System, and the result shows that Black patients’ mistrust is not too great to overcome and that education can remove the epistemic obstacles as well as overcome the mistrust. (shrink)

Currently, little is known about the mechanism of how university students’ attitudes toward entrepreneurship education (ATEE) affect entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) in the post-pandemic entrepreneurial environment. Based on the existing research, this study explores the relationship between ATEE, the post-pandemic entrepreneurship environment, and ESE through a questionnaire survey. A total of 910 university students from three universities in Zhejiang Province, China participated, with an effective rate of 92.9%. The data collection focused on the period from August to December 2020. In this (...) study, Stepwise Multiple regression analysis was used to analyze university students' ATEE and its impact on ESE, as well as the moderating effect of the post-pandemic entrepreneurial environment. (shrink)

Background: Postoperative pneumonia is a preventable complication associated with adverse outcomes, that greatly aggravates the medical expenses of patients. The goal of our study is to identify risk factors and outcomes of postoperative pneumonia.

Background: In the context of globalization, Vietnamese universities, whose primary function is teaching, there is a need to improve research performance. Methods: Based on SSHPA data, an exclusive database of Vietnamese social sciences and humanities researchers’ productivity, between 2008 and 2019 period, this study analyzes the research output of Vietnamese universities in the field of social sciences and humanities. Results: Vietnamese universities have been steadily producing a high volume of publications in the 2008-2019 period, with a peak of 598 articles (...) in 2019. Moreover, many private universities and institutions are also joining the publication race, pushing competitiveness in the country. Conclusions: Solutions to improve both quantity and quality of Vietnamese universities’ research practice in the context of the industrial revolution 4.0 could be applying international criteria in Vietnamese higher education, developing scientific and critical thinking for general and STEM education, and promoting science communication. (shrink)

Cover songs are a familiar feature of contemporary popular music. Musicians describe their own performances as covers, and audiences use the category to organize their listening and appreciation. However, until now philosophers have not had much to say about them. This book explores how to think about covers, appreciating covers, and the metaphysics of covers and songs. Along the way, it explores a range of issues raised by covers, from the question of what precisely constitutes a cover, to the history (...) and taxonomy of the category, the various relationships that hold between songs, performances, and tracks, and the appreciation and evaluation of covers. (shrink)

In this paper I trace the manner in which Herder’s philosophy of language grounds his approach to hermeneutical issues regarding history, interpretation, and translation. Herder’s approach to the question of language has been repeatedly lauded for its important influence on the later work done by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer, but in this discussion I am going to put him more directly in conversation with Wilhelm von Humboldt. Although recent critics have derided Humboldt’s theory as both derivative and wrong, I will (...) argue that we should instead recognize that Humboldt’s philosophy of language represents a significant development of Herder’s thesis. This development is accomplished by way of Humboldt’s application of Kant’s mature theory of reason to a program for comparative linguistics. In Humboldt’s hands, this amounts to a new strain of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Markosian presents an argument against certain theories of time based on the aesthetic value of music. He argues that turning a piece of music sideways in time destroys its intrinsic value, which would not be possible if the Spacetime Thesis were true. In this paper I show that sideways music poses no problems for any theory of time by demonstrating that turning a piece of music sideways does not affect its intrinsic value. I do this by appealing to spatial analogies (...) that highlight the similarities between spatial and temporal rotations. (shrink)

A brief overview of _A Philosophy of Cover Songs_, highlighting some of the main themes in the book. The first part addresses the nature of covers and makes some important initial distinctions. The second part addresses the appreciation and evaluation of covers. The third part addresses covers as a clue to the ontology of songs. Written to introduce a session at the American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 13, 2024).