Social capital can serve as informal governance in weak investor-protection regimes. Using hand-collected data on entrepreneurs’ political connections and firm ownership, we construct several original measures of social capital and examine their effect on the performance of entrepreneurial firms in China after their initial public offerings. Political connections or a high percentage of external investors tend to enhance firm performance, but intragroup related-party transactions commonly lead to performance decline. These forms of social capital have a strong influence on the performance (...) of Chinese firms, whereas formal governance variables such as board size or board independence have little effect. Although social capital may serve as an informal governance mechanism and effectively substitute for formal governance mechanisms in an emerging market, this role of social capital raises several ethical concerns, notably the development of rent-seeking and crony capitalism. (shrink)

Recently implemented Chinese health insurance schemes have failed to achieve a Chinese health care system that is family-oriented, family-based, family-friendly, or even financially sustainable. With this diagnosis in hand, the authors argue that a financially and morally sustainable Chinese health care system should have as its core family health savings accounts supplemented by appropriate health insurance plans. This essay’s arguments are set in the context of Confucian moral commitments that still shape the background culture of contemporary China.

A certain metaphysical thesis about meaning that we'll call Informational Role Semantics (IRS) is accepted practically universally in linguistics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences: the meaning (or content, or `sense') of a linguistic expression1 is constituted, at least in part, by at least some of its inferential relations. This idea is hard to state precisely, both because notions like metaphysical constitution are moot and, more importantly, because different versions of IRS take different views on whether there are constituents of meaning (...) other than inferential role, and on which of the inferences an expression occurs in are meaning constitutive. Some of these issues will presently concern us; but for now it will do just to gesture towards such familiar claims as that: it's part and parcel of dog meaning dog2 that the inference from x is a dog to x is an animal is valid; it's part and parcel of boil meaning boil that the inference from x boiled y to y boiled is valid; it's part and parcel of kill meaning kill that the inference from x killed y to y died is valid; and so on. (See Cruse, Ch. 1 and passim.) IRS brings in its train a constellation of ancillary doctrines. Presumably, for example, if an inference is constitutive of the meaning of a word, then learning the word involves learning that the inference holds. If dog means dog because dog ---> animal is valid, then knowing that dog ---> animal is valid is part and parcel of knowing what the word dog means; and, similarly, learning that x boiled y ---> y boiled is part and parcel of learning what boil means, and so forth. IRS constrains grammatical theories. The semantic lexicon of a language is supposed to make explicit whatever one has to know to understand the lexical expressions of the language, so IRS implies that meaning constitutive inferences are part of the semantic lexical entries for items that have them. Lexical entries are thus typically complex objects (`bundles of inferences') according to standard interpretations of IRS.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Secular AgeJerry WallulisA Secular Age by Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. x + 874. $39.95, cloth.It is almost a philosophical truism that the phenomenologist who is able to see more in the phenomenon will be wise to do so. While Charles Taylor may not explicitly advocate such a truism in The Secular Age, he is adamantly opposed to "subtraction stories" regarding the secularization (...) process in modern Western societies. His alternative narrative involves "seeing" a meaning to secularity that is deeper and truer to the past and present lived experience of both believers and nonbelievers. The length of that narrative (800+ pages) is obviously demanding but also arguably rewarding—even to the philosophical or social theoretical temperament initially inclined to see less in the process.A "subtraction story" of secularization describes the transition to modernity in terms of discarding or outgrowing a framework of beliefs that typically is viewed as an impediment. Such a story is normally situated within the context of one of the two most recognized meanings of "secularity." The first of these meanings involves freeing modern political organizations and other forms of public life from explicit connections to religious beliefs and institutions. The second meaning refers to a decline in religious belief and practice as measured, for example, in falling church attendance. Particularly with respect to the second meaning, a subtraction story is likely to attribute secularity to progress in scientific and normative inquiry that supplants and even replaces earlier religious thinking, action, and politics. [End Page 302]The third and deeper meaning of secularity involves what Taylor terms the "conditions of belief." The whole context of understanding what it is to believe has changed in the past five hundred years "from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others" (3). For Taylor this momentous transition is misunderstood as a subtraction process in contrast to a richer historical tracing of the sources of meaningful belief and unbelief. According to this rival account, religious belief continues and alters, even as a strong alternative to faith emerges ("exclusive humanism") but also, and equally, a plenitude (or "nova") of intermediate views or human possibilities.The dramatic change in the conditions of belief is accompanied by an equally marked historical shift in the situation of the self that is experiencing this transition. After the change a clear distinction is made between the mind and the body and between the self and the world. The strong distinctions between the "mental" and the "physical" and the "subjective" and the "objective" serve to mark firm boundaries in our experience. These boundaries function as "buffers" so that things that go beyond our mental states and subjective feelings do not need to cross over and upset or disorient us.For Taylor the premodern situation of the self was not characterized by firm boundaries but rather by "porous" ones. The difference is that the inside of earlier lived experience was neither just inside nor cordoned off from the outside of experience. Thus a powerful emotion was not limited to mind or self but was porous to the influence of outside powers that boded well or ill. Indeed the force of such outside things could be experienced as so strong and the vulnerability of the self so great as to make urgent the need for propitiation of or defense against a friendly or evil spiritual power.The transition from enchantment to disenchantment is not simply a change in beliefs, but in sensibilities within lived experience that affect what it is to believe. We find enchantment so difficult to comprehend because we are "buffered selves" who are open to kinds of meanings with clearly delineated boundaries. Earlier "porous selves" were open, by contrast, to the possibility of being dominated by a spirit or being taken over by a medium. Disbelief is difficult to imagine for porous selves, since "God figures in this world as the dominant spirit, and moreover, as the only thing that guarantees that in this awe-inspiring and frightening field of forces, good will triumph" (41... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Listening Eye: Postmodernism, Paranoia, and the HypervisibleJerry Aline Flieger (bio)Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. Trans. of La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. Paris: Galilée, 1990.Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Trans. of L’inhumain. Paris: Galilée, 1988.Slavoj Zizek. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques (...) Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.“To the insides of the ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing.” That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.—Emmanuel Swedenborg, cited in Lyotard, The InhumanPostmodernism, Yet AgainIn this essay, I shall take a cue from Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of Lacanian anamorphosis, or skewed perspective (Looking Awry), in order to read three dissimilar works alongside one another, and from a “paranoid” slant. For in spite of sometimes radically incommensurate subject matter, the three works I discuss here—The Transparency of Evil (Jean Baudrillard), Looking Awry (Slavoj Zizek) and The Inhuman (Jean-François Lyotard)—all share a focus on the dehumanizing effects of technology as determinants of what Lyotard has called the postmodern condition. 1 Moreover, all three works themselves adopt something like a paranoid perspective, suggesting that under the sway of an ethic of sheer performativity, human contact—face to face—has been rendered obsolete by interface.In the bleak vision of The Transparency of Evil (1993), for instance, Baudrillard describes an isolated disembodied satellite man, cut loose from his moorings: “The centrifugal force of our proliferating technologies has stripped us of all weight.... Freed of all density, all gravity, we are being dragged into an orbital motion which threatens to become perpetual” [30–31]. Similarly, in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983), Baudrillard describes a robotic subject mesmerized by pornographic hypervisibility, [End Page 90] “more visible than the visible... the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, or what dissolves completely in information and communication” [130–31]. 2Like Baudrillard, Lyotard (The Inhuman) describes the loss of dimensional intersubjectivity, suggesting that space is no longer an enabling interval between subjects, the scene of the exchanged gaze: contemporary cyberspace is the scene of communication without community, saturated with hypervisible information. But while for Baudrillard, we are already in weightless orbit, in a postcatastrophic, fractal aftermath, for Lyotard our fate is not yet cast, although adumbrated disaster—the end of the species or of the universe—provides a telos for our existence.Slavoj Zizek is not nearly so metaphysical, nor so glum, as his fellow post-philosophers, but he is every bit as concerned with the optical, Looking Awry. Zizek is a patient and even cheery exegete of Lacan, attempting to “introduce” Lacanian thought by looking at film, detective fiction, and other user-friendly instances of modern culture as templates of theory. Indeed, compared to his fellow travelers, Zizek is resolutely quotidian, even earthbound, focusing on the contemporary human subject as consumer/spectator, seated not in a satellite capsule or at a computer terminal but at the movies, popcorn in hand.Yet in spite of his goodwill, Zizek’s take on postmodernism is anything but sanguine: he too depicts a subject who is prey to the fascination of overexposed “obscene” virtual reality (X-rated Hitchcock, if you will), and always threatened as well by the eruption of the menacing Lacanian real into the web of symbolic reality—an intrusion that awakens the paranoid “post-man” from an absorption in the image on the screen, with a reminder of the precariousness of all that appears evident or meaningful. Thus in “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity” [Looking Awry, chap. 8], Zizek describes a blot or stain that sticks out or refuses assimilation to the totalizing gaze, eclipsing the heretofore meaningful and legible symbolic universe with an ineffable real that “produces a radical opacity and blocks every essay of interpretation” [151]. I suggest that Zizek’s notion of the obscene object as blot—like the hair on the camera lens that “disturbs” our absorption in the screen—as well as Lyotard’s notion of obdurate matter, may... (shrink)

In the current dialogue of “science and religion,” it is widely assumed that the thoughts of Darwinists and that of atheists overlap. However, Jerry Fodor, a full-fledged atheist, recently announced a war against Darwinism with his atheistic campaign. Prima facie, this “civil war” might offer a chance for theists: If Fodor is right, Darwinistic atheism will lose the cover of Darwinism and become less tenable. This paper provides a more pessimistic evaluation of the situation by explaining the following: Fodor’s (...) criticism of adaptationism, viz., his refutation of any counterfactual-supporting laws on the macro-evolutionary level, implies that a law-maker is dispensable on this level. This will either encourage skepticism against the omniscience of the Creator, or render the notion of God less appealing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good by Marta JimenezJerry GreenMarta Jimenez. Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 224. Hardback, $70.00.Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good is a close examination of an underappreciated topic in Aristotle's theories of moral psychology and moral development: shame. Jimenez argues that shame is a sui generis emotion that plays a crucial (...) role in the habituation of moral virtue in young humans who are not yet virtuous and therefore cannot fully see the moral landscape as accurately as the fully developed virtuous adult. On this view, shame acts as a protovirtue that orients the developing moral agent toward "the noble" (τό καλόν), using social cues to learn not only what actions should be avoided or performed, but also what makes those actions shameful or noble, allowing them to eventually see beyond these external correlates of the noble and develop a grasp of nobility itself. Shame is therefore an indispensable tool for cultivating the emotional, perceptual, and cognitive abilities of a person on the path to virtue.The treatment of shame presented here is meant to bridge what Jimenez calls the "moral upbringing gap." On the one hand, nonvirtuous people are able to engage in the same behavior as virtuous people: they can, in principle, eat moderately, stand firm in battle, use their money judiciously, and so on, in a way that is externally indistinguishable from the virtuous. But there is no guarantee that performing these behaviors will lead the nonvirtuous person to develop the psychological traits necessary to perform virtuous actions as the virtuous person does them, with the correct motivation, emotion, and reasoning (e.g. performing a virtuous action enthusiastically, because it is the right thing to do, in a clear-eyed, informed way). Jimenez argues that shame can bridge this gap between action and affect by using signs like the disapproval of others or the depictions of literary exemplars such as epic heroes, not only to see what actions should be done or avoided, but also to begin to appreciate how and why these actions are in fact noble. So understood, shame is directed at the noble itself, not merely at the things that tend to be superficially associated with the noble (such as the pleasures of social praise or the inconveniences of ill repute).The chapters of this short book naturally fall into three groups. The first section (chapters 1 and 2) focuses on common interpretations of shame's role in Aristotle's ethics and objections to these interpretations. Chapter 1 studies the moral upbringing gap discussed above, with emphasis on moral motivation; chapter 2 focuses on the role of pleasure and pain. Both chapters draw heavily on classic works on the topic, such as Miles Burnyeat's "Aristotle on Learning to Be Good" (in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], 69-92) and Nancy Sherman's The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).The middle section of the book describes the nuances of moral development in Aristotle's moral psychology. Chapter 3 is a case study on the varieties of states that resemble courage; this chapter may initially appear to be a digression, but it highlights the many distinct psychological components of true virtue, giving us a better sense of just how complex the path toward moral development is, and hence what role shame would need to play in this development. Chapter 4 focuses on honor, with special attention paid to the importance of genuine approbation of praiseworthy actions from reputable sources.The final section of the book examines shame itself and the indispensable role it plays in moral development. Chapter 5 argues that shame is a sui generis emotion, not quite a full disposition (hexis), but more than a mere passion (pathos). This chapter also argues that we need not posit any special distinctions to harmonize two key passages on shame from books IV.9 and X.9 of the Nicomachean Ethics that may appear to be in tension. Chapter 6 shows how shame operates in moral development and why it is a... (shrink)

Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited , New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, x+228, $37.95, ISBN 978-0-119-954877-4 Content Type Journal Article Pages 439-443 DOI 10.1007/s11023-009-9164-4 Authors David Cole, University of Minnesota-Duluth Department of Philosophy 369 A B Anderson Hall Duluth MN 55812 USA Journal Minds and Machines Online ISSN 1572-8641 Print ISSN 0924-6495 Journal Volume Volume 19 Journal Issue Volume 19, Number 3.

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 494-496.

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as a (...) Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

InPsychosemantics Jerry Fodor offered a list of sufficient conditions for a symbol “X” to mean something X. The conditions are designed to reduce meaning to purely non-intentional natural relations. They are also designed to solve what Fodor has dubbed the “disjunction problem”. More recently, inA Theory of Content and Other Essays, Fodor has modified his list of sufficient conditions for naturalized meaning in light of objections to his earlier list. We look at his new set of conditions and give (...) his motivation for them-tracing them to problems in the literature. Then we argue that Fodor's conditions still do not work. They are open to objections of two different varieties: they are too strong and too weak. We develop these objections and indicate why Fodor's new, improved list of conditions still do not work to naturalize meaning. (shrink)

The arguments that Fodor (1987: 150-52) gives in support of a Language of Thought are apparently straightforward. (1) Linguistic capacities are "systematic", in the sense that if one understands the words 'John loves Mary' one also understands the form of words 'Mary loves John'. In other words, sentences have a combinatorial semantics, because they have constituent structure. (2) If cognitive capacities are systematic in the same way, they must have constituent structure also. Thus there is a Language of Thought. The (...) essential connection between language and thought that the argument requires is: Since the function of language is to express thought, to understand a sentence is to grasp the thought that its utterance standardly conveys. So from the systematicity of sentences it follows that anyone who can grasp the thought that John loves Mary can grasp the thought that Mary loves John. Thought must be as systematic as language, for the best empirical explanation of the psychological fact that one who grasps the thought that John loves Mary can grasp the thought that Mary loves John is that grasping a thought is standing in some thinking relation to a complex entity whose constituents are MARY, X LOVES Y, and JOHN and semantic relations among MARY, X LOVES Y, and JOHN. So sayeth Fodor (1987). (shrink)

Confúcio (551 aC - 479 aC) - foi um filósofo, professor e estadista bem conhecido, bastante influente durante os períodos de Primavera-Outono dos Estados Combatentes na China. Somados a esses atributos, destaca-se o fato de ele ter sido um pensador que transmitiu à humanidade numerosos conceitos perspicazes, dentre os quais a doutrina da "retificação de nomes" (正名 - zhèng míng). Esta doutrina, que tem caráter profundo, abrangente e metódico, procura resgatar a sociedade de um estado de caos para um estado (...) de ordem através da aplicação dos princípios da governabilidade benigna e através das virtudes. Nos tempos atuais, teríamos grandes ganhos humanos se conseguíssemos enxergar para além das suas falhas e encampar seus valores. Passado o tempo, nota-se que o pensamento de Confúcio sobre a rectificação de nomes ainda ostenta sua importância e serve como uma lição útil no avanço do desenvolvimento nacional das gentes. (shrink)

In 1956, Melvin M. Rader started a tradition of exploring life's "enduring questions" via classic and contemporary philosophical readings. Jerry Gill upholds this tradition in the sixth edition of this respected introductory text that addresses such fundamental concepts of philosophy as rationalism, idealism, and the social contract.

"Plato's Gift to Christianity is a book for all who seek to understand the beauty and depth of the Christian faith: for family discussions of values, virtues, and happiness; for educators who teach about the founding of Western Civilization and its basis of ethics; and especially for the Christian clergy who are not familiar with the Greek Classical and Platonic influence upon the making of Christianity. Dr. Ehrlich has presented here a most comprehensive study on the Platonic teachings adopted by (...) the New Testament and Early Church." --. (shrink)

In _Words, Deeds, Bodies_, Jerry H. Gill seeks to connect the thought of L. Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, M. Merleau-Ponty, and M. Polanyi in relation to the intersection between language and embodiment.

Trata-se do capítulo “Overdetermined Oedipus: Mommy, Daddy, and Me as Desiring-Machine” in: BUCHANAN, Ian. (Org). A Deleuzian Century?. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. (N.T.).

This volume presents work that evolved out of the Third Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications, held at Oiso, Japan, in November of 1991. The chapters presented in this volume continue the mathematical development of situation theory, including the introduction of a graphical notation; and the applications of situation theory discussed are wide-ranging, including topics in natural language semantics and philosophical logic, and exploring the use of information theory in the social sciences. The research presented in this volume reflects (...) a growing international and interdisciplinary activity of importance for many fields concerned with information. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the essence of Ayn Rand's theory of rational egoism and to indicate how it is the only ethical theory that can provide a foundation for ethics in business. Justice, however, cannot be done to the breadth and depth of Rand's theory in so short a space as this article; consequently, I have provided the reader with a large number of references for further study. At minimum, Ayn Rand's theory, because of its originality (...) and challenge to establishment theories, should be included in all business ethics courses and discussions of business ethics. (shrink)

In _Words, Deeds, Bodies_, Jerry H. Gill seeks to connect the thought of L. Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, M. Merleau-Ponty, and M. Polanyi in relation to the intersection between language and embodiment.

Three negative affective dispositions—anger, anxiety, and depression—are hypothesized to increase physical disease risk and have been the subject of epidemiological studies. However, the overlap among the major negative affective dispositions, and the superordinate construct of trait negative affectivity are only beginning to be tested. Presented here is a narrative review of recent prospective studies that simultaneously tested anger, anxiety, depression, and trait NA as risk factors for cardiac outcomes. Anxiety and depression emerged as independent risk factors for premature heart disease (...) in population studies of persons nominally healthy at baseline, and for recurrence/mortality among patients with existing heart disease. General trait NA also was a cardiac risk factor in population samples. (shrink)

A tracing of the dynamics of the relationship between Faith and Philosophy throughout Western intellectual history, following the dynamics of Tertullian’s ancient question: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” In the conclusion the author presents his own approach to this question.

Adam Smith is the best known among economists for his book, The Wealth of Nations, often viewed as the keystone of modern economic thought. For many he has become associated with a quasi-libertarian laissez-faire philosophy. Others, often heterodox economists and social philosophers, on the contrary, focus on Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and explore his moral theory. There has been a long debate about the relationship or lack thereof between these, his two great works. This work treats these dimensions of (...) Smith's work as elements in a seamless moral philosophical vision, demonstrating the integrated nature of these works and Smith's other writings. This book weaves Smith into a constructive critique of modern economic analysis and builds bridges between that discourse and the other social sciences. (shrink)

I agree with the commentators that study of physical disease risk conferred by affective dispositions such as anger/hostility, anxiety, and sadness, should be more cognizant of developments in emotion theory. Emotions differ in their functional value depending on the person’s lifespan trajectory. Discrete emotions have different psychophysiological signatures; and emotional competence, including production, regulation, and knowledge, may be critical in determining whether specific negative affects, or general negative affectivity, are toxic for physical health. Emotion researchers, however, have mainly focused on (...) acute affective experiences and ignored the general effects of negative affectivity, which subsumes the discrete negative affects. Most diseases develop over years so more needs to be known about the biological signatures of chronic specific affects and negative affectivity. (shrink)

We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the (...) content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sentences and you proceed to the content of words.” Brandom’s official view seems to be that he’s talking about explanatory priorities (see the preceding quote); but we think that can’t really be what he has in mind, and we can’t find any alternative interpretation that seems plausible. Speaking just for ourselves, we’re inclined towards a relatively pragmatic view of explanation; what explanation we should “start with” depends, inter alia, on what it’s an explanation of and whom it’s an explanation for. But, in any case, we would have thought that explanatory priority is of more than heuristic interest only if it reflects a priority of some other kind: ontological, semantical, psychological, or whatever. In talking about what one “starts with”, Brandom must be claiming more than. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher Jerry Fodor, a leading figure in the study of the mind for more than twenty years, presents a strikingly original theory on the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of cognitive science is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, deals out witty and pugnacious demolitions of rival theories, (...) and suggests that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations. This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford Cognitive Science Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitive science will never be the same again. (shrink)

This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not (...) only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

The class of geometric surgical theories is examined. The main theorem is that every stable theory that is interpretable in a geometric surgical theory is superstable of finite U-rank.