-
59无为的认知科学研究 [The Cognitive Science of Wu Wei]Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Culture 2011 (9). 2011.认 知科学对 人类大脑和行为的研究,能有助我们更细致精妙地了解 早期中国思想中 “无为”这个常见的人类行为。早期中国典籍中对“无为”的含蓄描述,亦同时可以令我们更 明白当代认知心理学在理论上、预设上的限制,以及可行的出路。本文将沿着上述的两个方向发挥。文章的第一部分,根据 《庄子》里与“无 为 ”行为有关的主要篇章,为“无为”的内容分类。“无为”可分为 “完整性 ”(wholeness) 和“流畅性”(fluency) 两大范 畴,当中“完整性”可细分作“集中”(collection) 和 “排除”(shedding), “流畅性”则可细分作 “回应性”(responsiveness) 和 “轻易”(ease)。 本文的 主要预设是,《庄子》里描述的“无为 ”(甚至是其他典籍里的相关描述)是一种不受文化制约的人类行为。订立一套准确的分类方法,有助我们借此审视当代心 理学和认知科学的 文献中, 曾述及的类似行为。本文继而在已订立的分类方法上,与齐 克森米哈里(Csikszentmihalyi) 的“自 成目的体验 ”(autotelic experience) 观念相互比较,而“自 成目…Read more
-
54Qing (情) and Emotion in Early Chinese ThoughtIn Keli Fang (ed.), Chinese Philosophy and the Trends of the 21st Century Civilization, Commercial Press. 2003.In a 1967 article, A. C. Graham made the claim that 情 qing should never be translated as "emotions" in rendering early Chinese texts into English. Over time, sophisticated translators and interpreters have taken this advice to heart, and qing has come to be interpreted as "the facts" or "what is genuine in one." In these English terms all sense of interrelationality is gone, leaving us with a wooden, objective stasis. But we also know, again partly through the work of Graham, that interrelati…Read more
-
125Because psychological studies of attention and cognition are most commonly performed within the strict confines of the laboratory or take cognitively impaired patients as subjects, it is difficult to be sure that resultant models of attention adequately account for the phenomenon of effortless attention. The problem is not only that effortless attention is resistant to laboratory study. A further issue is that because the laboratory is the most common way to approach attention, models resulting …Read more
-
213The rehabilitation of spontaneity: A new approach in philosophy of actionPhilosophy East and West 60 (2). 2010.Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of…Read more
-
76Emotion, Desire, and Numismatic Experience in Descartes, Zhu Xi, and Wang YangmingMing Qing Yanjiu 2001 45-75. 2001.In this article, I explore the relationship between desire and emotion in Descartes, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming with the aim of demonstrating 1) that Zhu Xi, by keying on the detriments of selfishness, represents an improvement over the more sweeping Cartesian suggestion to control desires in general; and 2) that Wang Yangming, in turn, represents an improvement over Zhu Xi by providing a more sophisticated hermeneutic of the cosmology of desire.
-
107What Is Self-Consciousness?In Brian Bruya (ed.), Labirinti della mente: Visioni del mondo, Società Bibliografica Toscana. pp. 223-233. 2012.In this article, I delineate seven aspects of the process of self-consciousness in order to demonstrate that when any of the aspects is compromised, self-consciousness goes away while consciousness persists. I then suggest that the psychological phenomenon of flow is characterized by a loss of self-consciousness. The seven aspects are: 1) implicit awareness that the person and the self are identical; 2) awareness of an event or circumstance in the world internal or external to the person; 3) a…Read more
-
57Review of Kern's Text and Ritual in Early China (review)China Review International 14 (2): 338-354. 2007.In this full length review, I create a running parallel between Martin Kern's Text and Ritual in Early China and Mark Edward Lewis' Writing and Authority in Early China. Both books cover the nexus of texts and their sociopolitical milieu, with Kern's book acting as a sort of update to Lewis'. I group the articles in Kern's book under the following headings: Texts and Authority (Nylan, Falkenhausen, Brashier), Textual Emergence (Boltz, Kern), and Ritual in Literary Genres (Schaberg, Csikszentm…Read more
-
60Chaos as the Inchoate: The Early Chinese Aesthetic of SpontaneityIn Grazia Marchianò (ed.), Aesthetics & Chaos: Investigating a Creative Complicity, . 2002.Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities--all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of chaotic …Read more