Lu Zhao

This chapter will pin down the most outlandish image of Confucius in Chinese history, which comes from a corpus particular to the intellectual and political context of the first two centuries CE China, the apocrypha (chenwei 讖緯). The corpus developed the image of Confucius from earlier ones, such as a thinker, a sage, and an unsuccessful politician. Moreover, apocrypha reflect the intellectual and political changes of the time, especially a growing enthusiasm for an ideal society based on the Five Classics and the restoration of the Han dynasty. The image of Confucius fluctuates in accordance with these changes and becomes that of a prophet and messenger of Heaven who not only encoded his political teaching in his work, the Annals of Spring and Autumn, but also foretold the ascendance of the ruling Liu family. His seemingly outlandish image was rooted in knowledge shared amongst scholars of that time.

Kant is regarded as the spokesman of the contemporary declaration of human rights and the forerunner of global citizenship theory. However, this noble image has been questioned by critics for his comment of empirical racial hierarchy stated in the pre-critical period: Kant’s moral law applies only to the white race with the “full personality”. Around the question of whether Kant’s pure moral philosophy was impregnated by his racist view, the defenders of Kant either adopt the negative defense strategy of affirming the transcendental moral philosophy and negating the racial thought, or try to justify the consistency of Kant’s theory from the perspective of his later philosophy of right. The deficiency of these two justifications is that they do not directly deal with the relationship between moral philosophy and race theory. When Kant developed a mature moral theory in the mid-1780s, he also constructed a systemically mature race theory under the guidance of teleology principles to defend the unity of mankind in a different world. This theory can be used as the explanatory basis to prove the universality of Kant’s moral philosophy, which reflects the deep correlation between moral philosophy and race theory. From this perspective, it can not only make up for the lack of defenders and respond to the critics’ doubts, but also portray a consistent egalitarian image of Kant.

Male sexual arousal (SA) has been known as a multidimensional experience involving closely interrelated and coordinated neurobehavioral components that rely on widespread brain regions. Recent functional neuroimaging studies have shown relation between abnormal/altered dynamics in these circuits and male sexual dysfunction. However, alterations in the topological1 organization of structural brain networks in male sexual dysfunction are still unclear. Here, we used graph theory2 to investigate the topological properties of large-scale structural brain networks, which were constructed using inter-regional correlations of cortical thickness between 78 cortical regions (subcortical regions were not included due to the used cortical surface model) in 40 patients with psychogenic erectile dysfunction (pED) and 39 normal controls. Compared with normal controls, pED patients exhibited a less optimal global topological organization with reduced global and increased local efficiencies. Our results suggest disrupted neural integration among distant brain regions in pED patients, consistent with previous reports of impaired white matter structure and abnormal functional integrity in pED. Additionally, disrupted global network topology in pED was observed to be primarily relevant to altered subnetwork and nodal properties within the networks mediating the cognitive, motivational and inhibitory processes of male SA, possibly indicating disrupted integration of these networks in the whole brain networks and might account for pED patients’ abnormal cognitive, motivational and inhibitory processes for male SA. In total, our findings provide evidence for disrupted integrity in large-scale brain networks underlying the neurobehavioral processes of male SA in pED and provide new insights into the understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms of pED.