Mou Zong-san’s “intellectual intuition” contains two internal contradictions: first, a contradiction between intellect and sensibility regarding moral feeling; second, a contradiction between being and creation of the thing-in-itself. These contradictions are caused by his acceptance of Kant’s theoretical assumption of a dichotomy between sensibility and intellect as well as by the characteristics of non-sensibility and creativity in Kant’s theory of intuition. In turn, this has led to unresolvable difficulties in Mou’s “intellectual intuition” reading of Chinese philosophy. While Husserl’s theory on the intentionality of perception resolved Kant’sdichotomy between sensibility and intellect, his distinction between sensation and perception also provides a phenomenologically based theoretical foundation for solving the internal contradictions of Mou’s “intellectual intuition”: while sensation is equivalent to intellectual intuition as a way for intuiting the thing-in-itself, it involves sensibility and non-creativity, and therefore avoids Mou’s two theoretical contradictions.

This essay investigates the problem about the modularity of central cognitive architecture, focusing on how to grasp the debate between Fodorian minimal modularism and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis (MMH) proposed by evolutionary psychologists. Both conceive of the idea of "modularity" in different ways. While minimal modularism takes "informational encapsulation" to be essential to modules, the MMH does not. Furthermore, their idea of "domain specificity" does not even agree. This essay does not take the debate to be mere verbal issue. Instead, this essay argues that from the minimal modularist point of view, due to the holistic and isotropic features essential to central mechanisms, such mechanisms are informationally unencapsulated and hence are not modular in the Fodorian sense. This is something not denied by evolutionary psychology. This essay then raises six objections to the MMH and concludes accordingly that even on the MMH conception of modularity, the central cognitive system need not be massively modular.

Professor Mou Zongsan once proclaimed: “Kant has no great successors in the West.” Recently, Professor Karl Ameriks also uttered: “A supposed childless professor, Kant the metaphysician left behind a fertile family of illegitimate heirs.” By contrasting Mou’s and Ameriks’ perspectives employed to express a somehow shared sentiment, this paper intends to extract the philosophical imports from this seemingly mere sentiment taking place in the history of philosophy.Mou believes that Kant is often too polite to attribute “intellectual intuition” exclusively to God. Instead, Mou, by taking the stand of Chinese practical philosophy, attributes “intellectual intuition” to humans, thus dissolves the gap between “phenomena and thing-in-itself” and further establishes an “absolute realism” based on values. Ameriks, on the other hand, thinks that Kant’s philosophy is apologetic and modest in comparison to its direct successors in German Idealism. The transformation of Kant into the German Idealism through advocating “the primacy of practical reason” by K. L. Reinhold, however, also misunderstands Kant's very basic discourse of critical philosophy. On the other hand, in the absence of English translation of Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, theAnglo-American Kantians, get Kant’s philosophy expressed in a completely different direction. By following the thread of exact science, they convert the Kantian philosophy to logical positivism, scientific realism and pragmatism, and thus miss the critical flavor of Kant's original insights. Only the early Romantics, in Ameriks’ view, have inherited Kant's critical philosophical thinking.

The category of “li” as it appears in the Yueji (Record of Music) chapter of the Liji (Book of Rites) is of considerable significance. On the one hand, the Liji Yueji contains the first instance of the word ‘lunli’ in the history of the category of “li.” On the other hand, following Zhuangzi, it contains an early use of the concept of “tianli” (principle of nature) and broadens this to “tianli renyu” (principle of nature and human desires). From all meanings of the character ‘li’ in the pre-Qin period, the Yueji inherited its aspects of “internal property and operational pattern of all things and events,” “consciousness of destiny and life,” and “ethics” (lunli). From a school perspective, the Yueji blends the thought of the Confucian, Daoist and Mohist schools, yet with Confucianism as its main framework. It moreoverbuilds a three-level tacit structure with li as body (ti), etiquette and music as performance (xiang), and the practice of social traditions and customs as function (yong). Moreover, the Yueji also generates close connections between “li” and other philosophical categories, thereby revealing the intellectual context of the category of “li” in the pre-Qin period.