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.

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.

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.

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.

Lewis’s arguments for the triviality results are considered as a powerful rejection of the truth-conditional accounts of conditionals: the absurd consequencethat for any propositions A and C, p(C/A) = p(C) is derived from the classical probability calculus, conditionalization, and Stalnaker’s semantics for conditionals.In this paper, it is argued that the triviality results need not be a threat to Stalnaker’s semantics, for we can derive a generalized triviality result from the classicalprobability theory and any thesis about conditional probability. The lesson, I suggest, is that we should reconsider the classical probability theory or set a restriction on the rule of conditionalization such that the triviality results may be avoided.

The criticism of Plato most often leveled by Aristotle against Plato is that his philosophy is oversimplified. On his view, Plato shares the Socratic assumption about words and definitions. When asked “What is F?” (justice, courage, etc.), Socrates thinks that a single definition can always be found. However, Aristotle claims that some of the crucial words and concepts in his philosophy, such as “being,” “goodness,” “justice,” and “friendship,” are homonymous or multivocal (said in many ways). In his eyes, therefore, Plato oversimplifies the issue: Plato mistakenly ignores homonymy and simply supposes that the same word is always said in the same way. Put briefly, the Platonic accounts of “being, ” “goodness, ” and “justice” should be rejected because homonymy and multivocity are ignored.However, Ch. Shields holds that two of the crucial concepts of the Aristotelian philosophy – “being” and “goodness” – cannot be shown to be homonymous; although Aristotle often issues special warnings against the homonymy of “being” and “goodness, ” all of his arguments fail. Shields claims that there is no defensible Aristotelian doctrine about the homonymy of “being” because this doctrine is false; he also thinks that the homonymy of “goodness” cannot be established because it is inferred from the problematical doctrine of the homonymy of “being”. In this article, I shall show that Shields’ critiques of Aristotle’s arguments for the homonymy of “being” and “goodness” do not succeed. In this way, I shall reconstruct the basic framework of Aristotle’s attempt to establish the homonymy of “being” and “goodness”.

In Wang Yangming’s theoretical premises, the concept of “Li” tends to relate to “the moral domain,” though its affinity with “the amoral domain” is also suggested. He furthermore expounds this concept of “Li” by the notion of “Xin.” In this paper I investigate Wang’s twin-track approach upon “Li,” and propose that his tenet of “Xin Ji Li” suits a moral conception of “Li.” I also point out the predicaments Wang encounters when carring out a forced application of the notion of “Xin” in expounding an amoral conception of “Li.” In addition to my attempts to categorize and elucidate Wang’s concept of “Li,” the proper application range of “Xin Ji Li” will also be explored.

This essay is to reject the so-called “bleak implication”—human beings are irrational in nature, which was said to follow from experiments on human reasoning in the eighties. The rejection is advocated by way of re-constructing for the cognitive scientists their argument for the bleak implication. Meanwhile, Stich constructs what he calls the “Selection argument” for human rationality, and then rejects it. This essay examines his arguments and argues that his objections are defective. This essay then revises the selection argument to show how human rationality is connected to the design and performance of human reasoning mechanism with the hope that we may re-open the possibility of defending human rationality from an evolutionary point of view.

Aristotle’s De anima is the first book which deals with all sorts of organism: the living facts of all the plants, animals and human beings, and their proper activities or functions respectively. Soul is defined as the vital principle which enables the natural bodies from having life in potency to be a living body in act.The problem regarding the immortality of the soul is altogether unclear in Aristotle’s writings. However, what is definite is that the concept of immortality of the soul is one of the central ideas in his early lost writings. At his early age, Aristotle was influenced by Plato and accepted the idea of the immortality of the soul. In his mature writings, Aristotle develops his own philosophy. When he speaks about psychology, he speaks in terms of the hylomorphism in the Physics. According to which, all the material substances are composed of form and matter, so is a man composed of soul and body. For Aristotle, as a man is a whole man, the soul cannot subsist separately in itself. In such a case, the possibility of the survival of the soul, after the death of body, becomes the repeated question on which philosophers have been trying to investigate.Aristotle never makes any demonstration of the immortality of the soul, as Plato does before him. Nevertheless, he affirms that the intellect is the very soul of human beings, being metaphysically simple and immaterial, and its activity is immaterial in nature. Intellect is not the form of body; it is a separable substance in its own right. In fact, hylomorphism cannot be referred to the relationship between intellect and body. Intellect is different from the vegetative and animal souls which are bound to be united with bodily organs, whereas intellect can be a separable substance in its own right. It is a different genos of soul. Since intellect is immaterial, its activities are independent from body. It is therefore eternal and immortal. The Aristotelian idea of the intellect is platonic in essence. Aristotle has never given up his early idea of the immortality of the soul throughout his whole life.