Gender in Chinese Philosophy The concept of gender is foundational to the general approach of Chinese thinkers. Yin and yang, core elements of Chinese cosmogony, involve correlative aspects of “dark and light,” “female and male,” and “soft and hard.” These notions, with their deeply-rooted gender connotations, recognize the necessity of interplay between these different forces in generating and carrying forward the world. The major thinkers

Emergence If we were pressed to give a definition of emergence, we could say that a property is emergent if it is a novel property of a system or an entity that arises when that system or entity has reached a certain level of complexity and that, even though it exists only insofar as the system or entity exists, it is distinct from the properties

John Rawls (1921—2002) John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do. Son premier livre, A Theory of Justice [TJ] (1971), revitalized the social-contract tradition, using it to articulate and defend

Compositionality in Language Compositionality is a concept in the philosophy of language. A symbolic system is compositional if the meaning of every complex expression E in that system depends on, and depends only on, (J’ai) E’s syntactic structure and (Ii) the meanings of E’s simple parts. If a language is compositional, then the meaning of a sentence S in that language cannot depend directly on

Institution Theory Institution theory is a very general mathematical study of formal logical systems—with emphasis on semantics—that is not committed to any particular concrete logical system. This is based upon a mathematical definition for the informal notion of logical system, called institution, which includes both syntax and semantics as well as the relationship between them. Because of its very high level of abstraction, this definition accommodates not only

Legal Pragmatism Legal pragmatism is a theory critical of more traditional pictures of law and, plus précisement, judicial decision-making. The classical view of law offers a case-based theory of law that emphasizes the universal and foundational quality of specifically legal facts, the meticulous analysis of precedent and argument from analogy. Legal pragmatism, d'autre part, emphasizes the need to include a more diverse set