On the Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture and its implications in the Chinese and Japanese context (post-1842)

This thesis aims to establish a Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture to address the theoretical problems of modern East Asian philosophy of culture, particularly Chinese New Confucianism and the Kyoto School (represented by Mou Zong-San and Watsuji Tetsuro respectively) who try to formulate their cultural subjectivities for the sake of cultural modernisation. Both schools adopt Hegelian philosophy of culture and therefore inherit the problems of Hegelian dialectics which Kierkegaard criticises. While Kierkegaard himself does not develop a philosophy of culture, this thesis argues that his concepts of culture in terms of the manifestations of passions, community and contemporaneity are useful resources for the formulation of East Asian cultural selves. Firstly, in chapter 1, I argue that there are two tasks of modern East Asian philosophers of culture: how to understand a culture (epistemic task) and how to establish a cultural self (ontological task). Secondly, in chapter 2, I argue that there are three theoretical problems in Mou’s and Watsuji’s Hegelian philosophies of culture, namely, the impossibility of change in cultural value, the lack of empirical method and the neglect of openness of interpretation. Thirdly, in chapter 3, I argue that Kierkegaard’s definition of culture in terms of the manifestations of passions explain East Asian cultural development more consistently than Hegelian dialectics. Fourthly, in chapter 4, I establish a Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture and argue that a cultural self is formulated by the concepts of community and contemporaneity where individuals express their passions according to their free wills. Finally, I argue that Kierkegaardian philosophy of culture fulfils both the ontological and epistemic tasks of East Asian philosophers and solves the theoretical problems they encounter when they adopt Hegelian dialectics

Magnetic ordering phase transitions of Gd2Sn2O7

Pyrochlores with magnetic rare earth ions are a topic of interest due to unusual results brought about by their high degree of geometrical frustration. The lattice structure prevents the magnetic spin interactions from finding a single minimum energy state, which leads to a nonzero residual entropy[1]. By analyzing the heat capacity at low temperatures, the type of magnetic interaction can be determined and the temperatures at which long-range magnetic ordering and magnetic field induced splitting of energy states occur

Bank Debt Guarantee Programs

One of the hallmarks of the global financial crisis of 2007-09 was the rapid evaporation of the non-deposit, wholesale funding many financial institutions had become increasingly reliant upon in the years leading up to the crisis. In the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, governments became increasingly concerned about even fundamentally sound institutions’ ability to access necessary funding. In response, beginning in October 2008, authorities across the globe began introducing guarantee programs enabling institutions to issue debt that would be backed by a guarantee from the government in exchange for a guarantee fee. While the specific details of these programs varied (sometimes widely in ways that allow for interesting comparisons), some version of this basic idea was implemented by over twenty countries. The programs saw significant use in the aggregate but were not uniformly utilized. They are generally seen as having achieved their objectives but may also in certain circumstances have had unintended consequences such as market distortions based on flawed fee structures and the crowding out of non-guaranteed debt

Use of voltammetry for in vitro equilibrium and transport studies of ionisable drugs

In this review, we will briefly outline the voltammetric investigations of the transfer of ionisable drugs at the interface between two immiscible electrolyte solutions. The voltammetric techniques enable the determination of some key in vitro properties of ionisable drugs, including partition coefficient, diffusion coefficient and membrane permeability. Some successful applications will be highlighted, together with the background methodologies

A Scenario-Based Functional Testing Approach to Improving DNN Performance

This paper proposes a scenario-based functional testing approach for enhancing the performance of machine learning (ML) applications. The proposed method is an iterative process that starts with testing the ML model on various scenarios to identify areas of weakness. It follows by a further testing on the suspected weak scenarios and statistically evaluate the model's performance on the scenarios to confirm the diagnosis. Once the diagnosis of weak scenarios is confirmed by test results, the treatment of the model is performed by retraining the model using a transfer learning technique with the original model as the base and applying a set of training data specifically targeting the treated scenarios plus a subset of training data selected at random from the original train dataset to prevent the so-call catastrophic forgetting effect. Finally, after the treatment, the model is assessed and evaluated again by testing on the treated scenarios as well as other scenarios to check if the treatment is effective and no side effect caused. The paper reports a case study with a real ML deep neural network (DNN) model, which is the perception system of an autonomous racing car. It is demonstrated that the method is effective in the sense that DNN model's performance can be improved. It provides an efficient method of enhancing ML model's performance with much less human and compute resource than retrain from scratch.Comment: The paper is accepted to appear in the proceedings of IEEE 17th International Conference on Service-oriented Systems Engineering (IEEE SOSE 2023) as an invited paper of 2023 IEEE CISOSE Congres

Self-affirmation and self-negation - an analysis on the ontological disagreements between Christianity and Confucianism in Mou Zongsan’s criticism of Kierkegaard = 從牟 宗三對齊克果「否定自我」之批評分析基督教與儒家之存在論分歧

Mou Zongsan rarely discusses Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Nevertheless, in On the Characteristics of Chinese Philosophy, Mou uses Kierkegaard as an example to illustrate the fundamental ontological differences between Christianity and Confucianism. Mou claims that Confucians affirm moral subjectivity, while Christians urge one to deny one’s sinful self and to be integrated into God’s subjectivity. Therefore, Mou believes that Confucianism is characterized by self-affirmation, while Christianity is characterized by self-negation. As a response to this, this article argues that, even if one agrees that Kierkegaard’s philosophy may represent this perspective of Christian ontology, “self-negation” can hardly outline the whole picture of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. By criticizing Mou’s oversimplified dichotomy of self-affirmation and self- negation, this article examines both Mou’s Confucian and Kierkegaard’s Christian perspectives on the ontological question of individual subjectivity, which can provide new insight to Confucian-Christian dialogue