"The Analects (Lunyu) is one of the most influential texts in human history. As a putative record of Confucius’s (551–479 B.C.E.) teachings and a foundational text in scriptural Confucianism, this classic was instrumental in shaping intellectual traditions in China and East Asia until the early twentieth century. But no premodern reader read only the text of the Analects itself. Rather, the Analects was embedded in a web of interpretation that mediated its meaning. Modern interpreters of the Analects only rarely acknowledge this legacy of two thousand years of commentaries. How well do we understand prominent or key commentaries from this tradition? How often do we read such commentaries as we might read the text on which they comment? Many commentaries do more than simply comment on a text. Not only do they shape the reading of the text, but passages of text serve as pretexts for the commentator to develop and expound his own body of thought. This book attempts to redress our neglect of commentaries by analyzing four key works dating from the late second century to the mid-nineteenth century (a period substantially contemporaneous with the rise and decline of scriptural Confucianism): the commentaries of He Yan (ca. 190–249); Huang Kan (488–545); Zhu Xi (1130–1200); and Liu Baonan (1791–1855) and Liu Gongmian (1821–1880)."

Considers the notable similarities between the thought of Confucius and Wittgenstein. In an incisive work of comparative philosophy, James F. Peterman considers the similarities between early Chinese ethicist Confucius and mid-twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their enduring legacies rest in no small part on projects to restore humanity to healthy ways of living and thinking. Confucius offers a method of answering ethical questions designed to get his interlocutors further along on the Dao, the path of right living. Struggling with his own forms of unhealthy philosophical confusion, Wittgenstein provides a method of philosophical therapy designed to help one come into agreement with norms embedded in our forms of life and speech. Highlighting similarities between the two philosophers, Peterman shows how Wittgensteinian critique can benefit from Confucian inquiry and how Confucian practice can benefit from Wittgensteinian investigations. Furthermore, in presenting a way to understand Confucius’s Dao as concrete language games and forms of life, and Wittgenstein’s therapeutic interventions as the most fitting philosophical orientation toward early Confucian ethics, Peterman offers Western thinkers a new, sophisticated understanding of Confucius as a philosopher.

This book is about the formulations, theoretical investigations, and practical applications of new stochastic models for fundamental concepts and operations of the discipline of risk management. It also examines how these models can be useful in the descriptions, measurements, evaluations, and treatments of risks threatening various modern organizations. Moreover, the book makes clear that such stochastic models constitute very strong analytical tools which substantially facilitate strategic thinking and strategic decision making in many significant areas of risk management. In particular the incorporation of fundamental probabilistic concepts such as the sum, minimum, and maximum of a random number of continuous, positive, independent, and identically distributed random variables in the mathematical structure of stochastic models significantly supports the suitability of these models in the developments, investigations, selections, and implementations of proactive and reactive risk management operations. The book makes extensive use of integral and differential equations of characteristic functions, mainly corresponding to important classes of mixtures of probability distributions, as powerful analytical tools for investigating the behavior of new stochastic models suitable for the descriptions and implementations of fundamental risk control and risk financing operations. These risk treatment operations very often arise in a wide variety of scientific disciplines of extreme practical importance.

This book introduces systematic design methods for passive and active RF circuits and techniques, including state-of-the-art digital enhancement techniques. As the very first book dedicated to multiband RF circuits and techniques, this work provides an overview of the evolution of transmitter architecture and discusses current digital predistortion techniques. Readers will find a collection of novel research ideas and new architectures in concurrent multiband power dividers, power amplifiers and related digital enhancement techniques. This book will be of great interest to academic researchers, R&D engineers, wireless transmitter and protocol designers, as well as graduate students who wish to learn the core architectures, principles and methods of multiband RF circuits and techniques.