This book provides a systematic exposition of mathematical economics, presenting and surveying existing theories and showing ways in which they can be extended. One of its strongest features is that it emphasises the unifying structure of economic theory in such a way as to provide the reader with the technical tools and methodological approaches necessary for undertaking original research. The author offers explanations and discussion at an accessible and intuitive level providing illustrative examples. He begins the work at an elementary (...) level and progessively takes the reader to the frontier of current research. This second edition brings the reader fully up to date with recent research in the field. (shrink)

L’article explore le tai chi, art martial d’origine chinoise aujourd’hui majoritairement suivi pour ses bienfaits sur la santé et ses implications spirituelles. Notre intérêt porte sur le fait que l’entraînement à des « formes », une série de mouvements exécutés en solitaire, souvent lentement, s’observe non seulement dans la plupart des écoles focalisées sur la santé, mais aussi dans une minorité portée sur l’aspect martial. Pour analyser le rôle des formes dans l’apprentissage des techniques de combat, l’article s’appuie sur l’émersiologie, (...) l’étude de l’activation involontaire du corps, permettant la focalisation sur les éléments propices à la transformation du schéma corporel. Cette analyse vise à concilier la dichotomie entre le tai chi comme art martial, de combat, et sa pratique à des fins de santé, apportant une meilleure compréhension de l’évolution historique du tai chi. (shrink)

The author points out that there is an essential difference as well as correspondence between the idea of the absolute in Fichte’s philosophy and that of the emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism. Both ideas treat the origin of the subject which goes beyond the relation of subject and object. In this point they are in agreement. But if we pay attention to the point that the absolute in Fichte’s philosophy is completely closed and therefore includes no negation in itself, it becomes (...) clear that it is, however, different from the Buddhist emptiness which consists in selfaffirmation through selfnegation. According to the author, the consciousness which works as a creator of the world in Fichte’s system remains out of the absolute. In this sense, Fichte’s idea of the absolute is insufficient as a principle of philosophy.Der Verfasser weist darauf hin, dass es zwischen dem Begriff des Absoluten bei Fichte und dem der Leere im Mahayanabuddhismus neben einer Übereinstimmung auch einen wesentlichen Unterschied gibt. Beide Begriffe stimmen darin überein, dass es ihnen um den Ursprung des Subjekts geht, der über die Relation von Subjekt und Objekt hinausgeht. Wenn man aber die Aufmerksamkeit darauf richtet, dass das Absolute bei Fichte als ein in sich Geschlossenes keine Negation in sich enthält, wird deutlich, dass es sich von der buddhistischen Leere unterscheidet, die in Selbstaffirmation durch Selbstnegation besteht. Bei Fichte hingegen bleibt das Bewusstsein als Weltschöpfer noch außer dem Absoluten. In diesem Sinne ist das Fichtesche Absolute als Prinzip der Philosophie unzureichend. (shrink)

Compared to institutional and area-based ethics committees, little is known about the structure and activities performed by ethics committees at national medical organizations and societies. This five year follow-up study aimed to determine (1) the creation and function of ethics committees at medical organizations in Japan, and (2) their general strategies to deal with ethical problems. The study sample included the member societies of the Japanese Association of Medical Sciences (n=92 in 1998, n=96 in 2003). Instruments consisted of two sections: (...) (1) the structure, function and activities of ethics committees, and (2) the strategies for dealing with ethical problems. Response rates were 84.4% in 1998 and 64.4% in 2003. Findings showed a significant increase of ethics committees at medical organizations between 1998 (25.6%) and 2003 (50.0%). Members were mostly male, medical doctors in clinical or basic medicine, and members of the organization. The major functions of ethics committees were ethical reviews of research protocols, policy making and ethical reviews of manuscripts submitted for journal publication. Among organizations that did not have an ethics committee, a significant decrease was found in organizations that replied that they had never experienced an ethical problem which needed further investigation (p<0.01). Findings suggested an overall rise in awareness of the importance of ethical issues and also highlighted an increase in recognition of responsibility regarding ethical problems. (shrink)

BackgroundSolitary death (kodokushi) has recently become recognized as a social issue in Japan. The social isolation of older people leads to death without dignity. With the outbreak of COVID-19, efforts to eliminate solitary death need to be adjusted in line with changes in lifestyle and accompanying changes in social structure. Health monitoring services that utilize wearable devices may contribute to this end. Our goals are to outline how wearable devices might be used to (1) detect emergency situations involving solitary older (...) people and swiftly connect them with medical treatment, to (2) reduce the frequency of deaths that remain undiscovered and (3) to reduce social isolation by promoting social interaction. MethodsTheoretical and philosophical approaches were adopted to examine ethical issues surrounding the application of wearable devices and cloud-based information processing systems to prevent solitary death in the world with/after COVID-19.Main body(1) Technology cannot replace social connections; without social support necessary to foster understanding of the benefits of health management through wearable devices among older adults, such devices may remain unused, or not used properly. (2) Maturity of the technology; systems face the difficult task of detecting and responding to a wide range of health conditions and life-threatening events in time to avert avoidable morbidity and mortality. (3) Autonomy and personhood; promoting the voluntary use of wearable devices that are a part of larger efforts to connect isolated individuals to a community or social services might be effective. Legal force should be avoided if possible. There is some concern that landlords may require an older person to sign a contract agreeing to wear a device. The autonomy of solitary older people should be respected. (4) Governance: policies must be developed to limit access to data from wearables and the purposes for which data can be used.ConclusionIf thoughtfully deployed under proper policy constraints, wearable devices offer a way to connect solitary older people to health services and could reduce cases of solitary death while respecting the personhood of the user. (shrink)

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

Myhill-Shepherdson property in recursive function theory states that extensional effective program transformations determine continuous operations on partial functions. Case showed that this property fails to characterize acceptability of numberings of partial recursive functions. In this note we present a higher type analogue to Myhill-Shepherdson property. Our purpose is to show that higher type Myhill-Shepherdson property characterizes weak acceptability under a natural condition.

Le réseau Labornet a été créé en Californie en 1991 par des syndicalistes, pour donner un nouveau souffle au mouvement ouvrier. Il est aujourd'hui présent dans une dizaine de pays industrialisés, en Amérique du Nord, en Europe et en Asie. La branche japonaise, Labornet Japan, est née en 2001 avec l'aide des militants coréens. À travers une série d'événements annuels comme la Labor Fiesta ou la campagne Union, Yes !, la diffusion de vidéos sur Union-Tube, le réseau Labornet Japan a (...) su développer une nouvelle culture militante qui dépasse les vieux clivages politiques et syndicaux. En dépit de la multiplication des contrats précaires, il attire de nombreux jeunes vers l'action collective.LaborNet network was established in California in 1991 by trade unionists, to reinvigorate the labor movement. It is currently present in ten countries in North America, Europe and Asia. The Japanese branch, LaborNet Japan, was founded in 2001 with the help of Korean activists. Through a series of annual events like the Fiesta or the Labor Union campaign, Yes!, Dissemination of EU-Tube videos on the network LaborNet Japan has developed a new activist culture that goes beyond the old political divisions and labor. Despite the proliferation of precarious contracts, it attracts many young people to collective action. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a new method to deal with continuously varying quantity in the situation calculus based on the concept of the nonstandard analysis. The essential point of the method is to devise a new model called nonstandard situation calculus, which is an interpretation of the situation calculus in the set of hyperreals. This nonstandard model allows discrete but uncountable (hyperfinite) state transition, so that we can describe and reason about the continuous dynamics which are usually treated with (...) differential equations. In this enlarged perspective of the nonstandard situation calculus, we discuss about an infinitesimal action, infinite plan and an abnormality theory for the temporal prediction based on the differentiability. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende fazer uma breve apresentação do platonismo não-realista de Abelardo através da solução dada na Logica Ingredientibus à célebre “querela dos universais”.

一遍仏教やその周縁と対話し、無・型・身体性などを契機として日本独自の教育の構築を試みたユニークな教育再生論。.

The two competing camps of theorists in moral psychology share one common view on the disagreement between their theories: moral foundations theory presupposes basic emotion theory, while dyadic morality theory presupposes constructionist theory of emotion. The paper challenges this common view. First, it reviews the four theories. Second, it clarifies the issue about the relation between the moral contents and emotions on which the two camps of moral-psychological theorists dispute. Third, it identifies the explananda for the moral-psychological theories, and examines (...) the two distinctive types of explanations that each of the two theories offers to them. Finally, it concludes that the deepest disagreement between the two morality theories consists in the role that the theories give to emotions in explaining moral judgments. (shrink)

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal knowledge embedded in word vectors is important for cognitive modeling using distributional semantic models. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to identify the knowledge encoded in word vectors by conducting (...) a computational experiment using Binder et al.'s (2016) featural conceptual representations based on neurobiologically motivated attributes. In an experiment, these conceptual vectors are predicted from text‐based word vectors using a neural network and linear transformation, and prediction performance is compared among various types of information. The analysis demonstrates that abstract information is generally predicted more accurately by word vectors than perceptual and spatiotemporal information, and specifically, the prediction accuracy of cognitive and social information is higher. Emotional information is also found to be successfully predicted for abstract words. These results indicate that language can be a major source of knowledge about abstract attributes, and they support the recent view that emphasizes the importance of language for abstract concepts. Furthermore, we show that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories. This suggests that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected. (shrink)

Today Asia is attracting attention in the area of bioethics. In fact, the potential of bioethics is beginning to be discussed seriously at academic centers across Asia. In Japan, this discussion began a decade ago with the publication The book is one of the principal explorations of biomedical ethics involving Japan to date. Tom Beauchamp, an author of one of the book's chapters, compares Japanese and American standards of informed consent and refutes relativistic positions, concluding that.