Major depression (MD) is a highly heterogeneous diagnostic category. Diverse symptoms such as sad mood, anhedonia, and fatigue are routinely added to an unweighted sum-score, and cutoffs are used to distinguish between depressed participants and healthy controls. Researchers then investigate outcome variables like MD risk factors, biomarkers, and treatment response in such samples. These practices presuppose that (1) depression is a discrete condition, and that (2) symptoms are interchangeable indicators of this latent disorder. Here I review these two assumptions, elucidate (...) their historical roots, show how deeply engrained they are in psychological and psychiatric research, and document that they contrast with evidence. Depression is not a consistent syndrome with clearly demarcated boundaries, and depression symptoms are not interchangeable indicators of an underlying disorder. Current research practices lump individuals with very different problems into one category, which has contributed to the remarkably slow progress in key research domains such as the development of efficacious antidepressants or the identification of biomarkers for depression. The recently proposed network framework offers an alternative to the problematic assumptions. MD is not understood as a distinct condition, but as heterogeneous symptom cluster that substantially overlaps with other syndromes such as anxiety disorders. MD is not framed as an underlying disease with a number of equivalent indicators, but as a network of symptoms that have direct causal influence on each other: insomnia can cause fatigue which then triggers concentration and psychomotor problems. This approach offers new opportunities for constructing an empirically based classification system and has broad implications for future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conference of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesEiko Hanaoka and Jonathan A. SeitzFour lectures were given, with the theme “The Philosophy of Religion in Hajime Tanabe”:1. “Philosophy as Metanoetics” by Professor Masakazu Fujita2. “Hajime Tanabe’s Philosophy and Christian Dialectic” by Professor Emeritus Isao Onodera3. “‘Christianity’ and ‘Philosophy of Religion’ in Tanabe’s Philosophy” by Professor Emerita Eiko Hanaoka4. “The Original Subjectivity in Pure-Land Buddhism” by Professor Emeritus Akira Kawanami.Professor (...) Emeritus Ausluv Lande from Lund University in Sweden also participated in this conference. [End Page 193]Eiko HanaokaOsaka Prefecture UniversityPalace Side Hotel, Kyoto September 2–4, 2013Copyright © 2014 University of Hawai‘i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 32-41 [Access article in PDF] Does Art Education Dream of Disneyland? [Figures] Introduction What image can we present when challenged to illustrate art education in the form of a scheme? The word "illustration" literally means to build understanding through an explanatory diagram. In art education or anything [End Page 32] else, the use of a visual image to understand a certain system (...) can be interpreted as a question of human sensitivity and recognition. Translating minute nuances or peculiarities of information into a vibrant image is, however, a confusing and difficult exercise. In this essay, I attempt to portray those elements crucial to the teaching and learning process of art education using Disneyland as a structural as well as a functional metaphor. The Happiest Place on Earth? Disneyland is depicted as "a dream world" and "the happiest place on earth." As described in various incisive essays, Disneyland is a symbol of modern American culture, an ultimate form of the consumer society or the hegemony of entertainment. 1 To start with, the structural elements of this epitome of Walt Disney's vision are outlined.Walt Disney created Main Street USA (the World Bazaar) to make all visitors feel as if they are the leading character in a Disney film, walking through the main street of life. He attempted to remove the ugliness of everyday life from his dream space by eradicating the back streets of the real world. The design of the buildings along Main Street originates from Walt Disney's hometown. The sense of distance within the Disney complex is enhanced by using a smaller scale for the upper stories of buildings and a progressively narrowing street.Sleeping Beauty's Castle (or Cinderella Castle at Tokyo Disneyland) lies beyond Main Street and is modeled on Neuschwanstein Castle in Fussen,South Bayern, Germany. The road leading to the castle ascends slightly which amplifies the anticipation factor for visitors. Sleeping Beauty's Castle is the centerpiece of Disneyland and functions as the hub to guide visitors to various lands. Several attractive spaces radiate from this hub, forming a total of six areas.On the extension line from the Entrance via Sleeping Beauty's Castle lies Fantasyland where Walt Disney has reproduced the world of animation based on European legends and fables. Toontown lies beyond Fantasyland. This is a world of familiar characters, such as Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy. Traveling clockwise, Tomorrowland is next where all kinds of imaginary worlds await visitors. Adventureland, on the opposite side of Main Street, offers worlds of different cultures and spaces for adventure. Beyond Adventureland lies Westernland, designed to invite visitors to return to the Wild West.It is possible to form a hypothesis that there are three axes connecting the six lands. Those axes run through Sleeping Beauty's Castle that acts as the hub and two opposing areas on the same axis with the Castle being the point of symmetry.The first axis could be the axis of "reality." If Main Street is considered to be the "crawling approachway" from the everyday sphere to dreamland,Fantasyland, offering playful space of extraordinary imagination, is set [End Page 33] against the ordinary space for everyday life. The second axis is the axis of "relationship" which connects individual persons to society. Toontown presents a world of fraternity and is a place where people bonded by kinship or friendship can trust each other and feel at ease. Frontierland, located on the opposite side of this axis creates a solitary space where people leave family and friends for the adventure of traveling to unknown lands. The third and final axis is that of "time" from the past to the future. Tomorrowland is a future world based on fantasy and imagination where prophecies becomereality. On the opposite side of this axis lies Westernland embodying the history and traditions of the American past.It is possible to regard each area of Disneyland, structured by these different worlds, as a metaphor to reflect the basic content and structure of art education in the context of the general curriculum. In fact... (shrink)

In the chapter “Fit for Emperors and Kings,” the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu relates the myth of Hun-tun, the emperor of chaos, who died when the seven sense openings were bored into him. The story goes: Shu, the ruler of the Southern Sea, and Hu, the ruler of the Northern Sea, met in the realm of Hun-tun, the emperor of the Center, that is to say in the world of true reality that contradicted their own as being one of vast disorder. (...) Hun-tun received the two emperors warmly, and they both overcame their knowledge-based and conceptional consciousness, entirely forgot the evaluating, one-sided viewpoint of differentiation. Thus they enjoyed the world of true reality, the land of Hun-tun, Emperor Chaos. Subsequently the two guests wondered how they could possibly repay the kindness of Hun-tun. Concluding their consultation, they decided to present Hun-tun with seven openings — the sense doors of the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. They duly proceeded to bore one opening into Hun-tun every day. However, on the seventh day, when he was finally becoming like a human being, Hun-tun died. (shrink)

Legislative scholars have debated what factors (e.g. divided government) account for the number of important laws a legislative body passes per year. This paper presents a monopoly model for explaining legislative production. It assumes that a legislature adjusts its law production so as to maximize its utility. The model predicts that socio-economic and political changes increase the marginal benefit of law production, whereas low negotiation costs and ample legislative resources decrease the marginal cost of law production. The model is tested (...) in two ways. The first approach compares the legislatures of 42 developed and developing countries. The second analyzes Japanese lawmaking from 1949 to 1990, using an appropriate method for event count time series data. Both empirical investigations support the model's predictions for legislative production. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the new possibility of social transformation by religion in order to save the global nihilistic situation in the contemporary world because of the modern technology which neglected human dignity in all over the world since the Industrial Revolution started from England in the latter half of the 18th Century. Such possibility by religion can be realized, in my view, by “the way of walking” on the ground of “self-awareness”, where each person realizes the great death (...) of egoistic ego and is aware of the true self, which is common to each of all nature, which awareness then results in the faith in God as action, God who is non-substantial and has no peculiar nature of its own. Such religion could be found in the religion and the philosophy of religion advocated by A. N. Whitehead and K. Nishida. (shrink)

Children often personify non-living objects, such as puppets and stars. This attribution is considered a healthy phenomenon, which can simulate social exchange and enhance children's understanding of social relationships. In this study, we considered that the tendency of children to engage in personification could potentially be observed in abstract entities, such as numbers. We hypothesized that children tend to attribute personalities to numbers, which diminishes during the course of development. By consulting the methodology to measure ordinal linguistic personification (OLP), which (...) is a type of synesthesia, we quantified the frequency with which child and adult populations engage in number personification. Questionnaires were completed by 151 non-synesthetic children (9--12 years old) and 55 non-synesthetic adults. Children showed a higher tendency than adults to engage in number personification, with respect to temporal consistency and the frequency of choosing meaningful answers. Additionally, children tended to assign unique and exclusive descriptions to each number from zero to nine. By synthesizing the series of analyses, we revealed the process in which number personification diminishes throughout development. In the discussion, we examined the possibility that number personification serves as a discrimination clue to aid children's comprehension of the relationships between numbers. (shrink)

Public engagement in science and technology has grown in importance as developments in science and technology make increasingly significant impacts on people's lives. Now, efforts to engage publics in social decision-making or consensus-building regarding science and technology involve participation, learning or deliberation opportunities, as well as interactive or coproductive efforts among various sectors in society based on the recognition of scientific activities as a part of social operations - even those performed by scientific communities. We have conducted a community engagement (...) program in the HapMap project, the international human genome program, in Japan since 2002. Consequent upon our various approaches to engage Japanese publics, a range of observations were made, such as that: public engagement is not yet recognized or institutionalized in Japan; there is a wide gap between science and society; and the implications of public engagement in a Japanese context have not been examined enthusiastically, especially from the perspectives of political decision making, social consensus-building or self-determination. In this paper, we provide an overview of public engagement in Japan, and discuss issues and challenges raised by the HapMap community engagement project. We also discuss the implications of public engagement for social decision-making and self-determination, and explore the prospects for public engagement in science and technology in Japan. (shrink)

In the contemporary world all kinds of culture, thought modes, philosophies and religions are complicatedly active. Social conditions of our contemporary world wear a nihilistic look which Nietzsche prophesied as a fact, 200 years after his time. In this nihilistic ambience, the whole world seems to be overrun by various crimes neglecting morality and ethics. In such a world we are urged to consider how morals and ethics can be realized. In this meaning the „bounds of ethics‟ are considered in (...) regard to the paradigms of different historical epochs as the framework and basis of life, culture and thinking. One of these paradigms, common to East and West, is the one based on being and nothingness: relative being, relative nothingness, absolute being, nihil, and absolute nothingness, which last-mentioned paradigm subsumes the other four. In essence, this paper will discuss how morality and ethics in the paradigm of absolute nothingness can finally act in oneness with religion and overcome nihilism in the contemporary world, even if it acts very slowly. (shrink)

Kripke bundle [3] and C-set semantics [1] [2] are known as semantics which generalize standard Kripke semantics. In [3] and in [1], [2] it is shown that Kripke bundle and C-set semantics are stronger than standard Kripke semantics. Also it is true that C-set semantics for superintuitionistic logics is stronger than Kripke bundle semantics [5].In this paper, we show that Q-S4.1 is not Kripke bundle complete via C-set models. As a corollary we can give a simple proof showing that C-set (...) semantics for modal logics are stronger than Kripke bundle semantics. (shrink)

This article reconsiders how to judge judicial independence by using the Japanese judicature, one of the allegedly-most dependent judiciary branches. In their influential work, Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue that judges who once belonged to a leftist group take longer to reach a under the long-term conservative rule of Japan. Their method does not, however, deal appropriately with the possibility of judges not reaching this position because the judge dies, retires early, or is still at the early stage of her career. (...) Ramseyer and Rasmusen also mistakenly assume that all judges will eventually obtain this position. This article develops a survival analysis model of judicial careers and attempts to solve the problems of censoring, left truncation, and split population. We also offer a way to utilize a matching procedure to estimate average treatment effects on censored time-to-event as well as event occurrence. We re-analyze a corrected version of Ramseyer and Rasmusen's data using their and our methods. One of the most important findings is that, contrary to what Ramseyer and Rasmusen argue, leftist judges are not discriminated against in terms of the timing of promotion. (shrink)

The role of figurative languages such as metaphor and metonymy in creativity has been studied in cognitive linguistics. These methods can also be applied to analyze non-linguistic data such as pictures and gestures. In this paper we analyze fashion design by focusing on visual metaphor and metonymy. The nature of creativity in fashion design is not fully studied from a cognitive perspective compared to other related fields such as art. We especially focus on the aspect of fashion design as a (...) communication tool between the designer and the audience to convey designer’s image of human. Photos from two fashion shows are analyzed. We carried out an experiment to compare how human images in two shows are interpreted by those who are familiar with fashion and those who are not. We got three results: (1) As far as figurative (metaphorical and metonymic) interpretations of human image are concerned, two groups with different familiarity to fashion have significantly different patterns of responses to two shows. (2) For non-figurative interpretations (such as physical or personal attributes), no significant difference in the pattern of response to the show was observed between two groups. The participants as a whole, however, responded to the two shows differently. (3) In addition for non-figurative interpretation, fashion experts found significantly more attributes in human images than the others. The results show that the analysis of figurative interpreations is effective in seeing how the familiarity to fashion affects the mode of seeing fashion shows. (shrink)

Kripke bundle and C-set semantics are known as semantics which generalize standard Kripke semantics. In [4] and in [1, 2] it is shown that Kripke bundle and C-set semantics are stronger than standard Kripke semantics. Also it is true that C-set semantics for superintuitionistic logics is stronger than Kripke bundle semantics . Modal predicate logic Q-S4.1 is not Kripke bundle complete of the present paper). This is shown by using difference of Kripke bundle semantics and C-set semantics. In this paper, (...) by using the same idea we show that incompleteness results in Kripke bundle semantics which are extended versions of [2]. (shrink)

El eikôs-lógos es un concepto central del Timeo. Este ensayo se propone mostrar que con este concepto Platón recoge y resume sus reflexiones anteriores sobre el lógos, que se pueden sintetizar diciendo que al lógos en general le es inherente un momento de imagen y que la dialéctica platónica se realiza en la tensión entre imagen y concepto. Por esto, el eikôs-lógos no es algo propio únicamente de la cosmología, sino principalmente de la filosofía. Eikoôs señala a la dimensión finita, (...) terrena, del lógos filosófico. Por último, se quiere mostrar que el eikôs-lógos tiene sus raíces en el lenguaje y el número y que en las imágenes que nos hacemos del cosmos participan lenguaje y número. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Reverse eikos (plausibility) arguments are notorious for reversing a reason that supports an accusation into a reason that denies this accusation. This article offers new insights on their analysis and evaluation, by reconstructing a reverse eikos argument’s line of reasoning as an argumentative pattern. The pattern reveals that this type of argument centers not only on the arguer’s claim that by doing the act of which they have been accused, they would risk becoming the likely suspect, but also on (...) the connected reasoning that they would not want to risk this since that would be stupid and they are not stupid. The proposed analysis, which is illustrated with classic and modern examples of reverse eikos arguments, shows that the evaluation of these arguments boils down to estimating the arguer’s calculation of the costs and benefits of taking the risk, while taking into account the arguer’s character, intellect, and circumstances. (shrink)

The key phrase eikōs muthos is standardly translated ‘a likely tale’, suggesting an empiricist philosophy of science quite alien to Plato’s outlook. I argue for translating, in the first instance, ‘a reasonable myth’, and focus on the point that the reason involved in world-making is practical, not theoretical. This should make a significant differenceto how we assess the Demiurgic arguments reported to us in the dialogue.