This paper introduces an agent system for supporting user's dairy work on the Internet like a secretary. In this system, an agent is assigned to a user, and receives requests from the user or other agents. Since there are various kinds of requests, it is difficult to prepare a complete set of request-handling rules in advance. In order to handle various requests, the agent uses Case Based Reasoning (CBR), which is an approach to solve a problem by referring old cases. (...) Requests and cases are described as XML documents, that are easily understandable for both the user and agent, because the agent needs to interact with them. Describing documents in XML enables an agent to match a request and a case more exactly. This agent consists of a request receipt module, planning module, executing module, and case storage module. The request receipt module receive a request from the user or other agents. The request is described as a XML document by interacting with the user. The planning module searches an old case similar to the request, and generates a sequence of basic operations as a plan by referring the case. The executing module executes the plan. If the agent fails to execute a basic operation or requires user's instruction, then it carries out the plan by interacting with the user. The case storage module stores the new case with user's evaluation score into the case base. The experimental results shows that increase in the number of cases raises a proposal rate and accuracy rate. However, too many cases may cause decline in the accuracy rate by inconsistency of user's evaluation. (shrink)

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, (...) colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records. (shrink)

This special 10th anniversary edition of the David Suzuki classic, re-examines our place in the natural world in light of sweeping environmental changes and recent advances in scientific knowledge.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of PicturesSachiko KusukawaIf not for the attractive plant with overhanging flute-like flowers that was named after him, Leonhart Fuchs (1501–66) is best known today as one of the pioneers of accurate representations of plants in histories of scientific illustrations.1 The pictures in Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants (1542) have been appreciated usually for their “naturalistic” features (i.e., pictures drawn from observing (...) a plant specimen), as well as for their tendency to discard individual blemishes and portray a universal or ideal “type” of a plant where several varieties of species could be incorporated into one bush, or where various stages of the same plant may be depicted in one figure.2 On the other hand no historian of botany who has examined the text these pictures accompanied has found that such qualities as observation from nature or a sense of “ideal type” contributed to Fuchs’s theoretical understanding of [End Page 403] plants: he lacked any sense of the family genera or Linnean classification, for he had simply adopted an alphabetical ordering.3Fuchs himself considered his pictures remarkable—as he was at pains to point out—and he believed his pictures were absolutely crucial for his commentary on plants. My immediate aim in this paper, therefore, is to offer an interpretation of Fuchs’s Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants which does not split the work into artistically positive and botanically negative elements. As I shall argue, the uniqueness and so the controversial nature of Fuchs’s enterprise lies in the kind of argument and procedure he believed to be valid for an academic study of plants. More generally, I hope to use this reassessment of Fuchs’s work to show how pictures could be as controversial as texts and how the uses of texts and pictures together form past acts which require historical explanation. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.The Artists. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542, verso of last folio page. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.In 1542 Fuchs published his Remarkable Commentaries on the History of Plants Belaboured with Great Expense and Vigilance with More than Five Hundred Live Images of Plants Attached. It begins with a picture of Fuchs, the author, at the age of forty-one and ends with that of the artists (fig. 1). Although the division of labor depicted here seems to have been a standard one for printing illustrated books in this period,4 it is unusual that we know their names. Albrecht Meyer did the drawings from life, Heinrich Füllmaurer transferred the drawings to woodblocks, and Veit Rudolf Speckle cut those woodblocks.5 Fuchs was proud of one of the artists in particular: “the woodcutter [sculptor] Veit Rudolf Speckle, by far the best in Strasbourg, excellently imitated the admirable industry of painters: he has so skilfully expressed the outlines of each picture by carving [sculpendo] that he seems to compete with the painter for glory and victory.”6 A comparison between the painter and the sculptor had been a favorite topic in the Renaissance genre of paragone—Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Castiglione, and Michaelangelo composed treatises on it—where the [End Page 404] relative merits of various mimetic arts were discussed.7 Fuchs’s comment on Speckle is more nuanced, however, than a polite competition between the arts over their mimetic skills: Fuchs announces that Speckle is worthy of praise in producing a picture—normally the domain of the painter (pictor)—with the specialized skill of carving of the cutter (sculptor). This is surely an appreciation of the particular skill involved in producing replicable pictures for printed books, just as Erasmus had, a generation earlier, acknowledged in Albrecht Dürer’s prowess at engraving the potential for reproducibility in a print culture.8 Indeed, of the artists involved in printing, it was the woodcutter who could expect to be paid most in this period—nearly fifteen times more than the artist who originally drew the pictures.9 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Atriplex. Theodore Dorsten, Botanicon, 1540, fol. 35r. Reproduced... (shrink)

This is an important volume of seventeen essays that historicizes observation as a practice, concept and ideal. It belongs to the historiographical tradition of scrutinizing central aspects of the scientific enterprise such as experiments and objectivity that once appeared too self-evident to be probed. The challenge of historicizing such a significant idea is that it has to be a collective enterprise.The volume starts with three essays that provide a chronological survey of the period from 500 to 1800. Katherine Park, covering (...) the period from 500 to 1500, explains how observation for Cicero and Pliny had nothing to do with experiment or systematic investigation, but rather was a collective and largely anonymous process, associated with originary phrases of natural knowledge of a distant past and intelligible even by the illiterate. It was the basis for conjectural knowledge that lacked causal explanation. Observation of celestial events occurred from time to time, but in the context o .. (shrink)

世界は存在するのか、しないのか。生命とは、人間とは何か―西田幾多郎の哲学は世界のあり方を根源から問う実在論であった。行為的直観、自覚、絶対無の場所、絶対現在、永遠の今、絶対矛盾的自己同一といった西田独 自の概念を、生命論を手がかりに考察することを通して西田哲学と一体化しつつ、自身の思索を深化させる池田哲学の真骨頂が展開する。ピュシス(自然)の発する声に耳を傾けた、『福岡伸一、西田哲学を読む』の続編。 .

フェミニズム、環境批評、ポストヒューマン、精神分析、ポストコロニアリズム...多彩なトピックから文学の可能性に飛び込もう!読むことの基礎と批評理論の現在が学べるキーワード集。.

大東亜戦争後の世界は誰が引き継ぐのか。「漫然と世界の長」たるアメリカ発のグローバリゼーションの無思想性を超克し、来るべき地球時代の新ビジョンを示す。.

ヨーロッパの“美”と日本の“うつくしさ”の邂逅―それは単に比較文明の問題ではない。両者の邂逅に、西洋形而上学が形而上学=美学の歴史であった所以が立ち現われるなか、“あるがまま”という“うつくしさ”の存 在論が、ヨーロッパの存在論の忘れられた根底と呼び合う。.

Images in the service of scientific knowledge (broadly construed) in early modern Europe have received much scholarly attention in recent years. Given that this was a period where there was a large...

Dienes & Perner's analysis provides a clear theoretical justification for using a demonstration of volitional control as a criterion for conscious awareness. However, in memory tasks, the converse does not hold: A phenomenological awareness of a memory episode can arise involuntarily, even when the task does not require retrieval of the episode. The varying amounts of volitional retrieval required by different memory tasks need to be recognized.

This paper examines the inter-relationship between image, text and object in the Codex Kentmanus, which is one of the earliest records of the plants in the botanical garden at Padua, studied by Johannes Kentmann . The manuscript shows that “observation” for Kentmann involved a gradual process of assimilating knowledge from other physicians, apothecaries, and books in order to make the plants which were originally encountered at a specific time and place into a more generalised object of study for learned physicians.

Philip Melanchthon, humanist and colleague of Martin Luther, is best known for his educational reforms, for which he earned the title Praeceptor Germaniae. His most influential form of philosophical writing was the academic oration, and this volume, first published in 1999, presents a large and wide-ranging selection of his orations and textbook prefaces translated into English. They set out his views on the distinction between faith and reason, the role of philosophy in education, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, astronomy and astrology, (...) and the importance of philosophy to a true Christian, as well as his views on Classical philosophical authorities such as Plato and Aristotle and on contemporaries such as Erasmus and Luther. Powerfully influential in their time, inspiring many Protestant students to study philosophy, mathematics and natural philosophy, they illuminate the relationship between Renaissance and Reformation thought. (shrink)

「権利」概念に対する「義務」、「人格主義」に対する「非人格」を基盤にした思考など、近代的人間観の矛盾を根底的に問うたヴェイユの思想と核心とその現代的意義を鮮やかに示す気鋭の野心作。第5回「河上肇賞」本 賞受賞作。.