Thomas Nagel's conservative position of the political conception for world politics and his insightful ?Minimum Humanitarian Morality? (MHM) view on global justice are laudable. He admits that the path from anarchy to justice must go through injustice. But Nagel does not clearly identify the conditions under which we put up with global injustice. This paper reviews the conception of MHM through the lens of the institutional political economy. In my view, to recognize the degree of structural failure (weakness in governance) (...) as well as the degree of transition failure (elite bargain or personalization of power being interlocked) in each state can give us a hint on how to conceptualize and apply Nagel's MHM. We also argue that the scope and degree of humanitarian aid may vary in accordance with the options to global justice open to each state. (shrink)

Ethics education for professionals has become popular in Japan over the last two decades. Many professional schools now require students to take an applied ethics or professional ethics course. In contrast, very few courses of professional ethics for teaching exist or have been taught in Japan. In order to obtain suggestions for teacher education, this paper reviews and examines practices of ethics education for engineers and nurses in Japan that have been successfully implemented. The paper concludes that difficulties in professional (...) ethics education in Japan are caused by the fact that both teachers and students lack experience in leading and participating in discussion-based classes and misunderstand the effectiveness of a case-based pedagogy. It also suggests that we need to offer teachers systematic opportunities to be trained to be proficient in enabling students to be active and critical in class. (shrink)

Nearly all philosophers refer to Kant when debating the concept of dignity, and many approve of Kant’s conception, unaware of the tensions between Kant’s conception and the modern idea of dignity intimately connected to the idea of human rights. What exactly is Kant's conception of dignity? Is there a connecting tie between dignity and the legal sphere of human rights at all? Does Kant’s concept refer to a superior status human beings seem to own in comparison to non-rational beings? Or (...) does it refer to an absolute value? The contributions of this volume are organised in five broader topics. In the first section tensions within the Kantian conception of dignity are discussed (C. Horn, D. Birnbacher, G. Schönrich). The second group of articles illuminates the intimate connections between dignity and human rights (R. Mosayebi, M. Kettner). The third group discusses the prevailing moral conception of dignity (S. Yamatsuta, S. Shell, O. Sensen). The fourth group focuses on the relation of dignity and end in itself (T. Hill, D. Sturma, A. Wood). The central theme of the fifth group of contributions are the social, political, and cultural dimensions of dignity (Y. Kato, K. Ameriks, K. Flikschuh, T. Saito). (shrink)

Ascidian tadpole larvae, composed of only about 2500 cells, have a primitive nervous system which is derived from the neural plate. The stereotyped cell cleavage pattern and well characterized cell lineage in these animals allow the isolation and culture of identified blastomeres in variable combinations. Ascidian embryos express cell‐type‐specific markers corresponding to their cell fates, even when cultured under cleavage‐arrest by cytochalasin B. This system provides us with a unique opportunity to study the roles of cell lineage and cell contact (...) in early neuronal differentiation in the absence of events associated with complex morphogenesis. In addition, the isolated, cleavage‐arrested blastomeres are ideally suited to electrical recording, permitting the use of ionic channels as specific markers for differentiation. In the cleavage‐arrested embryos, suppression of one type of K+ channel, and induction of two types of Na+ channels, occur following cell contact with the vegetal blastomere. The combination of molecular and electrophysiological analyses on this simple animal system may provide insights into the nature of the cell interactions important in early neurogenesis, both in ascidians and in vertebrates. (shrink)

Henri Bergson critiques the traditional view of time as a mere succes­sion of states, arguing that it fails to capture the crucial aspect of time’s speed or pace. The paper explores Bergson’s concept of time’s speed through the lens of modern scientific insights and analytic philosophy, addressing critiques from cognitive science and logical analysis. By introducing the concept of “time qualia,” which distinguishes between the quantitative and qualitative aspects of temporal experience, the author defends Bergson’s position and provides a new (...) theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between external motion, its measurement, and conscious durée. The formulation of this concept not only sheds light on the intrinsic connections between various related texts but also contributes to the differentiation between two distinct types of time speed — time-qualia-based and flow-qualia-based. The author concludes that the qualitative aspects of time experience have an irreducible reality that comple­ments, rather than opposes, the quantitative aspects, arguing that Bergson’s perspective offers a more comprehensive understanding of time’s nature and our experience of it. Keywords: Henri Bergson. Time’s speed. Time qualia. Experience measurement. (shrink)

This paper discusses what constitutes good teaching, taking as its cue the ‘aesthetic’ concept treated in everyday aesthetics and ‘internal good’ accounted by McIntyre. Teaching is viewed as practice, not merely as a basic action, due to its epistemological nature as everyday work. What everyday aesthetics teaches us is that even in the practice of teaching, sensory experiences such as comfort, familiarity, discomfort, ordinariness, etc. can be viewed as aesthetic experience. This kind of aesthetic experience constitute intuition supporting ’good teaching’ (...) that confirmed by examining Dreyfus et al. This ‘good teaching’ sensitivity is not specific to the individual practitioner, but is considered to be an ‘in-practice value (internal good?)’ (McIntyre) shared by the community of practice. From the aesthetic perspective, this value could be called ‘aesthetic value in practice’. In the teaching community of practice, ‘good teaching’ is both ‘beautiful teaching’ and ‘ethically good’ teaching. Teaching should be seen as a relational practice, and for this reason, The Ethico-Aesthetics of Teaching should be constructed. (shrink)

Teaching has been one of the central themes in educational research. Not only empirical researchers of education but also philosophers of education inquire into the activity. Philosophers used to analyse the concept of teaching. The merely analytic approach, however, is no longer the main one in educational research. Will philosophical consideration of teaching, then, never contribute to our educational activity or any other activities in our life at all? In order to explore the possibilities for philosophical consideration of teaching, I (...) will examine three philosophers' distinction between teaching and telling. The philosophers are Israel Scheffler, Karatani Kojin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I will conclude that Wittgenstein deconstructs the distinction between teaching and telling, and that he requires us to change our attitude to the recognition of the others. (shrink)

大阪大学大学院文学研究科が所蔵する、会沢正志斎書簡を活字翻刻。会沢正志斎は、後期水戸学を代表する儒学者の一人。本書簡群は、会沢が、弟子で甥でもある寺門政次郎およびその父喜太平に対して宛てた書簡を主とし 、江戸に滞在していた寺門が水戸の会沢に対して定期的に府下の情報を送り続けた、その返答としての性格をもっている。また、会沢著作の書肆とのやりとりに関する記述が多く存在するのも特徴。緊迫する幕末の情勢と、 そのなかで行われた思想の営為を解明するための一級史料。.

Dynastic politicians, defined as those whose family members have also served in the same position in the past, occupy a sizable portion of offices in many parts of the world. We develop a model of how dynastic politicians with inherited political advantages affect electoral outcomes and policy choices. Our model predicts that, as compared with non-dynastic legislators, dynastic legislators bring more distributions to the district, enjoy higher electoral success, and harm the economic performance of the districts, despite the larger amount (...) of distributive benefits they bring. We test the implications of the model using data from Japan between 1997 and 2007. (shrink)

This volume brings Bergson's key ideas from Matter and Memory into dialogue with contemporary themes on memory and time in science, across analytic and continental philosophy. Focusing specifically on the application of Bergson's ideas to cognitive science, the circuit between perception and memory receives full explication in 15 different essays. By re-reading Bergson through a cognitive lens, the essays provide a series of alternative analytic interpretations to the standard continental approach to Bergson's oeuvre, without fully discounting either approach. The relevance (...) of philosophies of mind and memory sit alongside the role of a metaphysics of time in exploring connections to psychology, biology, and physics. This eclecticism includes an exciting focus on numerous topics that are not given sufficient attention in extant studies of Bergson, including the precise nature of his ideas on dualism, memory, and ecological theories of perception, especially in relation to his contemporaries. Led by leading Bergson scholars from France and Japan, this book maps the rich terrain of Bergson's contemporary relevance alongside the historical context of his ideas. (shrink)

トリアージ、ワクチンの分配、ゲノム編集、さらに倫理、思想、文学、政治社会まで、様々な領域の喫緊の問題として「尊厳」を論じる。.

Surface and line elements in three-dimensional space are given in terms of the delta function. We extend the representation to N-dimensional phase space to obtain the relation between the equi-energy surface and the density of states.

In this paper, we establish the first-order definability of sequents with consistent variable occurrence on bi-approximation semantics by means of the Sahlqvist–van Benthem algorithm. Then together with the canonicity results in Suzuki (2011), this allows us to establish a Sahlqvist theorem for substructural logic. Our result is not limited to substructural logic but is also easily applicable to other lattice-based logics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature (Ziran 自然) of Technological and Economic Development in Early DaoismYumi Suzuki (bio)I. IntroductionEric Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides comprehensive guidance on how early and later Daoist thought could offer both ideological and practical solutions to contemporary environmental issues. Nelson does not simple-mindedly claim that Daoists are environmentalists or that Daoism is comparable with modern environmental thought. His monograph has a more sophisticated, and (...) also more ambitious and consequently philosophically provocative, goal: to evolutionally develop old Daoist thought to directly address contemporary philosophical discourses on the environment.1I have summarized elsewhere what I find to be the most significant and meaningful contributions this book has made.2 I think its goal has successfully been achieved in various ways: Nelson gives careful and accurate interpretations to each passage from the original texts.3 What he calls "the new Daoism" deployed on the basis of these interpretations is reasonable and uncontroversial. The monograph overall offers an exemplary model of how wisdom acquired through studying the history of philosophy can be adapted to cogitating on newly emerging philosophical questions, despite differences in the intellectual contexts that we are required to warily distinguish. Moreover, by focusing on the Daoist tradition in East Asia, it well demonstrates how other systems of philosophical thought can be usefully employed to critically reflect on fundamental assumptions that an existing system is already committed to and that could be the very cause of relevant philosophical and pragmatic problems.While I mostly agree with his arguments in chapters 1–4 and 6, the only part I found unsatisfactory is chapter 5, "Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New [End Page 771] Daoist Political Ecology" (pp. 100–118). The present review aims to elaborate reasons for my resistance to Nelson's all-out endorsement of what he regards as the sociopolitical implications of Daoism. When it comes to politics, it appears to me, early Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi express often disappointingly ambiguous and agnostic attitudes toward what can be done with respect to their doctrinal opponents and outsiders. My suggestion is that if we examine the explorations of their contenders, that is, mainly Confucians and Legalists, concerning political and technological devices, they may present an altogether less biased and more balanced range of solutions to a question Nelson raises regarding an environmental challenge associated with a competitive globalized economy and rapidly developing technologies in our modern age.II. A Challenge to the Current Environmental MovementChapter 5 begins with the following statement:Appeals to encountering the myriad things in their environmental contexts and relations are necessary for an ecological transformation of existing cultures and societies. Yet an environmental ethos and culture of nature is not sufficient given how systematically reproduced social-economic processes in advanced capitalist societies meditate, entangle, and obstruct the transformative potential of such encounters. To this extent, an adequate environmental philosophy must concurrently be social-political philosophy that can offer an environmentally oriented critique of existing social structures and institutions that directly and indirectly harm creatures and degrade ecosystems in myriad ways such that transformations must transpire in economic and societal structures as well as at the level of individual cultivation and reflections.(p. 100)Nelson maintains that even though it is cardinal to transform the ways in which the myriad things encounter and mutually correspond with each other, as well as alter their own existential state, by cultivating an environmental ethos and culture of nature in each individual and society, one of the most serious challenges for such transformations could originate with already existing capitalist, materialist, and consumerist social structures and institutions widely prevailing and deeply embedded in the highly complex economic and political systems of our age.This, I think, captures the core problem of modern environmentalism. An individual, a group of people such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, or a single city or country might be convinced by the Daoist "biospiritual" mode of life. Nevertheless, it appears to be far more difficult in practice to have certain countries or multinational mega-firms abandon their steadfast, primary commitment to national, industrial, commercial, or corporate missions to pursue their own benefits that deprioritize or... (shrink)

Zen Buddhism as it has been discovered by the West in our time emerges as one of the great challenges to Western philosophy, psychology, and religion. The present volume, composed of the work of D. T. Suzuki, Zen's chief exponent in English, and presented to Western readers by William Barrett, is intended to introduce the general reader to the history and spirit of Zen.

This paper is a comparative study of the propositional intuitionistic (non-modal) and classical modal languages interpreted in the standard way on transitive frames. It shows that, when talking about these frames rather than conventional quasi-orders, the intuitionistic language displays some unusual features: its expressive power becomes weaker than that of the modal language, the induced consequence relation does not have a deduction theorem and is not protoalgebraic. Nevertheless, the paper develops a manageable model theory for this consequence and its extensions (...) which also reveals some unexpected phenomena. The balance between the intuitionistic and modal languages is restored by adding to the former one more implication. (shrink)