This article aims to discuss how Lucretius arranges the four ‘roots’ at the end of successive lines of verse in the De rerum natura (henceforth, DRN) (1.5–8). In this passage Lucretius, alluding to Empedocles, puts the words in such an order that one can see the layers of the world by a vertical reading. In the same passage, Lucretius imitates the very beginning of Homer's ecphrasis (Il. 18.478–85), which the allegorical tradition will explain as an image of the world, related (...) to Empedoclean theory. The article also discusses the allusion to Daedalus by means of the adjective daedalus in DRN 1.7 (daedala tellus), which could be related to both Empedocles and Homer. This adjective is a keyword for discussing the image produced by the words on the written page. (shrink)

Initially Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) and later Bell shed light on the non-local properties exhibited by subsystems in quantum mechanics. Separately, Kochen and Specker analyzed sets of measurements of compatible observables and found that a consistent coexistence of these results is impossible, i.e., quantum indefiniteness of measurement results. As a consequence, quantum contextuality, a more general concept compared to non-locality, leads to striking phenomena predicted by quantum theory. Here, we report neutron interferometric experiments which investigate entangled states in a (...) single-particle system: entanglement is, in this case, achieved not between particles, but between degrees of freedom i.e., between spin, path, and energy degrees of freedom. Appropriate combinations of the spin analysis and the position of the phase shifter in the interferometer allow an experimental verification of the violation of a Bell-like inequality. In addition, state tomography, tomographic analysis of the density matrix of a quantum system, and Kochen-Specker-like phenomena are presented to characterize neutrons’ entangled states and their peculiarity. Furthermore, a coherent energy manipulation scheme is accomplished with a radio-frequency (RF) spin-flipper. This scheme allows the (total) energy degree of freedom to be entangled: the remarkable behavior of a triply entangled GHZ-like state is demonstrated. (shrink)

To understand the public opinion concerning the genethics in culturally different populations, we conducted two focus groups in Japan, with one focus group each in China and Panama between April 2008 and August 2009. Generally, the participants in Japan were more cautious to disclose their personal thinking in a clear manner. Most participants in China and Panama hoped to have children free from any genetic disease if at all possible. The major difference between China and Panama seems to be whether (...) or not they will accept the issue of genetic abortion. Compared to China and Panama, fewer participants accepted a reprogenetics procedure in Japan. ―A goal of genetic counseling is to reduce the number of patients of genetic disease‖ is supported to a greater degree in China and Panama than in Japan. Most participants in China as well as Panama, and fewer participants in Japan accepted the concept of sharing genetic information with relatives, even though it is useful for preventing a possible genetic risk. The difference of the answers for the questions is depending on the cultural and value diversity in each country, while some of them are related into a paucity of knowing the principle of biogenetics. Education as to medical genetics and the principle of bioethics is most important to make genetics more accessible to the general public. (shrink)

Experiment with public deployment of the semantic service matchmaker to a UDDI registry for a year is described in this paper. UDDI is a standard registry for Web Services, but, its search functionality has been limited to a keyword search. Therefore, we propose an enhancement of UDDI, called Matchmaker, that supports semantic service capability discovery. Since September 2003, we have deployed the Matchmaker in one of four official UDDI registries operated by NTT-Communications. In this paper, we first introduce the Matchmaker, (...) and illustrate client tools which lower the threshold of use of semantics. Then, we evaluate this experiment by benchmarks in terms of its performance and functionality. Finally, we discuss user requirements obtained by two ways: questionnaire and observation of search behavior. (shrink)

Background:Protecting the dignity of elderly residents of facilities and providing dignified care can be difficult. Although attempts have been made from several aspects, dignity is considered an area in which less real impact has been made in both theory and practice.Objective:The objective of this study is to characterize the concept of dignity in care for elderly subjects in residential facilities from a practical perspective through concept synthesis.Research design:This study includes in-depth interviews with residents of elderly facilities and a literature review.Participants (...) and research context:A total of 12 residents of seven facilities in three prefectures in Japan were recruited via purposive sampling, and 27 interviews were conducted. Each digitally recorded interview was transcribed verbatim. The interview data were analyzed based on hermeneutic phenomenological research. The literature was searched using PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science with combinations of terms such as dignity, elderly, and residential facilities and then selected according to the predefined inclusion criteria. The descriptions about dignity in the included studies were divided into codes and compared with the results of the interviews.Ethical considerations:This study was approved by the institutional review board of Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Medicine.Findings and discussion:There were 1728 data codes for the interviews from which four themes were generated. In the literature review, 3716 titles were searched, and 28 articles were selected. Combining these results, five following themes and a conceptual matrix were obtained: individual dignity not affected by others; dignified care in a narrow sense; elements of the staff side; dignity in relation to family members, friends, society, and other residents; and dignity in relation to nursing care facilities and the nursing care system.Conclusion:According to the established matrix, we must consider the role of the care system, facility, family, and society in providing care with dignity and the individual dignity to residents and dignity in daily care. (shrink)

This study introduces an enigmatic construction in Japanese called chūshakuteki nibun-renchi ‘annotative dual-clause juxtaposition’ (ADCJ), exemplified below: Hiro wa, dare ni au no ka, resutoran o yoyakushita. top who dat meet nmlz int restaurant acc reserved Lit. ‘Hiro, (I wonder) who (he) will meet, reserved a restaurant.’ This construction is ubiquitous and yet little known even in Japanese linguistics circles. Because the matrix predicate of ADCJ cannot semantically accommodate such a component as dare ni au no ka ‘who (he) will (...) meet’ above, this paper argues that ADCJ is parenthetical, a construct that should be recognized as an essential element of verbal communication and, in turn, a determining factor in how utterances are to be formed and interpreted. This construction is dissimilar to any other type of parentheticals hitherto reported in the literature. What is so special about it is its merger of portraying two situations through abduction and expressing the entire circumstance in a single communicative unit. For example, in the above example, the parenthetical element explains why the speaker wishes to convey the matrix statement. From an interactional perspective, the primary function of ADCJ is to highlight the speaker’s intellectual and communicative involvement in the depicted scene. This style of communication, when compared with an ‘objective’ and apathetic description, is likely to induce more earnest reactions from the hearer or reader and, consequently, promote a more favorable continuation of the conversation or reading. This paper advocates a wide-ranging examination of thetical grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011), for which detailed analyses of constructions such as ADCJ that traditional syntactic/semantic theories cannot capture are indispensable. (shrink)

Taking a Darwinian approach, we propose that people reason to detect free-riders on the Wason Selection task with the sharing-rule; If one receives the resource, one is an in-group member (standard), or If one is an in-group member, one receives the resource (switched). As predicted, taking the resource-provider's perspective, both undergraduates and children (11 to 12 years old) checked for the existence of out-group members taking undeserved resource. Changing the perspective to that of the resource-recipient did not alter the selection (...) pattern in undergraduates, although the prediction was that another type of free-riding -failure to share by resource-provider- would be checked as well. However, by removing confounding factors in the materials, both undergraduates and children checked for both types of free-riding, which fully supports the prediction. These results indicate that the sharing-rule elicits a thematic content effect that cannot be explained by preceding deontic reasoning theories. (shrink)

「日本語の哲学」を目指すとは、いったいどんなことなのか。―少なくともそれは、古代ギリシャに始まった西洋の哲学をただ日本語で受容する、ということではないはずである。かつて和辻哲郎が挑んだその課題は、いま 、もっとも挑戦しがいのあるテーマとして研究者を待ちかまえている。ここに展開するのは、パルメニデス、デカルト、ハイデッガーといった哲学者たちと、「日本語」をもって切りむすぶ、知的バトルの数々である。これ までに類を見ない知的冒険の姿がここにある。.

In recent papers the authors have discussed the dynamical properties of “large Poincaré systems” (LPS), that is, nonintegrable systems with a continuous spectrum (both classical and quantum). An interesting example of LPS is given by the Friedrichs model of field theory. As is well known, perturbation methods analytic in the coupling constant diverge because of resonant denominators. We show that this Poincaré “catastrophe” can be eliminated by a natural time ordering of the dynamical states. We obtain then a dynamical theory (...) which incorporates a privileged direction of time (and therefore the second law of thermodynamics). However, it is only in very simple situations that this time ordering can be performed in an “extended” Hilbert space. In general, we need to go to the Liouville space (superspace) and introduce a time ordering of dynamical states according to the number of particles involved in correlations. This leads then to a generalization of quantum mechanics in which the usual Heisenberg's eigenvalue problem is replaced by a complex eigenvalue problem in the Liouville space. (shrink)

The mean-field theory with the use of the slave-boson functional method has been generalized to take account of the spin- and/or orbital-ordered state in the doubly degenerate Hubbard model. Numerical calculations are presented of the antiferromagnetic orbital-ordered state in the half-filled simple-cubic model. The orbital order in the present theory is much reduced compared with that in the Hartree–Fock approximation because of the large orbital fluctuations. From a comparison of the ground-state energy, the antiferromagnetic orbital state is shown to be (...) unstable against the antiferromagnetic spin state, although the situation becomes reversed when the exchange interaction is negative. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phe- notypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evo- lution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon dis- cussing the variability of the very ”contexts of life”: the in- teractions between organisms, biological niches and ecosys- tems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of (...) time the ”niches” which constitute the boundary conditions on selec- tion. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the ”phase space”, no laws of mo- tion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound concep- tual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to under- stand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of ”enablement”. Life lives in a web of enablement and radical emergence. This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases. Mutations or other causal differ- ences will allow us to stress that ”non conservation princi- ples” are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as sym- metries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to ”extended criticality” as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter. (shrink)

The laser chaos decision maker has been demonstrated to enable ultra-high-speed solutions of multiarmed bandit problems or decision-making in the GHz order. However, the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. In this paper, we analyze the chaotic dynamics inherent in experimentally observed laser chaos time series via surrogate data and further accelerate the decision-making performance via parameter optimization. We first evaluate the negative autocorrelation in a chaotic time series and its impact on decision-making detail. Then, we analyze the decision-making ability (...) using three different surrogate chaos time series to examine the underlying mechanism. We clarify that the negative autocorrelation of laser chaos improves decision-making and that the amplitude distribution of the original laser chaos time series is not optimal. Hence, we introduce a new parameter for adjusting the amplitude distribution of the laser chaos to enhance the decision-making performance. This study provides a new insight into exploiting the supremacy of chaotic dynamics in artificially constructed intelligent systems. (shrink)

This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

This entirely new work guides the reader through the most basic systems of modal propositional logic up to systems of modal predicate with identity, dealing with both technical developments and discussing philosophical applications.