Social presence, or the subjective experience of being present with another existing person, varies with the interaction medium. In general, social presence research has mainly focused on uni-directional aspects of each exchanged message, not on bidirectional interactions. Our primary purpose is to introduce such bidirectional evaluation by quantifying the degree of social presence with a few statistical measures. To this end, we developed a software called “TypeTrace” that records all keystrokes of online chat interactants and reenacts their typing actions and (...) analyzed the results from different chat conditions, mainly focusing on the characterization of bi-directional interactions. We also compared the chat interaction patterns with the patterns from phone call datasets to investigate the difference of live communication in different media. The hypothesis of the experiment was that either richness or concurrency of communication is important for organizing social presence. Richness is defined by the variety of information at a time in communication and the concurrency is the number of temporal thread being processed at the same time. Our results show that when we merely increase the richness of information by presenting the typing process, the cognition of others' presence does not significantly increase. However, when the information concurrency is augmented by introducing the transmission of realtime text, we found that the transfer entropy between the interactants becomes considerably higher, and the social presence and emotional arousal, intimacy increased. High transfer entropy was also observed in the phone call dataset. This result shows that the mere augmentation of information richness does not necessarily lead to increased social presence, and concurrent communication is another critical factor for fostering vivid conversation in digital environments. (shrink)

This book, which deals with the life and ideas of the poet and philosopher Tadano Makuzu, presents insights into gender discourses of the late Tokugawa period, and thereby opens a way to break away from conventional intellectual history.

Study on the concept of reincarnation; with a special reference to India.

西田哲学と語りえぬもの──その独創的な言語と思考の運動の、秘められた可能性の中心とは何か。西田と対話し続けた半生の記録。.

There is a growing phenomenon of brand advocacy, where brands pressure a producer country government to take pro-worker actions such as respecting the rights of activists and raising minimum wages. This article examines the potential and limits of brand advocacy by developing a conceptual framework and analysing three recent cases of brand advocacy in Cambodia's garment industry. The study shows that brands' action and influence are shaped by issue salience, mobilization structures, political opportunities/contexts, and resource dependency. This article makes both (...) empirical and theoretical contributions. This is one of the first studies delving into the advocacy role of brands in promoting labour rights and conditions vis-à-vis government. Moreover, the article develops a testable framework specifying the conditions under which brands are likely to respond, act collectively, and influence government for pro-worker change. It also offers novel insights by applying social movement lenses and casting brands as social movement actors. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether distinctive features influence speakers’ evaluations of metaphor aptness and their preference for metaphor use. We examined three types of topic-attributed fe...

Data from archaeology and paleoanthropology directly challenge the validity of the basic assumptions of the CLASH model. By not incorporating a “deep time” perspective, the hypothesis lacks the evolutionary baseline the authors seek to infer in validating the model.

In recent times, international comparative studies on managers’ beliefs regarding ethical/unethical leadership have increased in number. These studies focus on both Eastern and Western countries. However, although these previous studies focused on the effects of national culture, they did not pay sufficient attention to the effects of institutions. Moreover, these studies covered only a few countries. Despite Japan’s strong influence on the world economy, it has not been included in previous studies on ethical leadership. Thus, to reveal unexplored factors—particularly cultural (...) and institutional factors—and to determine the generalizability of previous findings, this study used a qualitative research method to examine Japanese business managers’ beliefs about ethical/unethical leadership. The data revealed the convergence and divergence in beliefs regarding ethical/unethical leadership between managers in Japan and in other countries. The analysis identified mostly the same themes of ethical/unethical leadership as found in other countries albeit with different distributions. In addition, We identified new themes that may be specific to Japan or that were neglected in previous studies. Moreover, this study suggests the necessity of considering each society’s history of business ethics and current ethics-related institutional contexts in ethical/unethical leadership studies. (shrink)

Introduction to the terms and concepts of Hinayana and Mahayana, Buddhist philosophy.

On political philosophy of Hemacandra, 1088-1172, Jaina philosopher.

Study in context of Indian religions, philosophers and thinkers.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected not only the health of populations but also their everyday social practices, transformed by orienting to risks of contagion and to health prevention discourses. This paper emanates from a project investigating the impact of Covid-19 on human sociality and more particularly the situated and embodied organization of social interactions. It discusses how Covid-19 impacts the design of ordinary actions in social interaction, how this is made publicly accountable by the participants orienting to the pandemic in (...) formatting their actions and in responding to the actions of others. Adopting an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, the analyses focus on a particular social activity: paying. The organization of payments in shops and services has been affected by the pandemic, not only by official regulations, favoring some modes of payment over others, but also in how sellers and customers situatedly adapt their practices to imperatives of prevention. On the basis of a rich corpus of video-recorded data, which spans from the pandemic’s prodromes to and after its peak, we show how money transfer is methodically achieved – imposed, negotiated, and readjusted – while variously taking into account possible risks of contagion. Thus, we show not only how pandemics affect social interaction, and how prevention is incarnated in social actions, but also how, in turn, situated solutions implemented by people during the pandemic reveal fundamental features of human action. (shrink)

On the contribution of Akalaṅkadeva, 8th cent, Jaina logician; reserach papers presented in national seminar.

This study attempted to answer the question of how to share the values and ethics of youth work among practitioners and with policymakers, funders, and society. Although social interest in youth support in Japan has been on rise recently due to the increase number of difficulties surrounding young people, the ‘ethics and values’ in practice and in the field can be driven by the neoliberal social and political trends present in our society. This study presents a way to resist and (...) counter the penetration of neoliberal practical ethics and organisational management through the process of visualising, sharing and legitimising the ‘practical ethics and values’ embedded in the fields where youth work has been developed with young people. This is the research-based practice of ‘practitioners collectively telling, writing, sharing, and communicating the stories of practice’. (shrink)

The author presents a panorama of the contemporary Italian philosophy of politics, focusing, in particular, on a reflection on a global society. This ‘globalisation’ of philosophical and political reflection has been subjected to a sudden acceleration, beginning with 11 September 2001, a day which was a tragic demonstration of the global nature of the contemporary balance of forces. Never before had a single state waged war against a vaguely identified terrorist group of global reach, where only the name and the (...) face of its elusive leader is known. The author familiarises the reader with the views of Sebastian Maffetone, who, with his Renaissance faith in the speculative mind, wants to make this world, which is itself chaotic, a reasoned, which is to say, a rational one. He places himself in the tradition of thought which leads from Kant, via Hegel, to John Rawls. (shrink)

ArgumentContrary to common portrayals of social Darwinism as a transference of laissez-faire values, the widely read evolutionism of Japan's foremost Darwinist of the early twentieth-century, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), reflects a statist outlook that regards capitalism as the beginning of the nation's degeneration. The evolutionary theory of orthogenesis that Oka employed in his 1910 essay, “The Future of Humankind,” links him to a pre-Darwinian idealist tradition that depicted the state as an organism that develops through life-cycle stages. For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism (...) marked the moment when the state began to decline toward extinction due to the orthogenetic overdevelopment of hitherto subordinate individual egos. Because conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals had been drawing upon this same organicist-developmental tradition since the 1880s in an attempt to forestall the social ills of industrialism, Oka's call for statist measures, including eugenics, to lessen and delay the atomizing, enervating, and corrupting influence of capitalism articulated the political vision of officialdom. Statist evolutionism, not social Darwinism, might be the term that best describes Oka's approach. (shrink)

In his anthology of socio-political essays, Evolution and Human Life, Oka Asajirō, early twentieth century Japan’s foremost advocate of evolutionism, developed a biological vision of the nation-state as super-organism that reflected the concerns and aims of German-inspired Meiji statism and anticipated aspects of radical ultra-nationalism. Drawing on non-Darwinian doctrines, Oka attempted to realize such a fused or organic state by enhancing social instincts that would bind the minzoku and state into a single living entity. Though mobilization during the Russo-Japanese War (...) seemed to evince this super-organism, the increasingly contentious and complex society that emerged in the war’s aftermath caused Oka to turn first to Lamarckism and eventually to orthogenesis in the hopes of preserving the instincts needed for a viable nation-state. It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent. The article concludes by suggesting that Oka’s emphasis on degeneration, autarkic expansion, and, most especially, totalitarian submersion of individuals into the statist collectivity indicates a complex relationship between his evolutionism and fascist ideology, what recent scholarship has dubbed radical Shinto ultra-nationalism. (shrink)

Artykuł zamierza odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy w ogóle istnieje w Polsce subgatunek regionalnej powieści kryminalnej. W przeciwieństwie do polskiej rzeczywistości literackiej na zachodzie Europy, przede wszystkim w Niemczech, cieszy się on wśród czytelników sporą popularnością. Wyróżnia się nie tylko konkretnym (regionalnym) sznytem przestrzennym, ale też innymi elementami narracyjnymi, jak np. dialektem. Dlaczego jednak nad Wisłą do tej pory kryminał regionalny tkwi w niebycie lub przyjmuje inne kształty gatunkowe? Czy jest w stanie wyjść z cienia kryminałów historycznych albo miejskich? Właśnie te (...) zagadnienia znajdują się w centrum zainteresowania artykułu, który próbuje z perspektywy strukturalistycznej oraz tzw. teorii literatury regionalnej naświetlić kompozycję kryminału typu regio. Powołując się na pewien literacki przykład, ukazuje, jak polski regional crime fiction mógłby wyglądać, gdyby samo pojęcie zostało terminologicznie dopracowane i było przede wszystkim w samym dyskursie wykorzystywane. (shrink)

Yoga for Poles: a glance at the reception of Indian spirituality in Poland: The article starts with a review of data on the religious affiliations and involvement of contemporary Poles, with special focus on religious traditions originating in India. Then, outlined briefly is the Polish reception of the Hindu and Buddhist religio-philosophical ideas, regarding the period between the mid-nineteenth century, through the 1990s and on to the present day. Both the oriental religions and psychophysical exercises associated with yoga have various (...) connotations for Poles, who mostly identify themselves as Christians. Along with the gradually growing popularity of modern postural yoga, one can observe increasing fears and prejudices developing, ones which are usually based on ignorance or confusion. In the following part of the article the term “yoga” is elucidated. The author also discusses the origin and the significance of yoga as a phenomenon within the context of Hindu culture. Finally, she considers the question as to whether yoga, as it has been adopted in Polish society, should be rather associated with physical culture and a method of relaxation or with a religious movement and a spiritual path. In conclusion, the author addresses the issue of the alleged incompatibility and discrepancy between the non- -western ideas implied by yoga and the Roman Catholic worldview predominating in Poland. (shrink)

In his anthology of socio-political essays, Evolution and Human Life, Oka Asajirō (1868-1944), early twentieth century Japan's foremost advocate of evolutionism, developed a biological vision of the nation-state as super-organism that reflected the concerns and aims of German-inspired Meiji statism and anticipated aspects of radical ultra-nationalism. Drawing on non-Darwinian doctrines, Oka attempted to realize such a fused or organic state by enhancing social instincts that would bind the minzoku (ethnic nation) and state into a single living entity. Though mobilization during (...) the Russo-Japanese War seemed to evince this super-organism, the increasingly contentious and complex society that emerged in the war's aftermath caused Oka to turn first to Lamarckism and eventually to orthogenesis in the hopes of preserving the instincts needed for a viable nation-state. It is especially in the state interventionist measures that Oka finally came to endorse in order to forestall orthogenetically-driven degeneration that the technocratic proclivities of his statist orientation become most apparent. The article concludes by suggesting that Oka’s emphasis on degeneration, autarkic expansion, and, most especially, totalitarian submersion of individuals into the statist collectivity indicates a complex relationship between his evolutionism and fascist ideology, what recent scholarship has dubbed radical Shinto ultra-nationalism. (shrink)