KM (Knowledge Management) systems have recently been adopted within the realm of enterprise management. On the other hand, data mining technology is widely acknowledged within Information systems' R&D Divisions. Specially, acquisition of meaningful information from Web usage data has become one of the most exciting eras. In this paper, we employ a Web based KM system and propose a framework for applying Web Usage Mining technology to KM data. As it turns out, task duration varies according to different user operations (...) such as referencing a table-of-contents page, down-loading a target file, and writing to a bulletin board. This in turn makes it possible to easily predict the purpose of the user's task. By taking these observations into account, we segmented access log data manually. These results were compared with results abstained by applying the constant interval method. Next, we obtained a segmentation rule of Web access logs by applying a machine-learning algorithm to manually segmented access logs as training data. Then, the newly obtained segmentation rule was compared with other known methods including the time interval method by evaluating their segmentation results in terms of recall and precision rates and it was shown that our rule attained the best results in both measures. Furthermore, the segmented data were fed to an association rule miner and the obtained association rules were utilized to modify the Web structure. (shrink)

There is an increasing emphasis on clear disclosure of conflict of interest in medical communities, following repeated scientific frauds in clinical trials. However, incomplete COI statements continue to be prevalent in the medical community, as appears to have occurred in the Capecitabine for Residual Cancer as Adjuvant Therapy trial, which was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors of the article did not clearly report the roles of the Japan Breast Cancer Research Group, a sponsor and (...) funder of the study, although a majority of the Japanese authors served in important positions in the organization. Furthermore, the conflict of interest related to Chugai Pharmaceutical Company, a Japanese distributor of capecitabine, was not correctly disclosed. More transparent statements of conflict of interest and clarification of sponsors and funders’ roles, as well as rigorous review by academic journals are required to fairly interpret the findings of clinical trials, including and beyond the single case of the CREATE-X trial. (shrink)

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an (...) interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth. (shrink)

Translated text is chapt. 7, pt. 2 of Kirisutokyō no benshō.

As Hegel suggests, there is no philosophy apart from the history of philosophy. Each philosophy represents the spirit peculiar to its own period. Heidegger, too, holds that every philosophy is the sound of Being, and the history of philosophy is the history of Being. This is true for the Kyoto School philosophy of modern Japan represented by Kitaro Nishida, Hajime Tanabe, and Tetsuro Watsuji, who made to endeavor to construct a new synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophy in the critical, (...) confrontational, and creative ways in the given historical contexts. In particular, Tanabe attempts at the dialectical unification of Christianity and Buddhism in the last resort from the standpoint of Absolute Nothingness. As, in Whitehead’s conception of process, actuality is composed of the past objective being as the given data and the present subjective act of becoming, so it might be highly significant to analyze the constitutive elements of Tanabe’s system of thought from the historical and comparative contexts. (shrink)

Terence Irwin's edition of the Nicomachean Ethics offers more aids to the reader than are found in any modern English translation. It includes an Introduction, headings to help the reader follow the argument, explanatory notes on difficult or important passages, and a full glossary explaining Aristotle's technical terms. The Third Edition offers additional revisions of the translation as well as revised and expanded versions of the notes, glossary, and Introduction. Also new is an appendix featuring translated selections from related texts (...) of Aristotle. (shrink)

In June 2017, Japanese and Korean authors published the results of the CREATE‐X trial in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). After we identified their inadequate disclosures of Financial Conflict of Interests (FCOIs), the authors made a post‐publication correction of their FCOIs. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of the post‐publication corrections by the Japanese authors of the CREATE‐X trial. All the Japanese authors of the CREATE‐X trial were included in the study. We determined the (...) payments received by these authors in 2016 using publicly available data published by 78 pharmaceutical companies based on the stipulated Japanese transparency guidelines. We retrieved the original and revised versions of the FCOI disclosures as published on the NEJM website, and compared the payments reported by the pharmaceutical companies and the original and revised FCOI disclosures of the authors. Of the 12 authors, nine received payments made by the drug manufacturer involved in the CREATE‐X trial. Of these nine, only three (33.3%) originally disclosed their relationships, and another three (33.3%) later disclosed such relationships in the post‐publication corrections. Similarly, of the 11 receiving at least one payment from other manufacturers of breast cancer products, none correctly disclosed the payments in the original or the revised disclosure. In the CREATE‐X trial, FCOIs with pharmaceutical companies were not properly disclosed by 11 of the 12 Japanese authors, even after the post‐publication corrections, which highlights the need to pay more attention to the accuracy of FCOI disclosures in academic publications. (shrink)

Recent climate change statistics attribute over a quarter of carbon emissions to residential energy use in the United Kingdom. To address this, a building standard was introduced to aim to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption. This paper analyzes how such an environmental standard reconfigures the sociotechnological relations and practices of housing professionals that design, construct, and manage social housing. We focus on how actors engage with the standard’s recommendation for incorporating low and zero carbon technologies (...) into new buildings. We identify diverse practices that emerge from these engagements, which, we contend, have significant consequences for the working relationships of professional actors and for renewable energy provision. By being entwined in, and generative of actors’ practices, we argue that the Code becomes part of the sociotechnological relationships and infrastructures that shape energy provision. (shrink)

In this collection on the Kyoto School of Philosophy, the author offers the reader Tanabe's religious philosophy, but also, and for the first time, his ...

For a prime k, the embeddability of finite lattices are discussed for various kind of the MODkP degrees of recursive sets. In particular, all finite lattices are embeddable into the MODkP Turing degrees, whereas the non distributive lattice M3 is embeddable into the MOD2P many-one degrees but N5 is not.

Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), the Kyoto- School philosopher of modern Japan, attempts to interpret Aristotle's ontology as being involved in the logic of self-identical being without self-negative conversion in action from his own dialectical perspective. For Tanabe, the eternal essence or Form is to be mediated by the dynamic character of matter, i.e., the temporality pertinent to the changing movement. For Aristotle, however, the essence or pure activity as the principle of being is devoid of such a dynamic mediation, but is (...) rather regarded as the past being, i.e., what it should be originally and eternally. In other words, for Aristotle, evil and matter are the lacks of goodness and the eternal Form that are identical with the essence of the individual substance. Evil is to be self-negatively mediated to goodness in free action through conversion in Tanabe's perspective. Movement pertaining to matter is not simply an incompletion of pure activity, but is rather self-negatively converted into the activity as the transcendent principle of the dialectical unification of time and eternity, matter and Form, evil and Goodness. The individual existence has freedom to unify the self-contradistinctive opposed moments, i.e., subjective action and objective being in a way of mutually negating conversion. The difference between Tanabe and Aristotle lies in that for Tanabe practice is relevant to the future, whereas for Aristotle contemplation is concerned with eternity as invariable and imperishable being since the past. While Aristotle's logic is confined to the self-identity of being in contemplation, Tanabe's logic is structured by the triadic elements of individuality, species as the relative universal, and genus as the absolute universal in terms of the negative conversion in action. (shrink)

Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), the Kyoto- School philosopher of modern Japan, attempts to interpret Aristotle's ontology as being involved in the logic of self-identical being without self-negative conversion in action from his own dialectical perspective. For Tanabe, the eternal essence or Form is to be mediated by the dynamic character of matter, i.e., the temporality pertinent to the changing movement. For Aristotle, however, the essence or pure activity as the principle of being is devoid of such a dynamic mediation, but is (...) rather regarded as the past being, i.e., what it should be originally and eternally. In other words, for Aristotle, evil and matter are the lacks of goodness and the eternal Form that are identical with the essence of the individual substance. Evil is to be self-negatively mediated to goodness in free action through conversion in Tanabe's perspective. Movement pertaining to matter is not simply an incompletion of pure activity, but is rather self-negatively converted into the activity as the transcendent principle of the dialectical unification of time and eternity, matter and Form, evil and Goodness. The individual existence has freedom to unify the self-contradistinctive opposed moments, i.e., subjective action and objective being in a way of mutually negating conversion. The difference between Tanabe and Aristotle lies in that for Tanabe practice is relevant to the future, whereas for Aristotle contemplation is concerned with eternity as invariable and imperishable being since the past. While Aristotle's logic is confined to the self-identity of being in contemplation, Tanabe's logic is structured by the triadic elements of individuality, species as the relative universal, and genus as the absolute universal in terms of the negative conversion in action. (shrink)

Tanabe Hajime, another pole of the so-called Kyoto-School of Philosophy of modern Japan, attempts to construct a dialectical, triadic logic of genus, species and individual as a creative synthesis between Eastern and Western philosophy. Although the formal pattern of his method is influenced by the Hegelian dialectic, the way of his thinking is rather prevailed by Kantian dualism. This makes a sharp contrast to his mentor Nishida Kitaro, whose logic of Topos or Place qua Absolute Nothingness is criticized as all-embracing (...) and static in character by him. The difference between them might be parallel to that of Greek and Latin theology concerning the Trinity. Tanabe never presupposes any preexistent entity as the primordial One in the eternal dimension, but rather maintains the individuality as the free subjective agent in the field of history. The dichotomy between the universal and the individual is overcome in and through the mediation of the third term— the species — as the negatively self-realized, specific form of the genus. The species, however, turns out to be the self-estrangement, when it loses the perpetually negative mediation of the free subjective activity of the individual. (shrink)

Tanabe Hajime, the Kyoto School philosopher of modern Japan, proposes a new idea of the relationship between religion and politics in terms of the triadic logic of species that is motivated by the religious moment of repentance. Even the state existence has the inherently radical evil as in the case of the individual person, due to its duality of the species level of being. This means that the state existence is on the way of actualization of the genus like universality, (...) while always involving in the regression into the past substrative being which prevents it from realizing its own universality. In other words, the state existence is not absolute as such but rather a balanced being between ideality and reality, absolute and relative. This entails that politics is in need of perpetual reformation in connection with the religious act of repentance for sin and evil deeply lurked in human beings from time immemorial. Tanabe’s Logic of Species as the dialectic elucidates the negative mediation of politics and religion from the metanoetic perspective and sheds a new light on the relation of world religion and politics today. (shrink)

The historical origins of the Kyoto School of Philosophy of modern Japan, represented by Kitaro Nishida and Hajime Tanabe, may be derived from both the ancient Chinese idea of Change and the ancient Indian Upanishadic idea of the mutual identity of Brahman and Atman. The ancient Chinese idea of Change signifies change as well as non-change, and even their dialectical unification. Both origins are structured by the self-identity of the opposed in logic, and these historical prototypes have been developed into (...) the various forms of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist philosophy. The notion of Nothingness or Emptiness rather than Being has been set up as the fundamental principle. The principle of Nothingness as ultimate reality has been connected with the logic of self-identity of theopposed, and this is evident in Nishida’s concept of the self-identity in absolute contradistinction that is equivalent to the Place of Absolute Nothingness. Even though Nishida’s idea of Place is directly and explicitly influenced by the ancient Greek idea of Topos, it has indirectly and implicitly been affected by the traditional agricultural society as well, in which the land is regarded as the self-identical substratum despite the cyclic time of the four-seasons change. The ancient Chinese idea of Change also reflects the agricultural society in which the cyclic time plays an important role on the basis of the unchanging self-identical land as the underlying substratum. Nishida succeeds in establishing the new logical expression of Eastern traditional thought, deeply hidden in consciousness, in relation toWestern philosophy. The uniqueness of Nishida’s idea of Place may have its main source in the traditional agricultural background, and in this sense his way of thinking may be rural in character. On the other hand, Tanabe, though following Nishida at first, turns to making criticism of the mentor with the establishment of the triadic logic of species as the dialectic, which is characterized by the perpetual self-negating conversion in action. In contrast to Nishida, Tanabe represents the urban type of thinking, which is in pursuit of transforming in life. While Nishida’s idea of Absolute Nothingness has an affinity with the ancient Chinese philosopher Laotzu’s idea of Nothingness from and into which every entity comes and goes, Tanabe’s concept of Absolute Nothingness as the principle ofconversion is more closed to the Buddhist idea of sunyata, i.e., Emptiness, which is devoid of any substance in itself. As regards evil, the difference between them is obvious in that for Nishida evil and time or history disappear into the ultimate horizon or place of Nothingness with the tendency toward a kind of monism of goodness, whereas for Tanabe evil copes with goodness and retains its own status throughout, never being reduced to the opposed. Even if so, both of them, however, fail to construct a philosophy of history from the epochal or durational viewpoint, compared to Heidegger and Jaspers. (shrink)

Some researchers claim that uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experiences because uncertainty toward an emotion-eliciting event prolongs attention to that event. However, some results contradict this claim. We assumed that curiosity rather than uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experience via attention, and that attention and emotional experience are prolonged only when uncertainty elicits curiosity. This assumption is based on the information gap theory, which proposes that curiosity increases with uncertainty, but that curiosity decreases at a certain level of (...) uncertainty. We conducted a survey study to investigate the relationships among curiosity, uncertainty, attention and duration of positive and negative emotional experiences. The results showed that curiosity, but not uncertainty, prolonged the duration of emotional experiences and the process was completely mediated by attention both for positive and negative emotions. Moreover, uncertainty prolonged the duration of emotional experiences only when uncertainty elicited curiosity, which in turn prolonged attention to the emotion-eliciting event. (shrink)

The members of the Six gene family were identified as homologues of Drosophila sine oculis which is essential for compound-eye formation. The Six proteins are characterized by the Six domain and the Six-type homeodomain, both of which are essential for specific DNA binding and for cooperative interactions with Eya proteins. Mammals possess six Six genes which can be subdivided into three subclasses, and mutations of Six genes have been identified in human genetic disorders. Characterization of Six genes from various animal (...) phyla revealed the antiquity of this gene family and roles of its members in several different developmental contexts. Some members retain conserved roles as components of the Pax-Six-Eya-Dach regulatory network, which may have been established in the common ancestor of all bilaterians as a toolbox controlling cell proliferation and cell movement during embryogenesis. Gene duplications and cis-regulatory changes may have provided a basis for diverse functions of Six genes in different animal lineages. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Chance Neutrality is the thesis that, conditional on some proposition being true, its chance of being true should be a matter of practical indifference. The aim of this article is to examine whether Chance Neutrality is a requirement of rationality. We prove that given Chance Neutrality, the Principal Principle entails a thesis called Linearity; the centerpiece of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory. With this in mind, we argue that the Principal Principle is a requirement of practical rationality but (...) that Linearity is not and, hence, that Chance Neutrality is not rationally required. (shrink)

An English language translation accompanies the original Greek text of Aristotle's book about the nature of the state, constitutions, revolutions, democracy, and oligarchy.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions (...) and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ rishon. Sheʼelot u-teshuvot be-ʻinyanim shonim mi-toratenu ha-ḳedoshah shebi-khetav ṿeshe-be-ʻal peh -- ḥeleḳ sheni. Leḳet mikhtavim u-maʼamarim le-ḥizuḳ ṿe-hitʻorerut ba-ʻavodat ha-Shem yitbarakh -- ḥeleḳ shelishi. Leḳet mikhtavim me-a.m. ṿe-r. ha-Rav Ḥayim Shaʼul z. l.l. h.h. Grainiman baʻal ha-ḥidushim u-veʼurim".

Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify (...) four desiderata that, I contend, any such justification should satisfy, and explain how my account meets these desiderata, unlike some previous accounts. (shrink)

In this book, developed by a group of collaborating scholars in bioethics from different European countries, an overview is given of the most salient themes in present-day bioethics. The themes are discussed in order to enable the reader to have an in-depth overview of the state of the art in bioethics. Introductory chapters will guide the reader through the relevant dimensions of a particular area, while subsequent case discussions will help the reader to apply the ethical theories to specific clinical (...) problems and health policy queries. The book focuses on perspectives typical for the European context. This highlights not only particular bioethical themes such as social justice, choices in health care, and health policy (e.g., in post-communist countries), it also emphasizes specific approaches in ethical theory, in relation to Continental philosophies such as phenomenology and hermeneutics. Because of its articulation of what is typical for the European health care setting as well as for bioethical debate, this book is unique in comparison to existing textbooks in bioethics. The book is an introductory textbook acquainting the reader with the major issues in present-day health care as well as the various theoretical and practical approaches to clarify these issues. (shrink)

This paper offers a unified explanation for the procreation asymmetry and the non-identity thesis – two of the most intractable puzzles in population ethics. According to the procreation asymmetry, there are moral reasons not to create lives that are not worth living but no moral reasons to create lives that are worth living. I explain the procreation asymmetry by arguing that there are moral reasons to prevent the bad, but no moral reasons to promote the good. Various explanations for the (...) procreation asymmetry have failed to explain the non-identity thesis: if one could create a person with a good life or a different person with a better life, one has a moral reason to create the better life. I argue that reflections on the misfortune of unfulfilled potential allow us to circumvent the non-identity problem. (shrink)