The purpose of this paper is to clarify Prajñākaragupta’s view of mental perception ( mānasapratyakṣa ), with special emphasis on the relationship between mental perception and self-awareness. Dignāga, in his PS 1.6ab, says: “mental [perception] ( mānasa ) is [of two kinds:] a cognition of an [external] object and awareness of one’s own mental states such as passion.” According to his commentator Jinendrabuddhi, a cognition of an external object and awareness of an internal object such as passion are here equally (...) called ‘mental perception’ in that neither depends on any of the five external sense organs. Dharmakīrti, on the other hand, considers mental perception to be a cognition which arises after sensory perception, and does not call self-awareness ‘mental perception’. According to Prajñākaragupta, mental perception is the cognition which determines an object as ‘this’ ( idam iti jñānam ). Unlike Dharmakīrti, he holds that the mental perception follows not only after the sensory perception of an external object, but also after the awareness of an internal object. The self-awareness which Dignāga calls ‘mental perception’ is for Prajñākaragupta the cognition which determines as ‘this’ an internal object, or an object which consists in a cognition; it is to be differentiated from the cognition which cognizes cognition itself, that is, self-awareness in its original sense. (shrink)

How is it possible to say that truth can be of one kind at the conventional level and totally different in the ultimate plane? As Matilal ( 1971 , p. 154) points out, Kumārila (ca. 600–650), a Mīmāṃsaka philosopher, claims that the Buddhist doctrine of two truths is “a kind of philosophical ‘double-talk’.” It is Prajñākaragupta (ca. 750–810), a Buddhist logician, who tries to give a direct answer to this question posed by Kumārila from the Buddhist side. He argues that (...) even a Mīmāṃsaka cannot demonstrate the validity ( prāmāṇya ) of the Veda without accepting two truth levels. His point is this. Consider the proposition to be proved: the Veda is valid. If the Veda is already known as valid, then it is useless to prove this proposition. But if it is already known as invalid, then it is impossible to prove this proposition. Therefore in the argument to prove the proposition, the Veda is not to be regarded either as valid or as invalid. This means that at the first stage of the argument one has the concept of the Veda as neutral in validity. However, as soon as one acquires the knowledge of the Veda as valid through the argument, one has to repudiate such a conception of the Veda. The acceptance of the Veda as neutral in validity is to the acceptance of the Veda as valid as the conventional truth is to the ultimate truth. (shrink)

In this article Kobayashi Toshiaki discusses the importance in all periods of Karatani’s oeuvre of the notion of an “exterior” that necessarily falls beyond the bounds of a system, together with the notion of “singularity” as that which cannot be contained within a “universal.” The existential dread vis-à-vis the uncanny other that Karatani in his early works of literary criticism had initially found to be the underlying tone in Sōseki’s works remained with Karatani himself throughout his career and is (...) what had drawn him closer to philosophy. This sense of the “exterior” to—or other than—the normality of consciousness and the meaningfulness of the world is then extended and applied as the “exterior to systems” in his analyses of logical, mathematical, and linguistic systems, in his reading of Marx’s discussion of capitalist economics, and most recently in his analysis of commodity exchange between communities. (shrink)

The effect of Internet use as a mediating variable on self-efficacy as it relates to the cognition of network-changing possibility (i.e., connecting people or groups with different social backgrounds) was examined. The results showed that Internet use (i.e., the frequency of sending e-mail, friends made on the Internet) had a positive effect on the cognition of network-changing possibility. The cognition that it is possible to connect people with different social backgrounds by using the Internet also had a positive effect on (...) self-efficacy. On the other hand, the cognition that it is possible to find people or groups who share beliefs and interests by using the Internet negatively affected self-efficacy. Hence, it was found that the effect of Internet use on self-efficacy was different as a function of cognition of network-changing possibility. (shrink)

Après un bref survol de l’esthétique britannique au xxe siècle, les objections de Wollheim à la théorie « idéelle » de l’art, qu’il attribue à Croce et à Collingwood, sont présentées. Dans une deuxième partie, les critiques de Bosanquet à l’endroit de la théorie de Croce sont examinées, pour en conclure qu’on ne peut pas lui attribuer la théorie « idéelle ». Il en va de même pour Collingwood, dont les grandes lignes de son esthétique sont présentées dans la troisième (...) partie, dont le but accessoire est de montrer que sa théorie est par ailleurs plus satisfaisante que celle de Bosanquet ; elle est en réalité très proche de celle de Wollheim, malgré les dires de ce dernier. Dans la conclusion, on revient sur le motif des théories de l’art des idéalistes britanniques, à savoir le rôle social que doit jouer l’oeuvre d’art, pour montrer toute l’actualité de la théorie de Collingwood, pour qui l’oeuvre d’art est le produit non pas de l’artiste seul, mais de l’artiste et de son audience.After a brief survey of British aesthetics in the XXth century, Wollheim’s objections to the ‘ideal’ theory, which he imputes to Croce and Collingwood, are presented. In the second part, Bosanquet’s critique of Croce’s theory is presented in order to show that one cannot attribute to him the ‘ideal’ theory. The same goes for Collingwood, whose aesthetic theory is sketched in the third part, which argues accessorily that it is more satisfactory than Bosanquet’s ; it is in fact, his own claims to the contrary notwithstanding, rather close to Wollheim’s. The conclusion comes back to the central motivation for British Idealist theories of art, namely that the work of art has a social role to play, in order to show the actuality of Collingwood, who viewed the work of art not as the product of the artist alone, but from the artist and the audience alike. (shrink)

In particular, as we shall see, Collingwood is often dismissed as having held an indefensible, outmoded ‘ideal’ theory, according to which the work of art is primarily ‘mental’, while his potential role in current debates is simply ignored. I will argue that this view is largely mistaken.

We investigate stationarity of types over models in simple theories. In particular, we show that in simple theories with finite SU-rank, any complete type over a model having Cantor-Bendixson rank is stationary.

For a robot to cohabit with people, it should be able to learn people’s nonverbal social behavior from experience. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method for recognizing gestures used in interaction and communication. Our method enables robots to learn gestures incrementally during human–robot interaction in an unsupervised manner. It allows the user to leave the number and types of gestures undefined prior to the learning. The proposed method (HB-SOINN) is based on a self-organizing incremental neural network (...) and the hidden Markov model. We have added an interactive learning mechanism to HB-SOINN to prevent a single cluster from running into a failure as a result of polysemy of being assigned more than one meaning. For example, a sentence: “Keep on going left slowly” has three meanings such as, “Keep on (1)”, “going left (2)”, “slowly (3)”. We experimentally tested the clustering performance of the proposed method against data obtained from measuring gestures using a motion capture device. The results show that the classification performance of HB-SOINN exceeds that of conventional clustering approaches. In addition, we have found that the interactive learning function improves the learning performance of HB-SOINN. (shrink)