One of six commentaries on “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” by Daniel Callahan, from the January‐February 2013 issue.

In contemporary nihilism the nihility stretches, so to speak, into the site of God’s being, and in this way becomes an abyss. And upon this godless nihility that has become an abyss, all life, not only biological life and souls, but even spiritual and personal life, manifests the form of something fundamentally meaningless. At the same time, it is furthermore claimed that human beings can only truly become free and independent and become true subjects when they resolutely ground themselves upon (...) this abyssal nihility. (shrink)

In _Religion and Nothingness_ the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy lays the foundation of thought for a world in the making, for a world united beyond the differences of East and West. Keiji Nishitani notes the irreversible trend of Western civilization to nihilism, and singles out the conquest of nihilism as _the_ task for contemporary philosophy. Nihility, or relative nothingness, can only be overcome by being radicalized to Emptiness, or absolute nothingness. Taking absolute nothingness as the (...) fundamental notion in rational explanations of the Eastern experience of human life, Professor Nishitani examines the relevance of this notion for contemporary life, and in particular for Western philosophical theories and religious believes. Everywhere his basic intention remains the same: to direct our modern predicament to a resolution through this insight. The challenge that the thought of Keiji Nishitani presents to the West, as a modern version of an Eastern speculative tradition that is every bit as old and as variegated as our own, is one that brings into unity the principle of reality and the principle of salvation. In the process, one traditional Western idea after another comes under scrutiny: the dichotomy of faith and reason, of being and substance, the personal and transcendent notions of God, the exaggerated role given to the knowing ego, and even the Judeo-Christian view of history itself. _Religion and Nothingness_ represents the major work of one of Japan's most powerful and committed philosophical minds. (shrink)

We propose a novel probabilistic image selection method for the Web image gathering system we proposed before. It employed two-step processing: (1) Gather HTML files of Web pages related to given keywords, analyze them and fetch only Web images expected to be highly related to the keywords. (2) Select only relevant images from the gathered images based on the image-feature-based clustering. In this paper, we propose building a generative model based on the Gaussian mixture model to represent the distribution of (...) image features of images related to the given keywords, and applying it to select images instead of the processing (2). We call the new system ``Probabilistic Image Collector''. We show the effectiveness of our proposed system by the experimental results. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe a generic image classification system with an automatic knowledge acquisition mechanism from the World Wide Web. Due to the recent spread of digital imaging devices, the demand for generic image classification/recognition of various kinds of real world scenes becomes greater. To realize it, visual knowledge on various kinds of scenes is required, and we have to prepare a large number of learning images. Therefore, commercial image collections such as Corel Image Gallery are widely used in (...) conventional studies on generic image classification. However, they are not suitable as learning images for generic image classification, since they do not include various kinds of images. Then, in stead of commercial image collections we propose utilizing of a large number of images gathered from the World-Wide Web by a Web image-gathering system as learning images. Images on the Web have huge diversity in general. So that we take advantage of the diversity of Web images for a generic image classification task, which is the first attempt among this kinds of work. By the experiments, we show that utilizing of Web images as learning images is effective and promising for generic image classification. (shrink)

Prenant acte de la fondation aristotélicienne de la métaphysique comme science de l’être en tant qu’être, Nishitani interroge la posture philosophique qui, sous-jacente à ce geste initial, le détermine de l’intérieur. En fait, c’est la conception même de la philosophie, comprise comme pensée objectivante et analytique, que remet en question Nishitani en retraçant la genèse de la question de l’être chez les prédécesseurs d’Aristote. Et c’est à l’aune de cette question de l’être qu’il réévalue l’héritage aristotélicien de l’ousia, et plus (...) spécialement le rapport de l’essence et de l’existence à l’être-vrai à l’intérieur de cette question de l’être. (shrink)

Dans cet article publié deux ans après la parution de son maître ouvrage, Qu’est-ce que la religion? , auquel il est fait allusion dans les dernières lignes, Nishitani jette un regard rétrospectif sur son parcours philosophique. Plutôt que de rédiger un essai autobiographique, l’auteur y adopte une perspective analytique sur sa propre démarche et s’efforce d’expliciter la position philosophique qui est la sienne, qu’il a forgée très tôt dans sa carrière et à partir de laquelle il faut comprendre sa pratique (...) de la philosophie. Tout l’intérêt de ce texte réside dans la jonction qu’il établit entre les préoccupations du jeune Nishitani pour la question du nihilisme et ses réflexions de maturité, imprégnées de l’héritage spirituel du bouddhisme. (shrink)

In recent years several books by major figures in Japan's modern philosophical tradition have appeared in English, exciting readers by their explorations of the borderlands between philosophy and religion. What has been wanting, however, is a book in a Western language to elucidate the life and thought of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), Japan's first philosopher of world stature and the originator of what has come to be called the Kyoto School. No one is more qualified to write such a book than (...) Nishitani Keiji, whose lifetime coincides with the rise and flowering of the Kyoto School and whose own critical contribution to Japanese thought has been so important. _Nishida Kitaro_ is a translation of essays Nishitani wrote about his teacher from 1936 to 1968 and published as a book in 1985. This series of meditations by one master on another provides a remarkable, living portrait of Nishida the person and conveys the enthusiasm he aroused in his students. Examining Nishida's most important work, _An Inquiry into the Good_, Nishitani penetrates to the core of his thought and presents it in language that is a marvel of clarity. (shrink)

Al-Kind la littcrivant sur les mcouverte des trcrivit sur ce sujet a survditions et des traductions de l'un et l'autre textes, ainsi que les deux traductions latines faites du chapitre dans Les quarantes chapitres et des commentaires de la proce par al-Kindī.

These volumes present the text of Abū Ma’͑šar’s _Great Introduction to Astrology_ in Arabic and Greek and the divergences in the Latin translations. It provides a fully-comprehensive account of traditional astrological doctrine and its philosophical bases.