Although it seems natural to consider the last fifty years the contemporary period, because this year (1995) punctuates a historical period celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, this essay will limit the term “contemporary” roughly to the last twenty‐five years. The reason for this demarcation is that at the beginning of the 1970s, we witnessed a new philosophical mood emerging in Japan. Prior to that period, the Japanese philosophical scene was dominated by the study of (...) European thinkers, such as Husserl, Heiddeger, Sartre, and Merleau Ponty. The end of the students' movement in the early 1970s also marked the end of the ideological disputes launched by Marxism since the early 1930s. Instead, it appears that the Japanese intelligentsia in the early 1970s began to acutely sense problems inherent in the Eurocentric philosophy which had served as a foundation for Western science and technology. This occurred largely through a recognition that scientific technology had yielded, as its unexpected byproduct, a “mind/heartless” society, pollution, and global ecological crises, which had permeated almost all parts of the Japanese archipelago to threaten the psyche of the Japanese people and their mode of living. In this essay, I should like to briefly introduce three representative contemporary Japanese thinkers who have addressed some aspects of these problems in their writings. They are Nakamura Yujiro, Sakabe Megumi, and Yuasa Yasuo. (Because of the limitations of space, this article will restrict itself to these three thinkers, but this should not suggest that there are no other representative thinkers in Japan. Consider particularly those belonging to the neo Kyoto school, such as Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaki, Koyama Iwao, Umehara Takeshi and Ueda Shizuteru. Nishitani's works are well known in the English speaking world, along with those of Abe Masao. Out side of the Kyoto school, we can also mention other thinkers, such as Matsumoto Masao, Hiromatsu Wataru and Ichikawa Hiroshi.). (shrink)

One short passage on what is called the Receptacle in Plato’s Timaeus has been the subject of much controversy since Cherniss presented an alternative reading of it in 1954. In this paper, I criticize an influential argument presented by Zeyl for a traditional reading, and propose a new interpretation which adopts the alternative reading on important sentences of the passage, but is not accompanied by the defects of Cherniss’ interpretation.

1. Kodai shisō -- 3. Chūsei shisō -- 4. Kindai shisō -- 5. Tōzai bunka no kōryū -- 6. Shōtoku Taishi -- 7. Kinsei Nihon no hihanteki seishin -- 8. Nihon shūkyō no kindaisei.

1. Katachi no odissei -- 2. Rinshō no chi -- 3. Aku no tetsugaku nōto 4. Zōho 21-seiki mondaigun ; Jutsugoshū II -- 5. Shūkyō to kagaku; Jinruichi shō -- 6. Shinpen Nihon bunka ni okeru aku to tsumi ; Shōnenba -- 7. Jutsugoteki sekai to seido -- 8. Seishin no fūga -- 9. Shinpen Pasukaru to sono jidai -- 10. Shinpen kindai Nihon ni okeru seido to shisō.

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the College international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of (...) place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

This article addresses how Asian racialization grounds contemporary social media experimentation on—and comprehensive surveillance of—users. To make this point, we focus on the relationship between the sentimentality of white benevolence as an expression of US empire and the social scientific history of sentiment analysis, which derives from early twentieth-century analyses of women workers and Japanese internment camps. The drive to “read” the inscrutable other—framed as a benevolent alternative to direct coercion—underlies methods to better capture and control individuals by understanding their (...) reactions within experimental and disruptive environments. In tracing these histories, we contribute to larger efforts to unpack the centrality of racial formations to current forms of social media and to reveal how contemporary digital campaigns to protect Asian Americans sustain the mutually constitutive logic of white love and white hate. We conclude by reading for moments of Asian affective opacity as ways to move beyond the sentimental economy of love and hate that so easily feeds the digital economy of sentiment analysis. These examples of opacity make possible contradictory meanings to any particular affective response and makes possible practices of care that coexist with, but exceed, the extractive logics of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

This volume concludes the two-volume sequel to Masao Abe's Zen and Western Thought. Like its companion, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, this work contains many previously published essays and papers by Abe. Here he clarifies the true meaning of Buddhist emptiness in comparison with the Aristotelian notion of substance and the Whiteheadean notion of process.

Resumo: Este artigo procura responder à pergunta se Marx possui de fato um método dialético próprio. A argumentação está dividida em três partes. Na primeira, procura-se mostrar que as críticas de Marx ao método absoluto de Hegel poderiam ser tomadas por este como meras explicações sobre o seu próprio método. Na segunda parte, tecem-se algumas considerações sobre o que é o método dialético de Hegel, a partir das figuras da imediaticidade e da imediaticidade mediada. Na última parte, apresentam-se três exemplos (...) de como Marx pratica, em sua crítica à Economia Política, exatamente aquilo que criticou no método dialético de Hegel.: This paper attempts to answer the question whether Marx really has an own dialectic method. My argument is divided into three parts. In the first, I try to show that Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s absolute method could be taken by Hegel as mere explanations of his own method. In the second part, I offer some considerations about what Hegel’s dialectical method is based on the figures of immediacy and mediated immediacy. In the last part, I present three examples of how Marx practices in his critique of Political Economy exactly what he criticized in Hegel’s dialectic method. (shrink)

The Komori–Kashima problem, that asks whether the implicational intermediate logics axiomatizable by formulas minimal in classical logic are only intuitionistic logic and classical logic, has stood for over a decade. In this paper, we give a counter-example to this problem. Additionally, we also give some open problems derived from this result.

1 Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Its Significance and Future Task1 The contemporary world is rapidly shrinking due to the remarkable advancement of science ...

Wenn auch das Postulat vollständiger Autarkie in der Gegenwart an Bedeutung verloren hat, so ist doch die Forderung nach einer begrenzten Autarkie der Staaten wenigstens in bestimmten Wirtschaftsbereichen grundsätzlich unentbehrlich für ihr friedliches Nebeneinanderbestehen. Das damit angesprochene Problem läßt sich am negativ zu bewertenden Beispiel Japans sehr deutlich aufzeigen, einem Land, das einerseits seinen ungewöhnlichen Reichtum der Ausbeutung anderer nicht industrieller Staaten verdankt, das andererseits jedoch im Bereich der Agrarwirtschaft vom Ausland abhängig ist. In einer solchen unbalancierten wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit liegen (...) prinzipielle Gefahren für eine friedliche Koexistenz. (shrink)

The recent discovery of the medullary circuit driving “hunger responses” – reduced thermogenesis and promoted feeding – has greatly expanded our knowledge on the central neural networks for energy homeostasis. However, how hypothalamic hunger and satiety signals generated under fasted and fed conditions, respectively, control the medullary autonomic and somatic motor mechanisms remains unknown. Here, in reviewing this field, we propose two hypothalamomedullary neural pathways for hunger and satiety signaling. To trigger hunger signaling, neuropeptide Y activates a group of neurons (...) in the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVH), which then stimulate an excitatory pathway to the medullary circuit to drive the hunger responses. In contrast, melanocortin‐mediated satiety signaling activates a distinct group of PVH neurons, which then stimulate a putatively inhibitory pathway to the medullary circuit to counteract the hunger signaling. The medullary circuit likely contains inhibitory and excitatory premotor neurons whose alternate phasic activation generates the coordinated masticatory motor rhythms to promote feeding. (shrink)

Wegner's monograph presents the view that conscious will is a feeling that we experience when we perform an action through a mechanistic process of the brain, rather than a mental force that causes the action. The view is supported by several lines of evidence in which conscious will is dissociated from the actual performance of voluntary movements, as in automatism. The book further extends an insightful analysis of the mental system behind the illusion of conscious will and inspires neuroscientists to (...) reflect on its neural substrates. (shrink)