This collected volume of leading specialists in this field offers not only a comprehensive understanding of the medieval concept of nature, but also instructive information for our environment crisis because of continuity and discontinuity between these two ages.

Modal realism is an ontological position made familiar by David Lewis, according to which there exist possible worlds other than the actual world that we inhabit. It is hard to uphold modal realism, and indeed modal realism has only a few advocates. However, as most contemporary metaphysicians agree, this does not mean that it is easy to refute modal realism. In this paper, I argue against modal realism from a metaontological point of view. First, I provide a precise formulation of (...) modal realism based on Lewis’ discussion of modal realism. Second, I argue that modal realism is undermined unless it incorporates a view of metaontology known as ontological realism. Third, I point out that if modal realism incorporates ontological realism, it comes into conflict with its own formulation. (shrink)

Modal realism is an ontological claim according to which there exist many possible worlds just like our actual world. Since it is so hard to believe, modal realism has only a few advocates. However, it is well known that alternative theories have serious problems. It is one of the central issues of metaphysics to find a persuasive way to reject modal realism. In this paper, I will suggest that it could be accomplished with help of metaontology-one of the topics of (...) metaphysics which has recently discussed intensely. I will show how we could argue against modal realism from the metaontological point of view. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to defend Presentism. First of all, I explore how Presentism diverges to its versions and show that none of them, which include the currently standard Presentism that invokes tense logic, are tenable. Next, I point out that some philosophers argue that by replacing the Quinean criterion of existence with the Truthmaker Principle, another version of Presentism, which invokes tensed properties, can emerges. However, this version has a highly implausible conclusion. Finally, I argue that it can (...) be avoided by taking the evidences of the past or future truths to be typical truthmakers of them. (shrink)

Doctrinal classification or the panjiao 判教 system of Chinese Buddhism has been rediscovered and renewed in modern East Asian philosophy since both the Kyoto School and New Confucianism clarified the philosophical meaning of this intellectual tradition. The theoretical relation between these two modern reconsiderations, however, has not yet been studied. I analyze the theory of panjiao in Kōyama Iwao 高山岩男 and Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 so as to identify and extract, despite their apparent irrelevance, the same type of philosophical argument concerning (...) the ontological character of yuanjiao 圓教. My analysis shows that Mou’s distinction between the “two-door mind” paradigm and Buddhistic ontology in his interpretation of Tiantai 天台 Buddhism corresponds to Kōyama’s distinction between an idealistic system and the existential turn in his generalized panjiao system. (shrink)

An application of the entropic theory of perception to evolutionary systems indicates that environmental entropy increases will exert pressures on an organism to adapt. We speculate that the instability caused by such environmental changes will also cause an increase in the mutation rate of organisms leading to an eventual increase in their complexity. Such complexity generation allows organisms to adapt to the more entropic environment. Although we conclude that increases in environmental entropy cause an organism to evolve into a more (...) complex organism, increases in entropy may not be necessary for complexity generationper se. (shrink)

About Japan at the beginning of the postmodernity, through the reading of David Pollack’s Fracture of Meaning and the comment of positions on is history of two young Japanese philosophers : Kôyama Iwao and Kôsaka Masaaki, Naoki Sakai problematise relations between universalism and particulartism. The identity of Japan which dialectise with which of China, exists only as Jar as Japan break loose as a particular object in the Occidental field. The criticism of the West and of modern expressed in its (...) denunciation of the monistic history reveals that all the rhetoric of the anti-modernity is a coverage without principles of all which is modern. Because world is mainly a sphere of heterogeneity and plurality, history has to be interpreted as a synthesis of time and internationalized spaces. (shrink)