"This book aims to shine light on the scene created by "belief" and "knowledge" and how they influenced the history of ideas at turning points interweaving its important epochs." -- Preface.

To understand Plato’s Republic as a whole, we must know his notion of injustice as well as that of justice, since he makes a comparison between the life of justice and the life of injustice. Prior to his detailed analyses of injustice in Books IV, VIII, and IX, Plato discusses injustice philosophically even in Book I. In this paper I deal with 351b-352b where Plato clarifies the function of injustice by appeal to the analogy between city and individual. According to (...) Plato, injustice in the city causes hatred in each citizen, which results in the civil war and fighting among them, leading to the destruction of the city. Analogously, Plato discusses the function of injustice in the individual, showing that hatred is the most fundamental function of injustice. Plato’s analogy, though, includes two remarkablediscrepancies between city and individual. First, justice in the individual causes a conflict among beliefs and desires, which makes him incapable of doing anything, while social injustice still allows the city lacking its unity to do something. Second, hatred or hostility social injustice engender in each citizen is directed toward others, whereas injustice in the individual produces self-disgust of the whole soul, functioning as the destructive principle of the soul. This is howthis argument serves to foreshadow Plato’s analyses of injustice in the remainder of the Republic. (shrink)

This paper reports on a quiz robot experiment in which we explore similarities and differences in human participant speech, gaze, and bodily conduct in responding to a robot’s speech, gaze, and bodily conduct across two languages. Our experiment involved three-person groups of Japanese and English-speaking participants who stood facing the robot and a projection screen that displayed pictures related to the robot’s questions. The robot was programmed so that its speech was coordinated with its gaze, body position, and gestures in (...) relation to transition relevance places, key words, and deictic words and expressions in both languages. Contrary to findings on human interaction, we found that the frequency of English speakers’ head nodding was higher than that of Japanese speakers in human-robot interaction. Our findings suggest that the coordination of the robot’s verbal and non-verbal actions surrounding TRPs, key words, and deictic words and expressions is important for facilitating HRI irrespective of participants’ native language. Keywords: coordination of verbal and non-verbal actions; robot gaze comparison between English and Japanese; human-robot interaction ; transition relevance place ; conversation analysis. (shrink)