This article attempts to examine Nihonjinron, the popular essentialist genre in Japan, which purports to analyse Japan's quintessence and cultural core by using three concepts - nationality, ethnicity and culture - synonymously. The focus of the paper will be placed on: (1) the widespread political bases of Nihonjinron and its internal divisions; (2) its changing features in the face of globalization; (3) the possible productive uses of Nihonjinron at both conceptual and theoretical levels; and (4) the dilemma of inter-societal and (...) intra-societal cultural relativism, which the Nihonjinron debate has highlighted. The paper presents an outline of an inductive, pluralistic, multicultural model of analysis as a possible alternative. (shrink)

生命科学技術をめぐる倫理的・法的・社会的問題について、社会の意思決定に重要な役割を果たす「生命倫理委員会」。理論と事例をつなぐ立場から、公共政策としての生命倫理を体系的に論じる。.

As biomedical research with volunteers was expanded in the United States, the rule of subject selection, constituting scientific and ethical criteria, was generated in 1981 to resolve selection bias in research. Few historical studies, however, have investigated the role of this new hybrid rule in institutional review systems. This paper describes how bioethics commissions and federal agencies have created the subject selection rule based on the concept of justice. I argue that the standardization of this rule as temporal measures, linked (...) with risk-benefit assessment, has reformed the review mechanism, specifically investigators’ modification of research plans, thereby developing justice as balancing. (shrink)

The measurement of pain depends upon subjective reports, but we know very little about how research subjects or pain patients produce self-reported judgments. Representationalist assumptions dominate the field of pain research and lead to the critical conjecture that the person in pain examines the contents of consciousness before making a report about the sensory or affective magnitude of pain experience as well as about its nature. Most studies to date have investigated what Fechner termed “outer psychophysics”: the relationship between characteristics (...) of an external stimulus and the magnitude and nature of pain experience. In contrast, Fechner originally envisioned that “inner psychophysics” should investigate the relationship between physiological states and subjective experience. Despite the lack of established research tradition, inner psychophysics has a potential utility in elucidating underlying mechanisms for the production of phenomenal self-report. We illustrate this, using causal modeling analyses of the accuracy of self-reported pain ratings from our laboratory. We submit that the results are inconsistent with representationalist assumptions. Converging trends from several domains of consciousness studies seem to suggest that we need to abandon the unquestioned doctrine of representationalism and search for a more viable framework for understanding the generation of subjective self-report. (shrink)

歴史学をめぐる“方法論的な挑発者”として―自己省察的な小文、時評、書評等を精選して収録。巻末に、編者4人が著作集の意義と魅力を縦横に論じあう座談会の記録と、「安丸良夫著作目録」を付載。.

「通俗道徳」論をはじめ、著者の歴史研究の基軸をなす「民衆思想史」に関する代表的な論考を収める。.

「高等数学」への想いを脱し、「フランス文学」へ転向。そしてブランショの「レシ(r ́ecit)」に没頭する。「常識」「一般了解」「予断」をカッコに入れ、在野にて約30年にわたって“存在”をめぐるノートを記し、考察を続けた。“存在”と“時間”を考えた哲学者(ハイデガー、カント、ベルク ソン等)の論考を徹底的に読み込み、“存在”そのものに深く切り込む瞠目の書。.

The aims of this study were twofold, to: examine the behavior displayed by participants who expected to be nominated for donor roles in dictator games wherein initial endowments of players are determined by lottery and investigate the conduct of donors who were confident in their good fortune in relation to their power as they redistributed the rewards they had gained. Results from a dictator game in which a donor is accorded the absolute power to redistribute initial income and a random (...) dictator game in which both a donor and a recipient declare their redistributive preferences and one of them is selected randomly by a computer were compared. Confident donors made more self-serving redistribution decisions than did unconfident donors in both games, but the difference was clearer in the dictator game. In relation to their preferences exhibited before being informed of their roles, confident donors decreased their redistribution amounts after discovering their roles; the decrements in the dictator game were conspicuously larger than those in the random dictator game. In short, confident donors were greedier than unconfident donors; the difference became more pronounced when their redistributive power was unconditional even though their confidence had no rational basis. (shrink)