This special issue of the _ Revue d’études benthamiennes _, entitled the 'International and Colonial Thought of the British Empire', aims to broaden recent debates on global intellectual history and imperial history. While this subject has been extensively studied in current scholarship, the issue attempts to approach several relatively under-examined figures, including Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker, and Frederic Rogers, as well as classical thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith, from new perspectives. In this Introduction, we describe a pan-European (...) intellectual setting wherein these thinkers’ international and imperial thought should partly be situated, with a focus on the idea of international law, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism. (shrink)

Smith’s critique of empire has recently attracted scholarly attention, but it has mostly been from the perspective of justice. The present article, however, argues that his views on it could also be appreciated by his 'utilitarian' attitude toward it. Combined with a similar line of analysis of Josiah Tucker, another key (though neglected) figure, the authors hope to add to the current trends of scholarship on the Enlightenment critique of empire. Neither Smith nor Tucker appealed merely to political right principles, (...) but rather frequently explored imperial problems from 'utilitarian' viewpoints. A difference between Smith and Tucker derives from the latter's explicit appeal to Christian, or Protestant, ethics, by which Tucker was in a way associated not only with his mentor, Joseph Butler, but also with some of his adversaries, such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. The non-welfarist or non-consequentialist concept of justice was a significant element in the Enlightenment crit... (shrink)

This paper discusses Adam Smith’s intellectual relationship with the French Enlightenment, with a particular focus on his view of French culture as conveyed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Compared to England at that time, eighteenth-century Scotland is considered as having a closer affiliation with France in terms of their intellectual and cultural life during what has been dubbed the Enlightenment. While David Hume was representative of the affinity between the French and Scottish literati, Smith also held an enduring interest (...) in the French philosophy, literature, and other aspects of its civilisation, long before the historic visit to Toulouse and Paris that would shape his political economy greatly. While this paper shall examine Smith’s Francophile and Europeanist tendency within his moral argument, it also emphasises that he was abundantly aware of the moral cultural tensions between these two branches of the European Enlightenment. (shrink)

On linguistics and teaching of Malay language; festschrift in honor of Isamu Shōho, a professor of Malay language at Division of Malaysian Studies, Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Was ist das Sein? Meister Eckhart versteht das Sein nicht als etwas, was man an sich selber haben kann, sondern etwas, was man allein durch die Selbstvernichtung in einem anderen geben oder empfangen kann. Dies stellt das Seinsverständnis der Relationsontologie dar. Der Entwurf der neuen Ontologie bei Eckhart lässt sich als einen grossen Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der Philosophie verstehen. Denn die zwei grössten Philosophen im Mittelalter, Augustinus und Thomas von Aquin, nahmen hingegen immer noch die Substanzontologie auf, die sich (...) von Aristoteles herleitete. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht hauptsächlich die lateinischen Werke Eckharts und rekonstruiert seine Ontologie in den drei Bereichen, nämlich in der Dreifaltigkeitslehre, der Schöpfungslehre und der Anthropologie, um zu beweisen, dass Eckhart die traditionelle Substanzontologie überwand und neulich die Relationsontologie entwickelte."-- Back cover. (shrink)

In this dialogue, Hiroki Azuma discusses with Yuk Hui about the perception of technology in Japan after the defeat in the Second World War, from the Kyoto School to the postmodern critics, and the ambivalent conflicts between the modern and the tradition. The postmodern culture has a different signification in Japan than in the West as well as in other parts of Asia. Azuma documents the rise of the Otaku culture in Japan, and calls them “database animals,” a thesis (...) that he formulated through his reading of Alexandre Kojève’s end of man and the absorption of the human subject into the technological world. (shrink)

Recognition is one of the most ambivalent concepts in political and social thought. While it is a condition for individual freedom, the subject’s demand for recognition can be exploited as an instrument for reproducing domination. Axel Honneth addresses this issue and offers the concept of ideological recognition: Recognition is ideological when the addressees accept it from their subjective point of view but is unjustified from an objective point of view. Using the examples of the recognition of femininity, I argue that (...) Honneth’s account fails not only to offer the objective normative standard that delineates between morally justified and unjustified recognition, but also to descriptively explain why the addressees of ideological recognition accept their identities as having positive qualities. To overcome these problems, I provide an alternative, epistemic structural account. First, my account offers the concept of epistemic trust and identifies the objective injustice that Honneth’s account cannot capture. Second, my account offers the concept of structural power and discusses the problem of internalization of problematic identities. Furthermore, I argue that epistemic structural account has theoretical and practical benefits for analyzing domination and advancing the task of critique by explaining the ideological recognition in the case of racial identity, for example. (shrink)

A general relation between entropy and an evolutionary superoperator is derived based on the theory of the real-time formulation. The formulation establishing the relation relies only on the framework of quantum statistical mechanics and the standard definition of the von Neumann entropy. Applying the theory of the imaginary-time formulation, a similar relation is obtained for the entropy change due to the change in reservoir temperatures. To show the usefulness of these formulas, we derived the expression for the entropy production induced (...) by some dissipation in an open quantum system as the exemplary model system. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

Background Advance care planning (ACP) is a process in which adults engage in an ongoing dialogue about future medical treatment and care. Though ACP is recommended to improve the quality of end-of-life care, the details of the dialogue experience in ACP are unknown. Objective To explore participants’ experiences of dialogue in an ACP educational program that encouraged them to discuss the value of a way of life. Research design This qualitative descriptive study used the focus group interview method. Data were (...) analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Participants and research context A dialogue-based ACP educational program was conducted in four regions in Japan for local citizens to discuss the value of their way of life. A total of 66 individuals (mean age = 55.5 ± 17.2 years; 50 women and 16 men) participated in focus group interviews. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Ethical Review Committee of Tokyo Women’s Medical University (no. 4723) and Kyoto University (no. R2099). Findings Five main themes were extracted: discussing one’s thoughts with others in a considerate manner, reflecting on one’s way of life through others, feeling a sense of connection with others through storytelling, realizing the difficulties of talking about “what if” topics, and turning one’s eyes toward the future through the dialogue. These themes were interrelated and illustrated the complexity of the experience of discussing values. Conclusions The results suggest that dialogue in ACP is useful in clarifying values. They also indicated the need for dealing with the ethical challenges of discussing value and the importance of caring for the interlocutor to have a safe dialogue. In the ACP process, safety in dialogue may improve readiness in ACP, and health practitioners who support ACP need to address the ethical challenges entailing dialogue about values. (shrink)

Si pretendemos interpretar el significado de “Bu” con el pensamiento y las ideas actuales, dicha letra representaría el concepto de violencia, de la magnitud de una masacre. Esto es algo similar a la ficción que supone la tecnología que Winston-Churchill, narra en su obra sobre la Crisis Mundial, donde una sola llamada de teléfono podía hacer que miles de soldados mujeres y niños murieran, empujando de este modo a la humanidad al borde de la extinción. La Constitución de Japón, que (...) proclama la amenaza permanente de “La intimidación o el uso de la fuerza”, ilustra claramente este razonamiento. Nuestra guerra moderna en realidad implica poco más que derrotar la tecnología enemiga pero, el concepto que encierra la letra “Bu” no es tan mecánico ni superficial. (shrink)

When considering whether to enact or not to enact a tempting option, people often anticipate how their choices will make them feel, typically resulting in a “mixed bag” of conflicting emotions. Building on earlier work, we propose an integrative theoretical model of this judgment process and empirically test its main propositions using a novel procedure to capture and integrate both the intensity and duration of anticipated emotions. We identify and theoretically integrate four highly relevant key emotions, pleasure, frustration, guilt, and (...) pride. Whereas the former two (basic hedonic) emotions are anticipated to dissipate relatively quickly, the latter two (self-conscious) emotions are anticipated to be more long-lived. Regarding the relative weighting of emotions, we obtained evidence for a relative guilt bias and pride neglect under default conditions. Furthermore, we identify situational influences on this judgment process and find that rendering self-conscious emotions more situationally salient positively impacts self-control decision-making. We discuss how these findings build on an integrative theory of self-control and how they are useful for the design of choice environments and interventions. (shrink)

Social presence, or the subjective experience of being present with another existing person, varies with the interaction medium. In general, social presence research has mainly focused on uni-directional aspects of each exchanged message, not on bidirectional interactions. Our primary purpose is to introduce such bidirectional evaluation by quantifying the degree of social presence with a few statistical measures. To this end, we developed a software called “TypeTrace” that records all keystrokes of online chat interactants and reenacts their typing actions and (...) analyzed the results from different chat conditions, mainly focusing on the characterization of bi-directional interactions. We also compared the chat interaction patterns with the patterns from phone call datasets to investigate the difference of live communication in different media. The hypothesis of the experiment was that either richness or concurrency of communication is important for organizing social presence. Richness is defined by the variety of information at a time in communication and the concurrency is the number of temporal thread being processed at the same time. Our results show that when we merely increase the richness of information by presenting the typing process, the cognition of others' presence does not significantly increase. However, when the information concurrency is augmented by introducing the transmission of realtime text, we found that the transfer entropy between the interactants becomes considerably higher, and the social presence and emotional arousal, intimacy increased. High transfer entropy was also observed in the phone call dataset. This result shows that the mere augmentation of information richness does not necessarily lead to increased social presence, and concurrent communication is another critical factor for fostering vivid conversation in digital environments. (shrink)

Local food is a popular subject among consumers, as well as food producers, distributors, policymakers and researchers in many countries. Previous research has identified that the definition of local food varies by context, and from country to country. The literature also suggested that environmental sustainability is one of the goals for many of the local food movements. While there is a substantial body of literature on local food internationally, limited research has been undertaken in New Zealand. This paper aims to (...) understand how consumers define local food, what attributes they associate with local food, and the extent to which life cycle-based environmental aspects are represented in these attributes. Primary research employed quantitative methodology. This study identified that a majority of the respondents considered that local food may be defined as food that was produced in New Zealand and that support for community was the most important attribute associated with local food. Reduced GHG emission, conserving the landscape, and organic production were the life cycle-based environmental attributes that were associated with local food. This study provides a basis for further research into understandings of local food in New Zealand and how to improve communication among different social actors with respect to demand and supply of local food. (shrink)

Complexity is pleased to announce the installment of Prof Hiroki Sayama as its new Chief Editor. In this Editorial, Prof Sayama describes his feelings about his recent appointment, discusses some of the journal’s journey and relevance to current issues, and shares his vision and aspirations for its future.

Early animal embryos are patterned by localized egg cytoplasmic factors and cell interactions. In invertebrate chordate ascidians, larval tail muscle originates from the posterior marginal zone of the early embryo. It has recently been demonstrated that maternal macho‐1 mRNA encoding transcription factor acts as a localized muscle determinant. Other mesodermal tissues such as notochord and mesenchyme are also derived from the vegetal marginal zone. In contrast, formation of these tissues requires induction from endoderm precursors at the 32‐cell stage. FGF–Ras–MAPK signaling (...) is involved in the induction of both tissues. The responsiveness for induction to notochord or mesenchyme depends on the inheritance of localized egg cytoplasmic factors. Previous studies also point to critical roles of directed signaling in polarization of induced cells and in subsequent asymmetric divisions resulting in the formation of two daughter cells with distinct fates. One cell adopts an induced fate, while the other assumes a default fate. A simple model of mesoderm patterning in ascidian embryos is proposed in comparison with that of vertebrates. BioEssays 24:613–624, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Dayal’s (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare “singular” kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare “singular” (...) kind terms. A revised theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare “singular” kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare “singular” kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese. (shrink)

Dayal's (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare ``singular'' kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare ``singular'' (...) kind terms. A modified theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare ``singular'' kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare ``singular'' kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese. (shrink)

Japan has been facing with paradigm shift necessity in terms of the demographic structure, globalizing business and technology revolution, and as its consequence, also with deficiency of human resources with global literacy. The Japanese government has established a new strategy aiming to develop and foster “Global Human Resources” with high language and communication skills capable for international operations. Analyses of the literature on Japanese sociocultural behavioral characteristics and empirical case studies carried out in Poland with pragmatics approach in this paper (...) reveal that honorifics regarded as a technical layer of interaction management and Japanese habitus consisting of uchi/soto behavioral scheme, unique uchi-codex are causes of interaction failure. These features make Japanese uchi-group ethnocentric and almost impossible for a non-Japanese to assimilate themselves to the uchi-codex. Neither a foreign speaker’s high level of proficiency of the Japanese language nor their good knowledge on Japanese culture itself guarantee successful communication and interaction in the Japanese business sector without their practical ability and endeavors to apply this Japanese behavioral scheme even partially. The whole sociocultural and behavioral discrepancy or this incompatibility of Japanese behavioral scheme to other cultures seems to keep the Japanese away from achieving Human Resources with global literacy. (shrink)

Complexity is pleased to announce the installment of Prof Hiroki Sayama as its new Chief Editor. In this Editorial, Prof Sayama describes his feelings about his recent appointment, discusses some of the journal’s journey and relevance to current issues, and shares his vision and aspirations for its future.

We propose a new information sharing system, named ``BisNet'', which automatically gathers information about the bookmarks stored in users' web browsers and helps the users exchange URIs of possibly interesting web pages with others who have similar interest with them. Being different from other typical agent services that gather and provide information according to pre-registered user profiles, BisNet is expected to share more relevant information because of its use of web browser bookmarks that are actively selected and ordered by many (...) humans. To enhance the relevance of information being shared, we developed a novel algorithm for directory evaluation. This algorithm only looks at the local referential structure between bookmark directories and URIs and calculates for each directory the ``order index'' that represents how well its content URIs are put in order with a focus on specific areas of interest. Then each directory receives new URIs from other related directories with large order indexes. The repetition of such URI exchanges makes the whole directory-URI networks dynamically form directory groups according to the commonness of the URIs they refer to. Our method is unique in that it pays no attention to the actual contents of web pages, and thus is much simpler and faster than other methods based on the result of content analysis. We carried out a field trial that involved 45 people who used a prototype version of BisNet clients. The result indicated that the relevance of shared URIs positively correlated with the ``order index'' of surrounding related directories, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method we proposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we provide guidance for the implementation of education for sustainable development in schools. We combine Bhaskar's Transformational Model of Social Activity,...

Profit Sharing is one of the reinforcement learning methods. An agent, as a learner, selects an action with a state-action value and receives rewards when it reaches a goal state. Then it distributes receiving rewards to state-action values. This paper discusses how to set the initial value of a state-action value. A distribution function ƒ( x ) is called as the reinforcement function. On Profit Sharing, an agent learns a policy by distributing rewards with the reinforcement function. On Markov Decision (...) Processes (MDPs), the reinforcement function ƒ( x ) = 1/ L x is useful, and on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), ƒ( x ) = 1/ L w is useful, where L is the sufficient number of rules at each state, and W is the length of an episode. If episodes are always long, the value of the reinforcement function is little. So the differences of rule values become little, and the agent learns little by using the roulette selection as an action selection. This problem is called as Learning Speed Problem. If the value of the reinforcement function for an action is very higher than its state-action value, an agent will not select other action. There is a problem when its action is not a optimal action. This problem is called as Past Experiences Problem. This paper shows that both Learning Speed Problem and Past Experiences Problem are caused by the bad setting between the initial values of a state-action values and the function values of a reinforcement function. We propose how to set the initial values of a state-action values at each state. The experiment shows that an agent can learn correctly even if the length of episode is large. And shows the effectiveness on both MDPs and POMDPs. Our proposed method focuses on the initialization of state-action values and does not limit reinforcement functions. So it can apply to any reinforcement function. (shrink)

The concept of attractors is considered critical in the study of dynamical systems as they represent the set of states that a system gravitates toward. However, it is generally difficult to analyze attractors in complex systems due to multiple reasons including chaos, high-dimensionality, and stochasticity. This paper explores a novel approach to analyzing attractors in complex systems by utilizing networks to represent phase spaces. We accomplish this by discretizing phase space and defining node associations with attractors by finding sink strongly (...) connected components within these networks. Moreover, the network representation of phase space facilitates the use of well-established techniques of network analysis to study the phase space of a complex system. We show the latter by introducing a new node-based metric called attractivity which can be used in conjunction with the SSCC as they are highly correlated. We demonstrate the proposed method by applying it to several chaotic dynamical systems and a large-scale agent-based social simulation model. (shrink)

Sexually‐selected exaggerated traits tend to be unusually reliable signals of individual condition, as their expression tends to be more sensitive to nutritional history and physiological circumstance than that of other phenotypes. As such, these traits are the foundation for many models of sexual selection and animal communication, such as “handicap” and “good genes” models. Exactly how expression of these traits is linked to the bearer's condition has been a central yet unresolved question, in part because the underlying physiological mechanisms regulating (...) their development have remained largely unknown. Recent discoveries across animals as diverse as deer, beetles, and flies now implicate the widely conserved insulin‐like signaling pathway, as a common physiological mechanism regulating condition‐sensitive structures with extreme growth. This raises the exciting possibility that one highly conserved pathway may underlie the evolution of trait exaggeration in a multitude of sexually‐selected signal traits across the animal kingdom. (shrink)

Organisms must adapt to environmental stresses to ensure their survival and prosperity. Different types of stresses, including thermal, mechanical, and hypoxic stresses, can alter the cellular state that accompanies changes in gene expression but not the cellular identity determined by a chromatin state that remains stable throughout life. Some tissues, such as adipose tissue, demonstrate remarkable plasticity and adaptability in response to environmental cues, enabling reversible cellular identity changes; however, the mechanisms underlying these changes are not well understood. We hypothesized (...) that positive and/or negative “Integrators” sense environmental cues and coordinate the epigenetic and transcriptional pathways required for changes in cellular identity. Adverse environmental factors such as pollution disrupt the coordinated control contributing to disease development. Further research based on this hypothesis will reveal how organisms adapt to fluctuating environmental conditions, such as temperature, extracellular matrix stiffness, oxygen, cytokines, and hormonal cues by changing their cellular identities. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that all semisimple varieties of bounded weak-commutative residuated lattices with an S4-like modal operator are discriminator varieties. We also give a characterization of discriminator and EDPC varieties of bounded weak-commutative residuated lattices with an S4-like modal operator follows.

In this paper, we show that Ogasawa’s theorem has a proof in Bishop style constructive mathematics . In 25, we introduced the elementary constructive theory of C*-algebras in BISH, but we did not discuss the powers of positive elements there. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.