This special 10th anniversary edition of the David Suzuki classic, re-examines our place in the natural world in light of sweeping environmental changes and recent advances in scientific knowledge.

The time of ideological conflicts has passed. But different brands of political ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, in a word, nationalism, have taken the place of former “universal” ideologies, and stalk the world. In the face of these tendencies the necessity for the promotion of intercultural understanding has become ever more urgent. On the philosophical scene, many versions of cultural pluralism and relativism have been asserted and maintained. Since the rise of nihilism in the history of European thought, almost all universal (...) standards of morality that had been traditionally handed down have been denied and all sorts of a priori ideas which might contribute to the development of a consensus between different cultural worlds have been dismissed as mere fictions. Yet still, serious attempts have been made to establish a certain universal background for communicative understanding among different cultures. (shrink)

1. Menschliches Wesen und die transzendentale Frage 1.1 Notwendigkeit der transzendentalen Frage, 1.2 Gegen die Ent-Transzendentalization, 1.3 Apperzeption als Auslegung 1.4 Transzendentales Apriori, 1.5 Apperzeption als Selbstbewußtsein, 1.6 Freies Subjekt und seine "Tranzendenz"-Struktur, 1.7 Die transzendentale Struktur des Daseins 2. Phänomenologie und Sprachanalytische Philosophie 2.1 Die Struktur des prädikativen Satzes und die Intentionalität, 2.1.1 Was ist die Intentionalität?, 2.1.1 Intentionalität- Kritik aus der Sprachanalyse, 2.1.3 Ein Versuch der Gegenkritik 2.2 Noema und Sinn, 2.2.1 Neue Entwicklung der Husserl-Interpretationen, 2.2.2 Frege's Sinn (...) und Noema, 2.2.3 Noema und Gestalt, 2.2.4 Individuation und die Entschiedenheit der Intention, 2.2.5 Die Identität des Einzelnen und die ideale Identität 3. Die phänomenologische Theorie der Leiblichkeit---"mon corps". (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.

30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.

One of this century's leading works on Zen, this book is a valuable source for those wishing to understand its concepts in the context of Japanese life and art.

Background:Information sharing is one of the most important means of public health nurses collaborating with other healthcare professionals and community members. There are complicated ethical issues in the process.Research objectives:To describe the ethical dilemmas associated with client information sharing that Japanese public health nurses experience in daily practice and to clarify their decision-making process to resolve these dilemmas.Research design:Data were collected using a three-phase consensus method consisting of semi-structured interviews, self-administered questionnaires and a group interview.Participants and research context:We surveyed administrative (...) public health nurses in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. The semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 administrative public health nurses, and the self-administered questionnaires were sent to all 899 administrative public health nurses. The group interview was carried out with eight administrative public health nurses.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval was granted by the ethics committee of the School of Health Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan (8-158, 9-130).Findings:Information-sharing ethical dilemmas occurred most often when clients’ decisions did not coincide with the nurses’ own professional assessments, particularly when they faced clinical issues that were inherently ambiguous. In their decision-making processes, nurses prioritised ‘protection of health and life’.Discussion:These findings suggest that, above all, they sought to address urgent risks to clients’ lives while upholding the principle of client autonomy as much as possible. In such cases, the nurses made decisions regarding whether to share information about the client depending on the individual situation.Conclusion:Public health nurses should protect the client’s health while taking into consideration their relationship with the client. (shrink)

In this paper, we establish the first-order definability of sequents with consistent variable occurrence on bi-approximation semantics by means of the Sahlqvist–van Benthem algorithm. Then together with the canonicity results in Suzuki (2011), this allows us to establish a Sahlqvist theorem for substructural logic. Our result is not limited to substructural logic but is also easily applicable to other lattice-based logics.

Increasing psychophysical evidence suggests that specific image features - or statistics - can appear unpleasant or induce visual discomfort in humans. Such unpleasantness tends to be particularly profound if the image's amplitude spectrum deviates from the regular 1/f spatial-frequency falloff expected in natural scenes. Here, we show that profound unpleasant impressions also result if the orientation spectrum of the image becomes flatter. Using bandpass noise with variable orientation and spatial-frequency bandwidths, we found that unpleasantness ratings decreased with spatial- frequency bandwidth (...) but increased with orientation bandwidth. Similarly, a subsequent experiment revealed that sinusoidal modulations in the amplitude spectrum of 1/f noise along the spatial frequency increased unpleasantness, but modulations along the orientation decreased it. Given that natural scenes tend to have a linear slope along the spatial frequency but an uneven spectrum along the orientation dimension, our opposing results in the spatial-frequency and orientation domains commonly support the idea that images deviating from the spectral regularity of natural scenes can give rise to unpleasant impressions. (shrink)

The best seller and perennial classic by one of the great Zen Buddhist masters--now available in Spanish. En los más de cuarenta años que han transcurrido desde su publicación original, Mente Zen, mente de principiante se ha convertido en uno de los grandes clásicos de la espiritualidad moderna, muy querido, continuamente releído y profusamente recomendado como el mejor libro que se puede leer sobre el Zen. Suzuki Roshi presenta las bases —desde los detalles de la postura y la respiración (...) en zazen hasta la percepción de la no dualidad— de un modo que, además de ser notablemente claro, resuena con la alegría de la comprensión desde la primera hasta la última página. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study of the propositional intuitionistic (non-modal) and classical modal languages interpreted in the standard way on transitive frames. It shows that, when talking about these frames rather than conventional quasi-orders, the intuitionistic language displays some unusual features: its expressive power becomes weaker than that of the modal language, the induced consequence relation does not have a deduction theorem and is not protoalgebraic. Nevertheless, the paper develops a manageable model theory for this consequence and its extensions (...) which also reveals some unexpected phenomena. The balance between the intuitionistic and modal languages is restored by adding to the former one more implication. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend the canonicity methodology in Ghilardi & Meloni (1997) to arbitrary lattice expansions, and syntactically describe canonical inequalities for lattice expansions consisting of -meet preserving operations, -multiplicative operations, adjoint pairs, and constants. This approach gives us a uniform account of canonicity for substructural and lattice-based logics. Our method not only covers existing results, but also systematically accounts for many canonical inequalities containing nonsmooth additive and multiplicative uniform operations. Furthermore, we compare our technique with the approach in (...) Dunn et al. (2005) and Gehrke et al. (2005). (shrink)

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a (...) significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel's conservative position of the political conception for world politics and his insightful ?Minimum Humanitarian Morality? (MHM) view on global justice are laudable. He admits that the path from anarchy to justice must go through injustice. But Nagel does not clearly identify the conditions under which we put up with global injustice. This paper reviews the conception of MHM through the lens of the institutional political economy. In my view, to recognize the degree of structural failure (weakness in governance) (...) as well as the degree of transition failure (elite bargain or personalization of power being interlocked) in each state can give us a hint on how to conceptualize and apply Nagel's MHM. We also argue that the scope and degree of humanitarian aid may vary in accordance with the options to global justice open to each state. (shrink)

Many philosophers deny that two different material objects can “coincide”, i.e. share their spatial location and microscopic parts. But, there seems to be a difficulty in identifying these coinciding objects, since we have many kinds of predicates that appear to show differences between them. One prominent strategy to avoid such a difficulty is to argue that such “problematic” predicates merely indicate our ways of describing objects, and thus that any difference between coinciding objects is only apparent. I call this move (...) "the semantic solution". The goal of this paper is to show that the semantic solution is unmotivated. The semantic solution, I argue, must distinguish problematic predicates from ones that indicate genuine properties. But the trouble is that in doing so it bringsmassive indeterminacy into our understanding of vast numbers predicates. Furthermore, indeterminacy would be hopelessly massive if every actual material object is made of “atomless gunk”, i.e. matter divisible into proper parts ad infinitum. (shrink)

One criterion of constructive logics is the disjunction, property (DP). The Halldén-completeness is a weak DP, and is related to the relevance principle and variable separation. This concept is well-understood in the case of propositional logics. We extend this notion to predicate logics. Then three counterparts naturally arise. We discuss relationships between these properties and meet-irreducibility in the lattice of logics.

Reflections on Science, technology and nature - the pain of animals - genetics and society - our fragile democracy - dancing on racism's grave; The lesson of Japan - the prostitution of Academia - how educators have failed - the ecosystem as capital - the rape of the Amazon; The future; borrowing from the children - showdown in Brazil - Aboriginal people and the land; Acid rain - rain forests - deforestation - population.

We tend to think every ought statement implies that an actual agent can comply. However, our uses of “ought” suggest that some ought statements fail to have this implication: it is possible that the actual agent ought to do something she has no chance of accomplishing even if she intends to do so. Rather they imply that if the agent and her circumstances were defect-free, she could and would perform the prescribed action. There are two types of evaluation for ought (...) statements. One type of evaluation addresses the question of what to do given the agent’s peculiar capacity and condition. The point of this evaluation is giving personalized action guidance, and so recommends only what the actual agent can do under the actual condition. Another type of evaluation addresses a different question, that of what to do as a type of agents. The point of this evaluation is the coordination of individuals by selecting a shared norm for them: the standard that prescribes all of them to perform the same action and classifies for all of them the same traits as defect. This is why it endorses the ought statements that some actual agents cannot comply with, but that a normal agent could and would do so under normal conditions. (shrink)

Wabi Sabi is the Japanese Zen philosophy that all things are imperfect, unfinished and impermanent. It is a fresh way of seeing and moving through the world when our lives, literally and figuratively, feel cluttered. This book shows us how to apply this concept in the context of daily life and offers ideas on how to see it, embrace it and incorporate it into everyday thoughts, objects and situations."--Publisher description.

Modal counterparts of intermediate predicate logics will be studied by means of algebraic devise. Our main tool will be a construction of algebraic semantics for modal logics from algebraic frames for predicate logics. Uncountably many examples of modal counterparts of intermediate predicate logics will be given.

Feinberg and Mallatt, in their presentation of neurobiological naturalism, have suggested that visual consciousness was acquired by early vertebrates and inherited by a wide range of descendants, and that its neural basis has shifted to nonhomologous nervous structures during evolution. However, their evolutionary scenario of visual consciousness relies on the assumption that visual consciousness is closely linked with survival, which is not commonly accepted in current consciousness research. We suggest an alternative idea that visual consciousness is linked to a specific (...) class of agency, consequently justifying their phylogenetic claim. We also examine the implication of their phylogenetic claim: visual consciousness is homologous across vertebrates, but its neural basis is not. This apparent incongruence illustrates a general phenomenon of homology, and that the resulting hierarchical view of visual consciousness and its neural basis can be straightforwardly accommodated by neurobiological naturalism. Throughout these discussions, we aim to address the potential theoretical issues in neurobiological naturalism and refine the picture illustrated by Feinberg and Mallatt regarding phylogenetic distribution and trajectories of visual consciousness. (shrink)

Extending techniques of Dowd and those of Poizat, we study computational complexity of in the case when is a generic oracle, where is a positive integer, and denotes the collection of all -query tautologies with respect to an oracle . We introduce the notion of ceiling-generic oracles, as a generalization of Dowd's notion of -generic oracles to arbitrary finitely testable arithmetical predicates. We study how existence of ceiling-generic oracles affects behavior of a generic oracle, by which we show that is (...) not a subset of is comeager in the Cantor space. Moreover, using ceiling-generic oracles, we present an alternative proof of the fact (Dowd) that the class of all -generic oracles has Lebesgue measure zero. (shrink)