Background The number of medical lawsuits in Japan was between 14 and 21 each year before 1998, but increased to 24 to 35 per year after 1999. There were 210 lawsuits during this 10-year period. There is a need for skills and knowledge related to ethics, which is as fundamental to the practice of medicine as basic sciences or clinical skills. in Japan education in ethics is relatively rare and its importance is not yet recognized. Establishing ethics education using legal (...) precedents, which has already been achieved in Western countries, will be a very important issue in Japan. In the present study, a questionnaire survey was conducted among graduate intern doctors, in order to investigate whether ethics education using precedents might have a positive effect in Japan. Methods In 2002, a questionnaire survey entitled Physicians' Clinical Ethics was carried out in a compulsory orientation lecture given to trainees before they started clinical practice in our hospital. The attendees at this lecture were trainees who came from colleges in various districts of Japan. During the lecture, 102 questionnaires were distributed, completed by attendees and collected. The recovery rate was 100%. The questionnaire consisted of 22 questions (in three categories), of which 20 were answered by multiple choices, and the other two were answered by description. The time required to complete the questionnaire was about 10 minutes. Results The recovered questionnaires were analyzed using statistical analysis software (SPSS for Windows, Release 10.07J-1/June/2000), in addition to simple statistical analysis. answers using multiple choices for the 20 questions in the questionnaire were input into SPSS. The principal component analysis was performed for each question. As a result, the item that came to the fore was "legal precedent". Since many intern doctors were interested in understanding laws and precedents, learning about ethical considerations through education using precedents might better meet with their needs and interests. Conclusion We applied a new method in which the results of principal component analysis and frequencies of answers to other questions were combined. From this we deduced that the precedent education used in Western countries was useful to help doctors acquire ethical sensitivity and was not against their will. A relationship was found between reading precedents and the influence of lawsuits, and it was thought that student participation-type precedent education would be useful for doctors in order to acquire ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

Reviews : Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy : Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, Make to Itoh, Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan.

The debate around labour power, and particularly regarding its status as the ‘most peculiar’ of commodities, has been widely revisited in contemporary Marxist thought and critical theory. This concept, which has often resurfaced in works by Negri, Spivak, Virno and numerous other contemporary thinkers, has a long prehistory in the work of Marx and subsequent Marxist theorists, perhaps most importantly in the work of Uno Kōzō, arguably the most influential and widely known Marxist thinker in modern Japan. Uno’s work, and (...) particularly his major theoretical works of the 1950s, developed an entirelogicalanalysis of the peculiar position of the labour-power commodity within capital’s drive, noting that this site marks the place wherein capital’slogical interiorand itshistorical exteriorinterpenetrate each other, generating a volatile force of excess at the core of capital’s supposedly smooth and pure circuit-process. By developing around this point an extensive theoretical discussion of its dynamics ofimpossibilityorirrationality, centred on a term –muri– that he raises to the level of a concept, Uno formulates a series of original theses in methodology, on the concept of population, and particularly around the figures of thelogicaland thehistoricalin the critical analysis of capitalism. Focusing in particular on this ‘impossibility’ ormurithat is nevertheless constantly ‘passing through’ the capital-relation, this essay investigates the entire range of Uno’s analysis, revealing not only a crucial thread of theoretical inquiry that remains contemporary for us today, but also another set of possibilities linking the critique of political economy to the renewal of revolutionary politics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 177-208.

The unique conceptual status of Thomas Sekine’s approach to Marx’s Capital and capitalism, heavily indebted to Kōzō Uno’s work, will be analyzed by setting against its own theoretical counterparts, orthodox dialectical materialism. It will also be shown that Sekine’s critique of dialectical materialism differs from other neo-Hegelian perspectives or Althusser’s anti-Hegelian structuralism. These comparisons unearth Sekine’s concealed epistemological preoccupations: totality, subsumption of labor, self-commodification, historical indeterminacy and the logico-historical error. Last, Sekine also considered neoclassical economics as another form of unfounded (...) orthodoxy both in conceptual and empirical terms, which he emphasizes in his analysis of the current phenomenon of financialization. (shrink)

The unique conceptual status of Thomas Sekine’s approach to Marx’s Capital and capitalism, heavily indebted to Kōzō Uno’s work, will be analyzed by setting against its own theoretical counterparts, orthodox dialectical materialism. It will also be shown that Sekine’s critique of dialectical materialism differs from other neo-Hegelian perspectives or Althusser’s anti-Hegelian structuralism. These comparisons unearth Sekine’s concealed epistemological preoccupations: totality, subsumption of labor, self-commodification, historical indeterminacy and the logico-historical error. Last, Sekine also considered neoclassical economics as another form of unfounded (...) orthodoxy both in conceptual and empirical terms, which he emphasizes in his analysis of the current phenomenon of financialization. (shrink)

Sivadó Ákos javasolt megértés-koncepciójában arra is törekszik, hogy a megértés folyamata ne váljék szélsőséges relativizálássá, amely a maga eredményét is kétségessé teheti. Arra a következtetésre jut, hogy mindkét filozófus tanai – különbözőségük ellenére – értelmezhetők egy megértés-elmélet közös alapjaként. Úgy véli, a megértés a társadalomtudományok egyik hivatása, e módszer alkalmazása pedig tudományos igényű ismereteket generál. A lábjegyzetekkel kísért, nemzetközi szakirodalmat fölvonultató bibliográfiával záródó értekezés filozófiai, tudományelmélet, ismeretelméleti szakrészlegek állományába tartozik.