Some people in Japan are still comfortable with the paternalistic role of doctors, but others wish that their own decisions would receive a greater amount of respect. A total of 747 students of universities and colleges and 114 parents of these students participated in a questionnaire survey. Most of the participants thought that autonomy should be respected in situations involving death with dignity and euthanasia, whereas it should not be respected in attempted suicide and involuntary admission of individuals with mental (...) illness. A cluster analysis revealed that the participants could be divided into the following groups: aid in dying advocates, complete libertarians, protectors of the mentally ill, complete paternalists, and questionables. The assertion of independence score of the Scale for Independent and Interdependent Construal of the Self showed a significant difference among the 5 clusters. These findings suggest that the traditional paternalistic relationship between doctor and patient is undergoing a gradual transformation in Japan. (shrink)

Diese Abhandlung verteidigt gegen die heute vorherrschenden realistischen Interpretationen des kantischen transzendentalen Idealismus eine anti-realistische Zwei-Welten-Interpretation. Durch konkrete Textanalysen wird gezeigt, dass die realistische Interpretation an der Antinomienlehre und dem vierten Paralogismus (A) scheitern muss, während die anti-realistische Interpretation erlaubt, die Kritik der reinen Vernunft im Ganzen zu einer kohärenten Sinneinheit zu strukturieren. Anschließend wird der konkrete Gehalt von Kants anti-realistischer Ontologie der raumzeitlichen Wirklichkeit erhellt. Dafür entwickelt der Verfasser eine intuitionistische Wahrheitskonzeption (ein empirisches Gegenstück der Wahrheitskonzeption des mathematischen Intuitionismus), (...) kombiniert mit der Superassertibilität à la Crispin Wright. Die von Michael Dummett bereit gestellte Begrifflichkeit "Realismus/Anti-Realismus‟ erweist sich als fruchtbar nicht nur für die Analyse der kantischen Position selbst, sondern auch für ein klares Verständnis der mannigfaltigen Interpretationsansätze des transzendentalen Idealismus. (shrink)

いま最も注目される気鋭の哲学者、待望の初対談集。第一線で活躍する論客たちと、哲学、文学、社会、精神医学、サブカルチャーなどを横断し、現代の問題を縦横無尽に語りつくす。思考の前衛がここにある!

Nishida Kitaro's reformulation of the major issues of Western philosophy from a Zen standpoint of "absolute nothingness" and "absolutely contradictory self-identity" represents the boldest speculative enterprise of modern Japan, continued today by his successors in the "Kyoto School" of philosophy. This English translation of Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness evokes the movement and flavor of the original, clarifies its obscurities, and eliminates the repetitions. It sheds new light on the philosopher's career, revealing a long struggle with such thinkers as Cohen, (...) Natorp, Husserl, Fichte, and Bergson, that ended with Nishida's break from the basic ontological assumptions of the West. Throughout labyrinthine arguments, Nishida never loses sight of his theme: the irreducibility and unobjectifiability of the act of self-consciousness which constitutes the self. Extensive annotation is provided for the first time in any edition of Nishida's work. Historians of Japanese philosophy and culture, and all those interested in the interaction of Eastern and Western thought-forms, now have a document which highlights many of the cultural, psychological, and intellectual dynamics that have shaped Japanese intellectual life in one of its most fascinating and ambitious manifestations. (shrink)

In recent years, neural networks have attracted much attention in the machine learning and the deep learning technologies. Bio-inspired functions and intelligence are also expected to process efficiently and improve existing technologies. In the visual pathway, the prominent features consist of nonlinear characteristics of squaring and rectification functions observed in the retinal and visual cortex networks, respectively. Further, adaptation is an important feature to activate the biological systems, efficiently. Recently, to overcome short-comings of the deep learning techniques, orthogonality for the (...) weights in the networks has been developed for the signal propagation and the efficient optimization of the learning. In this paper, bio-inspired asymmetric networks with nonlinear characteristics are proposed, which are derived from the retinal networks in the biological visual pathway. The asymmetric network proposed here was verified to detect the movement of the object, efficiently in our previous studies. This paper shows a new characteristic of the adaptive orthogonality in the asymmetric networks. First, it is shown that the asymmetric network with nonlinear characteristics is effective for generating orthogonality. Second, the proposed asymmetric network with Gabor filters is compared with the conventional energy model from the point of the orthogonality characteristics. Finally, the asymmetric networks with nonlinear characteristics can generate the extended orthogonal bases in independent subspaces, which are useful for classification and efficient learning. (shrink)

In the United States alone, the prevalence of AD is expected to more than double from six million people in 2019 to nearly 14 million people in 2050. Meanwhile, the track record for developing treatments for AD has been marked by decades of failure. But recent progress in genetics, neuroscience and gene editing suggest that effective treatments could be on the horizon. The arrival of such treatments would have profound implications for the way we diagnose, triage, study, and allocate resources (...) to Alzheimer’s patients. Because the disease is not rare and because it strikes late in life, the development of therapies that are expensive and efficacious but less than cures, will pose particular challenges to healthcare infrastructure. We have a window of time during which we can begin to anticipate just, equitable and salutary ways to accommodate a disease-modifying therapy Alzheimer’s disease. Here we consider the implications for caregivers, clinicians, researchers, and the US healthcare system of the availability of an expensive, presymptomatic treatment for a common late-onset neurodegenerative disease for which diagnosis can be difficult. (shrink)

Background: Dementia is one the major problems of aging societies, and, novel and effective non-drug therapies are required as interventions in the oldest-old to prevent cognitive decline.Objective: This study aims to examine the efficacy and safety of reminiscence using immersive virtual reality focusing on anxiety that often appears with cognitive decline. The secondary objective is to reveal the preference for VR image types for reminiscence: live-action or computer graphics.Methods: This was a pilot, open-label, and randomized crossover study which was conducted (...) on January 2020 at a single nursing home. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups in equal numbers, and they alternately viewed two types of VR images themed on the mid- to late Showa era in Japan. In group A, the CG images were viewed first, and then the LA images were viewed. In group B, the images were viewed in the opposite order. Before VR viewing, subjects responded to Mini-Mental State Examination Japanese version and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Japanese version. After viewing the first and second VR, subjects responded to STAI and the numerical rating scale for satisfaction and side effects.Results: Ten subjects participated in this study. The values of analyses are presented in the mean. The age was 87.1 years, and the MMSE was 28.5. The total STAI score before VR viewing was 36.1, but it significantly decreased to 26.8 after the first VR viewing, and further decreased to 23.4 after the second VR viewing. The NRS score for satisfaction tended to be higher after viewing LA in group A vs. 8.6, P = 0.0993), while in group B, the score after CG was slightly lower than that after LA. There were no serious side effects.Conclusions: This study suggests that iVR reminiscence can reduce anxiety in the oldest-old without causing serious side effects. Furthermore, the impacts might be better with LA images. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 389-390.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 2 Seiten: 389-390.

The goal of Chiba’s book is to answer the following question: Is Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ ‘realism’ or ‘idealism’? (p. 2) Chiba concludes that Kant is an anti-realist: objects do not exist independently of our cognition. Chiba’s book contains a lot of interesting and precise analysis of parts of Kant’s argument in the Critique of Pure Reason. So it should be clear that the following remarks, although they express disagreement or reservation, are in no sense meant to hold (...) back anyone from reading Chiba’s book. The contrary is the case: although I do not agree with everything Chiba affirms and defends, I can recommend his in its detail very informative dissertation to anyone who is interested in the attempt to link Kant’s theory to the contemporary ‘realism’ debate. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that Fujiwara no Toshinori composed the text of the National Treasure Heike nokyo ganmon, which has usually been attributed to Taira no Kiyomori. First, the article establishes that Toshinori was a prolific author of the ganmon genre, which required skill in composing elaborate parallel prose and a profound knowledge of Buddhist doctrine and Chinese history. It then documents the existence of many, overlooked works written by Toshinori and reveals that certain passages found in them (...) match passages in the Heike nokyo ganmon, thus proving Toshinori’s authorship. It focuses in conclusion on Toshinori’s role in producing a picture scroll for the imperial court, a task precisely analogous to that carried out by his brother, the monk Joken, and suggests that Toshinori and his family may have been responsible for a good deal of the art created in the milieu of the retired emperor Goshirakawa. (shrink)