Human interaction has two principle functions: building and maintaining relationships with others and exchanging information. The function of building and maintaining relationships with others relates to interpersonal coordination; this behavior pattern is expected to predict the outcome of social relationships, such as between therapists and patients. It is unclear, however, whether the exchange of information is associated with interpersonal coordination. In the present study, we tested a hypothesis of whether body movement synchrony occurs in a natural conversation and whether this (...) synchrony has a positive correlation with the degree of information exchange. Fifty participants were engaged in a conversation task; each had different roles in the conversation. We measured their body movements during this conversation using an optical motion capture system. Similar to methods that can be found in previous research, we calculated body movements and quantified their synchrony applying the methods previously reported that automatically quantified their body movements. Moreover, we determined the participants’ degree of information exchange concerning the conversation using a questionnaire. We observed that the body movement synchrony of pairs who talked with each other was significantly higher than that of pairs who did not talk with each other, and that this synchrony was positively associated with the degree of information exchange. These results suggest that body movement synchrony predicted information exchange. (shrink)

Both Socrates and Mozi are said in Plato’s dialogues and in the Mozi respectively to have claimed that they are living a sort of life following superhuman “intention”: Socrates according to the Delphic oracle, and Mozi the intention of heaven. Some modern philosophers show discomfort with their “superstitious” attitudes, taking the claims literally as a kind of groundless devotion, while others conjecture “sensible” purposes to understand the mystic elements as providing moral lessons. This paper, by responding to these modern revisions (...) of their doctrines, aims at highlighting the necessity of their (re-)introductions of superhuman perspectives to their inquiries. Through examining the similarities in Plato’s and Mohists’ demonstrations, the suggestion made will be that despite countless incommensurable features, heaven’s intention for Mohists offers a fundamental philosophical basis which enables them to develop arguments by means of sharp dichotomies, what is right or wrong, in the same way that Socrates in the Apology and in the Hippias Minor does for the development of Plato’s constructive endeavour beyond his Socratic a/euporetic legacy. Not only are their practices dependent on the presupposition of the existence of a perspective beyond humans, but also the reality of that perspective is established though their own investigative practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature (Ziran 自然) of Technological and Economic Development in Early DaoismYumi Suzuki (bio)I. IntroductionEric Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides comprehensive guidance on how early and later Daoist thought could offer both ideological and practical solutions to contemporary environmental issues. Nelson does not simple-mindedly claim that Daoists are environmentalists or that Daoism is comparable with modern environmental thought. His monograph has a more sophisticated, and also (...) more ambitious and consequently philosophically provocative, goal: to evolutionally develop old Daoist thought to directly address contemporary philosophical discourses on the environment.1I have summarized elsewhere what I find to be the most significant and meaningful contributions this book has made.2 I think its goal has successfully been achieved in various ways: Nelson gives careful and accurate interpretations to each passage from the original texts.3 What he calls "the new Daoism" deployed on the basis of these interpretations is reasonable and uncontroversial. The monograph overall offers an exemplary model of how wisdom acquired through studying the history of philosophy can be adapted to cogitating on newly emerging philosophical questions, despite differences in the intellectual contexts that we are required to warily distinguish. Moreover, by focusing on the Daoist tradition in East Asia, it well demonstrates how other systems of philosophical thought can be usefully employed to critically reflect on fundamental assumptions that an existing system is already committed to and that could be the very cause of relevant philosophical and pragmatic problems.While I mostly agree with his arguments in chapters 1–4 and 6, the only part I found unsatisfactory is chapter 5, "Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New [End Page 771] Daoist Political Ecology" (pp. 100–118). The present review aims to elaborate reasons for my resistance to Nelson's all-out endorsement of what he regards as the sociopolitical implications of Daoism. When it comes to politics, it appears to me, early Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi express often disappointingly ambiguous and agnostic attitudes toward what can be done with respect to their doctrinal opponents and outsiders. My suggestion is that if we examine the explorations of their contenders, that is, mainly Confucians and Legalists, concerning political and technological devices, they may present an altogether less biased and more balanced range of solutions to a question Nelson raises regarding an environmental challenge associated with a competitive globalized economy and rapidly developing technologies in our modern age.II. A Challenge to the Current Environmental MovementChapter 5 begins with the following statement:Appeals to encountering the myriad things in their environmental contexts and relations are necessary for an ecological transformation of existing cultures and societies. Yet an environmental ethos and culture of nature is not sufficient given how systematically reproduced social-economic processes in advanced capitalist societies meditate, entangle, and obstruct the transformative potential of such encounters. To this extent, an adequate environmental philosophy must concurrently be social-political philosophy that can offer an environmentally oriented critique of existing social structures and institutions that directly and indirectly harm creatures and degrade ecosystems in myriad ways such that transformations must transpire in economic and societal structures as well as at the level of individual cultivation and reflections.(p. 100)Nelson maintains that even though it is cardinal to transform the ways in which the myriad things encounter and mutually correspond with each other, as well as alter their own existential state, by cultivating an environmental ethos and culture of nature in each individual and society, one of the most serious challenges for such transformations could originate with already existing capitalist, materialist, and consumerist social structures and institutions widely prevailing and deeply embedded in the highly complex economic and political systems of our age.This, I think, captures the core problem of modern environmentalism. An individual, a group of people such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, or a single city or country might be convinced by the Daoist "biospiritual" mode of life. Nevertheless, it appears to be far more difficult in practice to have certain countries or multinational mega-firms abandon their steadfast, primary commitment to national, industrial, commercial, or corporate missions to pursue their own benefits that deprioritize or... (shrink)

This paper revisits one of the most celebrated verses on dao and ming in the Opening Chapter of the received Laozi Daodejing. I shall clarify two types of English interpretations which are possibly applicable to the verse and demonstrate that they are equally sustainable. It follows that a commitment to either one of these interpretations may thereby spoil the meta-perspective effect which the verse skillfully creates.

Both Ambrose St. John (1815–1875) and John Henry Newman (1801–1890), who were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, became members of the Birmingham Oratory. Newman’s closest companion for over three decades, St. John’s death was extremely painful for Newman, not only because it was unexpected, but because of his devotion to Newman as well as his dedication to his spiritual duties. Along with presenting Newman’s narrative of the last few weeks of St. John’s life, this essay raises the (...) question: why did Newman write this “account.”. (shrink)

John Henry Newman has rightly been hailed as a giant in the Catholic intellectual tradition. His contributions to theology, literature, and education have been studied at length; however, his contribution to philosophy has not received appropriate attention. This essay 1) explores Newman’s unique philosophical insights in terms of the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl; 2) analyzes the transcendental approach of certain British scientists—notably Ronald Knox and Charles Darwin; and 3) discusses how Newman might be considered a phenomenologist.

We examined the effects of unconscious priming on temporal-interval production. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to keep visual displays on a screen for 2500 ms intervals. Half of the displays were repeated across blocks throughout the entire experiment, and the others were newly generated from trial to trial. The displays consisted of patterns so complex that the participants could not intentionally memorize them. The results showed that significantly more time elapsed for old displays than for new displays before participants (...) indicated that a 2500 ms interval had elapsed. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and excluded an alternative account based on perceived pattern complexity. The effect of repetitive presentation was obtained despite the fact the participants did not recognize the repetition, suggesting that unconscious priming increased temporal production. These results suggest that time perception is affected by an unconscious process. (shrink)

Some modal logics based on logics weaker than the classical logic have been studied by Fitch [4], Prior [7], Bull [1], [2], [3], Prawitz [6] etc. Here we treat modal logics based on the intuitionistic propositional logic, which call intuitionistic modal logics.

We develop a general algebraic and proof-theoretic study of substructural logics that may lack associativity, along with other structural rules. Our study extends existing work on substructural logics over the full Lambek Calculus [34], Galatos and Ono [18], Galatos et al. [17]). We present a Gentzen-style sequent system that lacks the structural rules of contraction, weakening, exchange and associativity, and can be considered a non-associative formulation of . Moreover, we introduce an equivalent Hilbert-style system and show that the logic associated (...) with and is algebraizable, with the variety of residuated lattice-ordered groupoids with unit serving as its equivalent algebraic semantics. Overcoming technical complications arising from the lack of associativity, we introduce a generalized version of a logical matrix and apply the method of quasicompletions to obtain an algebra and a quasiembedding from the matrix to the algebra. By applying the general result to specific cases, we obtain important logical and algebraic properties, including the cut elimination of and various extensions, the strong separation of , and the finite generation of the variety of residuated lattice-ordered groupoids with unit. (shrink)

Glivenko-type theorems for substructural logics are comprehensively studied in the paper [N. Galatos, H. Ono, Glivenko theorems for substructural logics over FL, Journal of Symbolic Logic 71 1353–1384]. Arguments used there are fully algebraic, and based on the fact that all substructural logics are algebraizable 279–308] and also [N. Galatos, P. Jipsen, T. Kowalski, H. Ono, Residuated Lattices: An Algebraic Glimpse at Substructural Logics, in: Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, vol. 151, Elsevier, 2007] for the details). As (...) a complementary work to the algebraic approach developed in [N. Galatos, H. Ono, Glivenko theorems for substructural logics over FL, Journal of Symbolic Logic 71 1353–1384], we present here a concise, proof-theoretic approach to Glivenko theorems for substructural logics. This will show different features of these two approaches. (shrink)

Prediction is essential for the efficiency of many cognitive processes; however, this process is not always perfect. Predictive coding theory suggests that the brain generates and updates a prediction to respond to an upcoming event. Although an electrophysiological index of prediction, the stimulus preceding negativity, has been reported, it remains unknown whether the SPN reflects the prediction accuracy, or whether it is associated with the prediction error, which corresponds to a mismatch between a prediction and an actual input. Thus, the (...) present study aimed to investigate this question using electroencephalography. Participants were asked to predict the original pictures from pictures that had undergone different levels of pixelation. The SPN amplitude was affected by the level of pixelation and correlated with the subjective evaluation of the prediction accuracy. Furthermore, late positive components were negatively correlated with SPN. These results suggest that the amplitude of SPN reflects the prediction accuracy; more accurate prediction increases the SPN and reduces the prediction error, resulting in reduced LPC amplitudes. (shrink)

Epistemological investigation belonged to the core topics in Indian philosophical traditions, too. Right cognition had generally been regarded as one of the important means to emancipation (niḥśreyasa) since ancient times. To reach this religious goal, they keenly discussed the problems of what kinds of cognition we should accept as right or what kinds of objects a right cognition refers to. Specifically it is about the number and the nature of the means of right cognition that opinions differ from school to (...) school. The number ranges from one (perception) to six or even ten (perception, inference, comparison, testimony, implication, non-perception, equivalence, tradition, gesture, and intuition). The concept of each means of right cognition, too, varies greatly among schools. In this paper I take up the Nyāya System, a rationalistic school of Brahmanic philosophy. In Nyāya the inference is regarded as particularly important, but it never means that logical thinking dominates testimony or the authority of religious scriptures in the Nyāya System. On the contrary we find such cases as the religious authority seems to delimit the validity of inference. Some inferences are obstructed by an axiom established in the school, whereas others by a ristriction of Brahmanic tradition. In this manner they seemed to protect their whole system from followers of other Schools. By examining this topic I would like to throw a tiny light on the characteristic affinity between philosophy and religion in Indian thought. (shrink)

This study explores the individual-level activities of legislators in parliament, which have been largely ignored in the literature on parliamentary democracies. Individual legislators are extensively involved in parliamentary activities such as drafting private members’ bills and posing questions, even though these activities have only been considered to play marginal roles in parliamentary democracies. Moreover, their engagement varies significantly. By using unique data from Japan, this study demonstrates that the personal attributes of legislators affect their choice of parliamentary activities. Under electoral (...) systems with intra-party competition, legislators use parliamentary activities as an important means to inform their constituents about what they can do for them and how they differ from other legislators. In elections, candidates cultivate personal votes by exploiting the image drawn from their personal attributes and, once elected, they behave in accordance with their attributes in order to maintain their electoral ground. Thus, they devote themselves to different activities in parliament. The data analyzed here support this argument. The results of empirical analyses show that legislators with local-level political experience engage in particularistic pork-barrel activities that will benefit their local interests, while legislators with legal-work experience allocate their time and energy to general policy-making activities that will enhance their public image and visibility as legal experts. (shrink)

Substructural logics have received a lot of attention in recent years from the communities of both logic and algebra. We discuss the algebraization of substructural logics over the full Lambek calculus and their connections to residuated lattices, and establish a weak form of the deduction theorem that is known as parametrized local deduction theorem. Finally, we study certain interpolation properties and explain how they imply the amalgamation property for certain varieties of residuated lattices.

The paper deals with involutive FLe-monoids, that is, commutative residuated, partially-ordered monoids with an involutive negation. Involutive FLe-monoids over lattices are exactly involutive FLe-algebras, the algebraic counterparts of the substructural logic IUL. A cone representation is given for conic involutive FLe-monoids, along with a new construction method, called twin-rotation. Some classes of finite involutive FLe-chains are classified by using the notion of rank of involutive FLe-chains, and a kind of duality is developed between positive and non-positive rank algebras. As a (...) side effect, it is shown that the substructural logic IUL plus t ↔ f does not have the finite model property. (shrink)