田中王堂のプラグマティズムと経済思想

抄録

After studying at Tokyo Senmon Gakkō, Ōdō Tanaka (1867–1932) stayed in the US for more than eight years from 1889, and taught philosophy at Waseda University for more than 30 years. At the University of Chicago, Tanaka was supervised by John Dewey (1859–1952) and trained also by William James (1842–1910, the author of Pragmatism) and George Santayana (1863–1952). Tanaka naturally became a pragmatist. Tanaka, like James and Dewey, praised utilitarianism highly, and therefore he paid attention to the development of utilitarianism, political economy, and economics.

In the early twentieth century, several scholars became interested in Sontoku Ninomiya (1787–1856, economic reformer and thinker). Tameyuki Amano (1861–1938, economist at Waseda University) introduced the teachings of Ninomiya into his Discourse on Thrift and Savings (1901) and his edited textbook New Commercial Reader (1911, 1913). In contrast, Tanaka regarded Ninomiya as a philosopher and authored A New Study of Sontoku Ninomiya (1912) by bringing focus into pragmatist, utilitarian, and individualist arguments in Ninomiya’s writings. Tanaka carefully examined Ninomiya’s concept of “chūyō (golden mean, constant mean),” which could serve as the criterion when a spectator questioned if something contributed to the happiness of a person or mankind in the world. Later Tanaka came to realize that Ninomiya’s concept of “suijō (concession)” should have something to do with Adam Smith’s concept of “parsimony.”

It is noteworthy that Dewey visited Japan in March and April 1919 and his lectures given at the University of Tokyo became the book Reconstruction in Philosophy in 1920. It is also important to remember that Dewey accepted the warm invitation sent by Hu Shih (1891–1962), his former student at Columbia University and a philosopher at Peking University, to visit China and then he spent more than two years on giving lecturers at Peking, etc.

With reference of Tanaka’s pragmatism, Dewey’s 1920 book, and Amano’s economics, this paper relates Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) with the use of the idea of “contributing to the happiness of mankind.” It also argues that Western economic thought has developed from some part of Western philosophy and that Western philosophy and economic thought have deeply connected with Christianity.