In this paper, I consider the impact of communication media on human relationships while introducing the results of a series of studies on the philosophy of technology concerning communication media that I have conducted (呉羽 2020, 2021, 2022). First, I present a critique of what I call the ‘face-to-face myth' — the discourse that online communication is inferior to face-to-face communication. Then, I discuss several hypotheses about why people believe in the face-to-face myth. Moreover, based on a ‘melioristic philosophy of technology' inspired by Dewey's thoughts, I describe a strategy for refreshing the view of communication and redesigning our forms of communication.

    The two competing camps of theorists in moral psychology share one common view on the disagreement between their theories: moral foundations theory presupposes basic emotion theory, while dyadic morality theory presupposes constructionist theory of emotion. The paper challenges this common view. First, it reviews the four theories. Second, it clarifies the issue about the relation between the moral contents and emotions on which the two camps of moral-psychological theorists dispute. Third, it identifies the explananda for the moral-psychological theories, and examines the two distinctive types of explanations that each of the two theories offers to them. Finally, it concludes that the deepest disagreement between the two morality theories consists in the role that the theories give to emotions in explaining moral judgments.

    Several studies on later Wittgenstein's notion of picture have recently emerged in Japanese literature. Here, I critically examine three of them: Ohtani (2020), Furuta (2020), and Noya (2022). My contentions are twofold. First, the disagreement between these studies lies in the fact that Noya supposes a common core shared by Tractatus's notion of picture and that of Philosophical Investigations, while Ohtani and Furuta deny this core. Second, Furuta and Noya fail to provide a conception of picture that contributes to the understanding of Wittgenstein's text, while Ohtani alone proposes an illuminating notion.

    In this paper, I outline and motivate the fictionalist account of biological teleology, which has received relatively little attention in recent discussions. It holds that our teleological discourse about biological traits employs a useful metaphor that treats them as if they were purposefully designed by an intentional agent, say, God or Mother Nature. Drawing primarily on various conceptual tools developed in the contemporary philosophy of fictionalism and metaphor, as well as on different forms of evidence, I argue for two specific versions of teleological fictionalism: descriptive and prescriptive pretense fictionalism. I argue that when we ascribe a purpose to a biological trait, at least in some important classes of cases, we are invoking a game of prop-oriented make-believe in which the trait in question is used as a prop. I also argue that we should engage in such metaphorical discourse, at least on some important occasions, on the grounds that it can yield certain practical benefits that might outweigh its costs. The upshot is that teleological fictionalism is a live option that deserves further philosophical scrutiny as well as empirical investigation.

    In his recent book Identity and Individuals, Yoshiyuki Yokoro proposes a theory of identity based on sortal concepts. He acknowledges that identity is a simple concept and unanalyzable. However, it is not a futile task to ask how the concept of identity is linked to other concepts. This book aims to “elucidation” such identity, and the key concept in such an attempt is sortal concepts, such as cats and rivers. In my opinion, it is important that he regarded sortals as “concepts” rather than “properties”. On the one hand, it shows the shortcomings of his metaphysical position, and on the other hand, it expresses his methodological “humility”.