As every Hume scholar knows, there are two leading interpretations concerning the fundamental position of Hume's philosophy. One views Hume the philosopher as a sceptic, and the other regards Hume's moral theory as naturalistic. And as far as Hume's moral theory is concerned, the latter interpretation is now no doubt dominant. Although by and large I would agree with the naturalistic interpretation of Hume's philosophy, I should think it necessary to clarify the meaning of “naturalism”. For, though moral naturalism tends to be identified with moral realism, I rather doubt whether we can say Hume's moral theory is a kind of moral realism. In addition to this, if moral realism, as the correspondence theory of truth maintains, should imply that a moral proposition corresponds to some state of affairs, then a problem would arise: to what state of affairs does a moral proposition correspond? This is a difficult question to anwser if we accept the dualism of fact and value.
Now some recent moral realists have introduced the idea of “

” into moral theory to solve the problem. This idea, I admit, is very attractive, because it seems not only to give us the criterion to decide whether any moral proposition is true or not, but also enables us to avoid confusing moral property with natural quality. S. Blackburn, however, propounded a forceful argument that is fatal to the strategy of introducing the idea of for the solution of the problem, and contradicts moral realism.
If, however, we would accept his argument, what would be the results? In the first place, in order for us still to be justified in talking about the truth of moral propositions, we have to refuse the correspondece theory of truth and make an appeal to the coherence theory (for the pragmatic theory would not be suitable in the present situation). But, then, it may be that we are not allowed to maintain that each moral proposition does correspond to some state of affairs. In that case, to settle the matter, we have to create some logical space of reasons in which moral propositions should be located. And this means that Hume's moral theory cannot be interpreted entirely naturaristically.
I would indeed make it m y methodological rule to consider the moral matter from a naturalistic point of view as far as it is possible for us to do so, and treat moral proposition as something that can be true or false. But the rule is only a rule, so it cannot be a principle from which one can deduce anything material. Therefore, the interpretation of Hume as a naturalist can hold true, only if and as far as it would permit this circumstance. So my conclusion is rather an ironical one. The strategy of interpreting Hume's moral theory as a naturalistic one is viable, only if it argues that Hume's moral theory is in some sense not naturalistic. I defend a kind of expressivism.

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There are many problems about causality and identity in Humeanism. Especially, a problem that “Humean ” allowing many possibilities of various external laws encounters is concerned with the difficulty whether such laws can be coherent with the intrinsic properties of causation. This problem is related to another one whether “Humean ” is compatible with objectivism in accordance with Hume's original intention. Struggling with a disharmony between Hume's pragmatic epistemology and his realistic ontology, many philosophers have tried to dissolve such a complicated problem. But I think their efforts wouldn't be successful and the disharmony doesn't need to be settled, because the prospective collapses of their efforts wouldn't reduce the meaning of Humeanism. In this paper, I conclude that the seeming incoherence should be retained, because it suggests a moderate scientific attitude to be placed between dogmatism and skepticism. I demonstrate it by emphasizing the significance of some parts included in Hume's Treatise.

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Humean compatibilists argue that determinism is compatible with leeway freedom. They refute one of the premises of the consequence argument that we have no choice about the laws of nature, and they do this by arguing that the laws of nature does not prevent us from doing otherwise by necessity since the laws of nature are just regularities. One of the humean compatibilists, Bernald Berofsky, starts off his critique of this premise by pointing out that the standard consequence argument fails to deal with the relationship between the physical and the mental. In order to overcome this deficit, he builds the expanded consequence argument, and argues that even this expanded argument has a corresponding false premise, namely that no matter what we do, the sentences representing the laws of nature are true. At the same time, he accepts two

theses: (i) humean about laws and (ii) physicalism, especially the thesis that mental properties strongly supervene on physical properties. In this article, I argue that these two theses, together with the reasonable premises and inference rules, entail that no matter what we do, we cannot choose otherwise than we actually do. I conclude that Berofsky's defense of humean compatibilism fails because humean compatibilism would not succeed without abandoning either humean about laws or physicalism.

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Higher-level (mental, sociological and biological, etc.) entities are said to be supervenient on more basic, lower-level (physical, micro-level) entities, and there is a view that lower-level theories can completely and sufficiently explain higher-level events. But Harold Kincaid criticizes such a view. He does not deny that lower-level theories do explain something, but argues that they are only partial and incomplete, because they cannot refer to higher-level kinds which supervene on the relevant lower-level entities and answer important questions about causal laws. I will argue that the completeness or sufficiency of explanation is often evaluated interest-relatively, and, against Kincaid, that higher-level explanation cannot be sufficient without mentioning lower-level causal mechanism.

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A detection scheme is presented for maneuvering affordance in noisy imagery. Under the assumption that image features to be observed are generated as fractal attractors induced by mental maneuvering process, environment features are represented in directional scale images. For eliminating background noise in this sampling process, pixelwise filter is designed based on probabilistic complexity analysis. The detectability of affordance patterns has been verified through experimental studies.

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    According to the Sibleyan account, descriptive aesthetic judgments are warranted by aesthetic perception. I defend this account by using a philosophical theory of perceptual experience, that is, Fregean intentionalism. I will then suggest an anti-realistic account of aesthetic properties, which claims that perceivable aesthetic properties are not realistic properties supervening on sets of non-aesthetic sensible properties (e.g. color, shape, etc.） of objects, but some kind of “modes of presentation” of such properties. Proving this argument, I demonstrate how the philosophy of perception can be useful for considering problems in aesthetics.

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What I am concerned with in this essay is a case that has often been taken up with respect to the problem of the reducibility of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics or of the logical hierarchy between them, namely, the case of the derivation of the equation for the state of ideal gases (Boyle-Charles law) from the kinetic theory of gases. This is commonly considered to be one of the most successful examples of theory reduction, in that through the efforts of Maxwell and Bolzmann the basic but phenomenological law of classical thermodynamics was brought to bear the Newtonian mechanical description of the movement of molecules which were supposed to constitute gases, and through this then the so-called mechanistic view of the world was laid firmly at the foundation of modern physics. As for the relation between thermodynamics and (statistical) mechanics, the most attractive and often discussed theme must be the one concerning the second law and irreversibility, which won't be taken up here. The main reason that I have chosen to focus on the former case, instead of the latter, is that it is not so much a question of abstract concepts of theoretical origin, such as ‘entropy’, of which it is hard to establish a consensus of usage even among physicists, but rather it is a question of concepts such as ‘heat’, ‘temperature’ or ‘pressure’, which could in one sense be said to be formed by the very logic of our ordinary sense experiences, to which this case refers. In other words, it is expected that the task of explicating the logical status of the presuppositions which are tacitly adopted in this derivation (which physicists often pass by as unquestionable) can serve as a case study for investigating such problems on the philosophy of science as that of the relation between scientific language and ordinary language, the relation between scientific realism and antirealism, or the relation between conceptual reducibility and ‘emergence’.
The points that result from this essay are as follows. First, the most important presupposition introduced in this reduction and in some sense upon which the whole individual molecules, it wouldn't make sense to think of the mean kinetic energy of molecular motion, and accordingly, nor of the concept of temperature of the gas system. But, on the other hand, they are also said to be subordinated to the whole system, to the effect that, once becoming members of the gas ensemble, the individual molecules are inevitably put under the structural constraint of the Maxwell-Bolzmann distribution and so are forbidden random movement. One might be able to notice here a situation analogous to the ‘hermeneutical circularity’ between parts and the whole, say, in the context of interpreting texts.
Thus, even if we were to overlook the problem of the reducibility of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, concerning the validity of the introduction of the additional postulate concerned, the emergence of the latter from mechanics eventually blocks the overall reducibility of the former to mechanics, and so establishes its emergence in the full sense.

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デカルトは現在の (特に英米系の) 心の哲学においてはたいへん奇妙な扱いを受けている。デカルトの心の哲学の第一の特質はその二元論であるが (ただし, あとで触れるように二元論に尽きるのではない), この二元論のゆえにデカルトの哲学は, しばしば, 反科学の扱いをうけるのである。J.サールは最近の著書で, 現代の心の哲学での (科学主義的的) 唯物論の動向を難じて, その要因の筆頭に,「 (人々は) デカルトの二元論に陥るのが怖いのだ」という点を挙げている。現代の科学の時代にあって, 実在とはすべて客観的なものであり究極的には物理的存在であると思われるにかかわらず, 物理的存在以外に心的実体なるものを認めるデカルトの二元論に同調することは, 科学的知性を脅かす不条理を引き受けることだと見られるというのである(1)。しかし, 改めていうまでもなく, 自然科学の対象から心的性質や目的論的な概念を一切除外して, 近現代の数理科学を方向づけたのは他ならぬデカルトである。彼はまた, 動物や人間の身体をも機械論的に説明しようとして近代の生理学の見地をも設定したのである (デカルトの生理学的な「人間論」はのちの唯物論的な「人間機械論」の一つの有力なソースであった)。デカルトにとっては自分の哲学こそが, 人間の身体をも含む自然全体の科学的探究を推進するものであったのである。しかし, 問題はもちろん, デカルトが科学的探究の対象となる物理的生理学的対象以外に, それとは独立のものとして思惟や意志という心的存在を認めたことである。現代の言葉でいえば, デカルトは, 科学的生理学的探究を推進しながら, それとは独立に「常識心理学」の領域があるとはっきりと認めたということになる。私見によれば, 現代の心の哲学の状況に身を置いて, いわゆる「消去的唯物論」に与するのでなしに, 自然や人間の身体に対する科学的生理学的探究の見地を堅持しながら, 常識心理学が表す心的性質や心的存在に独自の身分を認める方向の哲学を立てようとした場合には, デカルトの心の哲学はなおも極めて有力で説得的な見地と評価しうる。以下で私は, 現代の心の哲学の問題, とくに「心的性質の実在性」や「心的因果性」の問題を念頭におき,「デカルトの心の哲学」からはそれらの問題に対してどのような解答が与えられるか, という点を考えてみたい。

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    Ontic structural realism (hereafter OSR) is one of the most significant ontological attitudes toward modern physics. On close examination, OSR can be classified into several versions in terms of the relative ontological status of objects and relations. Previous studies have not carefully dealt with the differences among the several versions of OSR, mainly because the meanings of some metaphysical concepts are ambiguous. Among them, one way to formulate OSR is to appeal to the idea of identity. However, “identity” can be regarded as either numerical identity or essence. In this article, the derivations of OSR’s minimal statements from the cases in quantum theory give a clear-cut explanation about relationships between metaphysical and scientific statements and show that the formulation of OSR should be based on essence.

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    The present review concerns Yukihiro Nobuhara's masterpiece, Philosophy of Consciousness: Introduction to the Study of Qualia. This book should be highly acclaimed due to the fact that from an intentional / representational point of view, a modern orthodox naturalistic standpoint, the problems of qualia are examined conceptually by assimilating bodily sensations to perception, as well as that the author pursues these problems by suggesting the possibility of a strategy in which we assign explanatory priority to linguistic content and explain how mental content results from that. However, I believe that philosophy of mind should be naturalized and studied in greater detail on the basis of the results of neurological studies by distinguishing between sensory and affective phenomena.

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Swampan poses a problem for physicalists who adopt the teleological approach to functionalism. In this paper I reformulate the intuitive idea behind the physicalists' worry about it as "Swampman argument", and consider possible rejoinders, including Maeda (1999)'s claim that swampman is not even imaginable. This paper was originally intended as a comment on Maeda's reply to Mizumoto (2000), which criticized his (1999).

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During these twenty or thirty years, neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, cognitive scientists and others have accumulated various interesting findings about human beings and computer simulations of human cognitive abilities. Artificial neural-networks, experiments on split-brain subjects, “blind-sight” phenomena and so on. Many of these findings suggest that many of the cognitive processes in human beings, many more than we usually think, may be “automatic” and “merely physical” processes.
On the other hand, if we take the Evolutionary Theory seriously and apply it to “consciousness”, we seem to have to admit that consciousness has its own causal efficacy over and above “physical” causation in the usual sense of the word. For, as Cairns-Smith points out (and as William James pointed out long time ago), there is a remarkable correlation between pleasure and pain of our (conscious) feelings, on the one hand, and biological advantage and disadvantage of the corresponding bodily situations, on the other. This correlation cannot be understood without assuming that consciousness has evolved somehow in the adaptationist way. And that seems to require that consciousness have causal efficacy which cannot be reduced to that of the brain states that “realize” the consciousness.
From these considerations, it seems to follow that the physicalist principle of “” is false, and also that physics, as the science responsible for all physical phenomena, should include consciousness as its proper object.

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