| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,600,000)
Fiscal Year 1999: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Kitaro Nishida's philosophy of science is nothing but an original response to the controversy concerning "the crisis of science" in the early twentieth century. At that time in Europe, Russell discovered the paradox of set theory and it drove the basis of mathematics into a corner. Moreover Einstein's relativity theory radically changed our concept of space and time, and the development of quantum mechanics casted doubt on the concept of causality. Nishida tried to reexamine these problems from the viewpoint of "acting intuition."
Surveying the controversy about foundations of mathematics, Nishida rejected Russell's position of "logicism," on the grounds that it was lacking in insights into the role of intuition. On the other hand, Nishida evaluated Brouwer's "intuitionism" to a certain extent. But he suggested to substitute his concept of "acting-intuition" for Brouwer's "basic intuition." Generally speaking, Nishida did not necessarily succeed in applying "acting-intuition" to mathematical knowledge. For "acting-intuition" is originally a practical concept which depends on our bodily acts.
On the contrary, the concept of "acting-intuition" properly functions in the field of physics. Because, physics is a discipline which investigates a structure of objects by means of experimental operations. Based upon Bridgman's "operationalism," Nishida insisted that "there is not a physical world without practical acts of bodily selves." He elucidated the epistemological significance of quantum mechanics from this viewpoint. According to him, the law of causality in physics is no more than a special version of "historical causality." Finally, Nishida reached the position of "radical positivism" which was expressed by a term "phenomenon=reality."
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