| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,210,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥910,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥210,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
At first, as a historical study I have accomplished a translation into Japanese of "Trate des animaux" of Condillac (1755), comparing with Button's " Histoire naturelle" (which will be published in this Autumn). Through this working, I found a curious fact that Condillac had anticipated a kind of evolutionism, insisting on functional continuity between the minds of human being and beast, although his position-somewhat spiritualistic-was completely contadistinctive against that of, for example, la Mettrie. In addition to that, I discovered his excellent idea concerning human imitation that just imitation has brought such an expansive diversity in human being was a prediction of the theory of "meme", namely a cultural gene(replicator), which R.Dawkins and S.Blackmore and so on are developing now I have already published some papers on these discoveries. Next to this, in order to mark down the position of evolutionary ethics in the whole constellation of ethics, I have surveyed the philos
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ophical debate among, for instance, M.Ruse, E.Sobei, A.Gewirth, and so forth. In these reading, I could definitely confirm that we can't any more automatically deny the interface between evolutionism and ethics just by saying of "naturalistic fallacy", from nightmare association of social Darwinism (Spencerism). I got the perspective that we are required to construct a naturalistic and realistic-in its wide meaning-ethic which has good eyesight into the logically tense relation between biological and cultural evolutions, so as to overcome Moore's "un-nuturalistic fallacy" in spite of his brilliant criticism to social Darwinism. Of course, this is such a big problem that I couldn't yet accomplish this work, but the thesis contained in this result, which examines the human inclination to the war indicates the direction of our future research. Finally, reading some books and thesis of Burling, Miller and so on, who are trying to solve the questions of human culture and thinking that naive evolutionism of simple natural selection couldn't give an answer using a paradigm of sexual selection. It is so exiting that I acquired truly abundant suggestions. Referring these works, I am writing the papers on the problem of origin of human language in the 18th Century. (be published in this autumn.) Less
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