1988 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Life and Death Their Logical and Ethical Problems
| Project/Area Number |
62450001
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (B)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
Philosophy
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| Research Institution | University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
FUJIMOTO Takashi University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 教授 (20001795)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
IMAI Tomomasa University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 助教授 (50110284)
TAKAHASHI Tetsuya University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 助教授 (60171500)
MIYAMOTO Hisao University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 助教授 (50157682)
YAMAMOTO Takashi University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 助教授 (70012515)
TSUESHITA Ryuei University of Tokyo, College of Arts and Sciences, 教養学部, 教授 (00012261)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1987 – 1988
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| Keywords | Life / Death / Action / Ethics / Norm / Self-Knowledge / Liberty / 生命倫理 |
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| Research Abstract |
Today we are confronted with various types of serious medico-social problems concerning our life and death, as the result of recent developments of biological sciences and biotechnology. The purpose of this research is to provide current issues with some philosophical ethical points of view. Human life and death must be treated in a different way from that in which other creatures are dealt with as the object of scientific researches; for they cannot sufficiently be investigated without elucidating various philosophical problems centered around a most elementary question: "What am I?". The ultimate basis and meaning of our lives and deaths must be shown solely in terms of this "I". The results of our research, directed by this fundamental attitude of ours, are tentatively summarized as follows:
1. The existence of "Me" as supporter of the meaning of life and the world was examined from various aspects: for instance, (1) by analyzing the personal-identity problem in contemporary analytic philosophy, (2) by elucidating the structure of Self-Knowledge in the philosophical texts of socrates and plato and (3) by extracting the Aristotelian notion of "language-horizon" to illuminate the life and death of human individuals.
2. As to the structure of our practical actions, (1) we clarified their logical forms in terms of practical reasoning, as one of the central problems in the history of action-theory, and (2) scrutinized the original ideas of ST.Thomas and Spinoza to open up the ground and the essence of our free action.
3. As for the human foundations of bioethics, (1) we investigated relations of the human action and the social norms that are regulating them, on the bases of speech-act theory and the genetic theory of social norms, and (2) re-confirmed the importance of some complementary roles of both normative ethics and metaethics in developing ethical researches into the problems of life and death.
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