BACKGROUND Japanese acupuncture is gaining international recognition. However, previous research has failed to comprehensively describe the characteristics of Japanese acupuncture by not investigating it within the Japanese clinical environment. This study aimed to identify unique and routine elements of Japanese acupuncture, describe these elements in detail, and examine how the current belief...

50 years ago, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” W. V. Quine (1953) launched a discussion of philosophical notions of analyticity and the a priori. On this occasion, I want to try to arrive at a judgment about the upshot of that discussion. I will not engage in exegesis. I do not think of Quine’s writings as sacred texts or as existing independently of the discussions of others then and now. These ...

Category theory, possibly more than any other mathematical theory, has a rich philosophical significance. The reason why it has not been so far exploited by philosophers is that they know it, if at all, only superficially. In the present essay, I shall explore only one aspect of this theory, namely the way it contributes to our understanding of such concepts as: analogy, identity, equivalence. ...

The ethical structure of the Albanian customary code, the Kanun, is deemed to represent the ethical value system of a society without state power. In spite of the appearance of civilizations and the resultant advent of an incipient state power, humans seemed to have known only the ethical value system of a society without state power until Gotama, Socrates, Plato and Jesus proposed new religiou...

It is common for historians of medieval thought to note that the influence of Aristotle on Islamic philosophy was tinged with Neoplatonism, thanks to a text known as the "Theology of Aristotle." It is now known that the "Theology" is in fact not a work of Aristotle's but rather a paraphrase of parts of Plotinus's Enneads. Certainly, the misattribution of this work to Aristotle facilitated the s...

Despite the growing interest in the neurobiological correlates of meditation, most research has omitted to take into account the underlying philosophical aspects of meditation and its wider implications. This, in turn, is reflected in issues surrounding definition, study design, and outcomes. Here, I highlight the often ignored but important aspect of definition in the existing scholarship on n...

Philosophers coming to language from the tradition of logical semantics have sometimes been inclined to discount this sort of phenomenon. It makes no difference to the truth conditions of this particular sentence, and may appear merely to be an aspect of the vocal realization of the sentence—of interest to phonologists, and perhaps to socio-linguists, but not of much importance to fundamental p...

absolutism The view that there are some types of action that are strictly prohibited by morality, no matter what the specific facts are in a particular case. Some have held, for example, that the intentional torturing or killing of an innocent person is morally impermissible no matter what bad consequences could be prevented by such an action. Absolutism is an especially strict kind of deontolo...

Two years ago, the distribution of the world’s people reached the point at which over half now live in cities. Some social scientists and urban planners (but few political leaders other than those of large municipalities) had seen this change coming. With one group of exceptions, philosophers have paid less attention to the subject. I would like to advance some ideas about how to think philosop...