Research Highlights

It was a long time ago now, but I went to college because I wanted to study psychology. But by the time I graduated, my interests had shifted toward philosophy and logic, so I decided to study philosophy under a professor who was a Wittgensteinian philosopher in graduate school. I read a lot of Wittgenstein's texts in graduate school, but my master's thesis ended up being about the methodology of intellectual history and the philosophy of historiography. Even though my thesis was unrelated to Wittgenstein, my professor always gave my reports serious consideration and provided apt guidance.

After going on to a doctoral program, I began to think even more about history and became interested in the question of what it means to describe and evaluate past events and actions. This led me to think about what an action or event is in the first place. And before I knew it, I was on my way to becoming an expert in a branch of contemporary metaphysics that focuses on the concept of events. In late 20th-century Japanese analytic-philosophical circles, “metaphysics” was still an object of prejudice, so I tried to imply (without explicitly saying) that I was a metaphysician by adding subgenres of metaphysics to my specialties, such as philosophy of mind, causal theory, and some aspects of the philosophy of language. My interest in the concept of action has also led me to consider areas of expertise such as action theory, rationality, and axiology, all of which I continue to study today. Looking back, however, I feel that I have arrived at my research themes as a matter of coincidence and based on my frame of mind at the time rather than due to a consistent pursuit with some unshakable conviction. For example, I'm still not sure why I was never captivated by Wittgenstein.

I am also involved in cross-disciplinary research collaborations, currently working on a joint research project funded by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research with robotics engineers, experimental psychologists, and philosophers from different schools of thought, among others. As a philosopher, I try to ask fundamental questions about how we will coexist and communicate with artificial intelligence—assuming such a thing is possible —and about the nature of the mind and language these AIs may possess.

I have also learned a lot from discussions with graduate students whose interests are quite different from my own, although I worry that there is never as much time as I would like for those conversations.

(2023/4/1)