著者

田村 均 TAMURA Hitoshi

出版者

名古屋大学文学部

雑誌

名古屋大学文学部研究論集 (ISSN:04694716)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.56, pp.1-24, 2010-03-31 (Released:2010-05-21)

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This report deals with the results of a questionnaire about four historico-philosophical concepts: “modernity”, “tradition”, “individualism”, and “the will”. The questionnaire was designed to make it appear what attitudes or evaluations Japanese people had toward these concepts. It was filled out by more than five hundred Japanese college students. The results are this: the majority of them hold that contemporary Japan is a modern society but that it more or less belongs to the Eastern tradition; they feel that individualism is something nice; and, most important, they think that an individual can have several Ishi (wills) simultaneously. It is a common presupposition in English that one does not have wills. Nearly ninety percent of Japanese college students, however, take it for granted that there can be plural Ishi (the Japanese counterpart of “the will”) at one time in one person. They may not believe that it is the one and only Ishi (the will) that makes decision and chooses the best course of action among options. They may have quite a different scheme of explanation of decision making from that which English speakers naturally presumes to be valid. Hopefully, a new perspective for the explanation of human action will be obtained through a comparative study of the Japanese concept of Ishi with its English counterpart.