Hitoshi Nagai and solipsism

During this period, I met the philosopher Hitoshi Nagai, a lecturer at Housei University (now a professor at Shinshu University). Right after that, he published a philosophical treatise, The Metaphysics of “I” (Keiso Shobo, 1986), which contained an original expansion of solipsism. This work will certainly live on as a masterpiece in the annals of Japanese philosophical history. At the time the work was published, the concept of “I” brought up by Nagai in his development of solipsism had not become a topical subject in the field of philosophy; now, however, the new generation of young Japanese philosophers are paying much attention to that idea and a workshop has even been established at meetings of scientific philosophers.

Though Nagai and I are looking at the same field of philosophical issues, his superiority in understanding these issues and his publications have truly astounded me. At the time it was clear that he had the linguistic capabilities that I lacked, and the ideas in the 200 some odd pages that I had written would have to be rethought from their very foundation.

Nagai knew that I was writing a manuscript, and so he introduced me to Keiso Shobo Publishing. After talking with the editors at Keiso, and seeing that “The Philosophy of a Personal World” was still far from completion, they requested that before finishing that work, I should write a piece on “bioethics;” the result was the publication of An Invitation to the Study of Life.

Even after that I continued to write on “The Philosophy of a Personal World.” Masao Kurosaki made it possible for me to deliver a presentation on it at a PIN Philosophy Seminar. Shortly after that, however, I stopped writing on it, and it has sat sleeping on my bookshelf for quite some time.

Two years after having come to Kyoto, I suddenly remembered Osamu Tezuka’s Firebird, and realized that both my work “The Philosophy of a Personal World” and “Life Studies” shared the same motives and objectives. Furthermore, at that time, after pondering for a while, I gained a new perspective on how best to grasp Nagai’s solipsism theory and connect it to my own life studies research. As I was thinking about these things, I came across a certain type of mistake in Nagai’s solipsism, wrote and presented a critical paper on it. That paper, “The meaning of the uniqueness of one’s form of existence in this universe,” which was included ina collection of essays edited by none other than Nagai (Etica Lectures “Self and Others.” Showado, 1993). Though authors such as Yoshimichi Nakajima have started even referencing this debate between Nagai and myself (Morioka) (“Philosophy Textbook,” Kodansha, 1995), we still have to work together to determine how the debate should be interpreted (Motoyoshi Irifuji and Asaji Hirayama are already developing the ideas in a unique manner). Anyway, I still need to reexamine the 200 pages sleeping on my bookshelf and revise them in a particular area of life studies.

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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