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Ah, that changes things. Japanese credentials can be a little inscrutable sometimes, at least in my field. Their connections with the outside world's academics

Ah, that changes things. Japanese credentials can be a little inscrutable sometimes, at least in my field. Their connections with the outside world's academics aren't as strong for us. I know that's not true in e.g. math. Wonder what's going on.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
I suspect it's largely a cultural issue. Japan isn't as outwards-facing as most countries, certainly most large countries. It's one thing to export pop culture, which it does very successfully, quite another to export academic products from such a different system. A system so different it probably doesn't descend from the original Academia at all, unlike most modern instantiations of scholarship.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  What? The pursuit of knowledge does not require any intellectual hereditary descent from ancient Greece last time I checked. And the capacities of an academic culture is not correlated with closeness to the ideals of the ancient Greeks either. They rise or fail on their own merits.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    Modern academia doesn't even descend from any ancient Greek institution since schooling in Greco-Roman antiquity was far more of a personal engagement, universities were extensions of Christian monasteries and modern formal logic and 'rational debate' developed out of the practices of those monks communications with one another across distances. Moreover it was the Muslim Caliphates and Eastern Romans who inherited and further developed the wealth of surviving antique knowledge between the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and Northwest Africa and the renaissance, but since Hegel Europe has had this lasting fascination with a direct link to antiquity. Edit: An aside - People of Descartes' and Locke's generation were amongst the first waves of a secular break of this sacred academic tradition that was commensurate with similar breaks in politics. It is this sacred origin of secular thought that John Locke is referring to in The Essay on Human Understanding in the form of "the schoolmen" he references as his constant opponent: these are the Christian scholastics, from Peter Abelard down to Aquinas, who developed the prototypical notions of universality/causation as we understand them today, but these were conflated things from the scholastics all the way down to Kant rather than how we now consider the former distinctly as an exhaustive, inclusive set of things in some category, e.g. being human. The categorical imperative doesn't mean "act as if everybody else had to also do as you do", it means "act as if your decision was inextricable from any other necessary, causal law we observe of nature, like gravity (does the Earth decide to pull you back down when you jump up?). Morality based on pain/pleasure is a BIG NO-NO for Kant and Kant's minimalist definition of being human excludes being able to be recognized empathically/sympathetically.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    I'm not talking about capabilities at all. I'm talking about difficulty exchanging ideas when cultures are very different.
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      If the ideas are correct or built on a widely accepted basis, and can be reliably shown to be correct by third party investigators, i.e. in the hard sciences and engineering, the extra friction in exchange would hardly matter. If you mean when the ideas are contentious than yes the language barrier and different culture would add noticeable friction and probably put japanese academics in a disadvantageous position in debate. Though that degree of friction seems to be independent of closeness to the ideals of ancient Greece, unless you know of some correlation?
      - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
        Well, anecdotally... As a member of a youth program I spent quite a bit of time around elders of the native population of Canada. These cultures have a pretty sophisticated system of refining and passing on knowledge, which I found fascinating to participate in. I found that fellow program members who were very immersed in the western system of scholarship had a very hard time benefiting from the Native system of scholarship. Assumptions that come out of the Western system of scholarship, such as around the value of debate or abstraction, just don't translate well. It required a different attitude to learning, one I was probably more prepared for than my peers in part due to my time studying Japanese martial arts. There are cultural assumptions around how knowledge is discovered and perpetuated that are so deeply ingrained it's hard to imagine they'd be different in a different culture. Now, the Canadian native population has lost a huge portion of its cultural base, they essentially have to adapt to the Western model. But Japan's system has experienced no such widespread damage. I don't know much about it, but I could see there being the same kind of deep differences with the western system that make moving products of thought between them difficult. Not just language barriers that make debate difficult, but assumptions such as the proper role of debate. The Academia is a common ancestor to most existing systems of scholarship today. Japan's system doesn't share it, so the water Japanese scholars swim in could be very different from the water the rest of us are used to.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

I suspect it's largely a cultural issue. Japan isn't as outwards-facing as most countries, certainly most large countries. It's one thing to export pop culture, which it does very successfully, quite another to export academic products from such a different system. A system so different it probably doesn't descend from the original Academia at all, unlike most modern instantiations of scholarship.

MichaelZuo 5y ago
What? The pursuit of knowledge does not require any intellectual hereditary descent from ancient Greece last time I checked. And the capacities of an academic culture is not correlated with closeness to the ideals of the ancient Greeks either. They rise or fail on their own merits.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Modern academia doesn't even descend from any ancient Greek institution since schooling in Greco-Roman antiquity was far more of a personal engagement, universities were extensions of Christian monasteries and modern formal logic and 'rational debate' developed out of the practices of those monks communications with one another across distances. Moreover it was the Muslim Caliphates and Eastern Romans who inherited and further developed the wealth of surviving antique knowledge between the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and Northwest Africa and the renaissance, but since Hegel Europe has had this lasting fascination with a direct link to antiquity. Edit: An aside - People of Descartes' and Locke's generation were amongst the first waves of a secular break of this sacred academic tradition that was commensurate with similar breaks in politics. It is this sacred origin of secular thought that John Locke is referring to in The Essay on Human Understanding in the form of "the schoolmen" he references as his constant opponent: these are the Christian scholastics, from Peter Abelard down to Aquinas, who developed the prototypical notions of universality/causation as we understand them today, but these were conflated things from the scholastics all the way down to Kant rather than how we now consider the former distinctly as an exhaustive, inclusive set of things in some category, e.g. being human. The categorical imperative doesn't mean "act as if everybody else had to also do as you do", it means "act as if your decision was inextricable from any other necessary, causal law we observe of nature, like gravity (does the Earth decide to pull you back down when you jump up?). Morality based on pain/pleasure is a BIG NO-NO for Kant and Kant's minimalist definition of being human excludes being able to be recognized empathically/sympathetically.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  I'm not talking about capabilities at all. I'm talking about difficulty exchanging ideas when cultures are very different.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    If the ideas are correct or built on a widely accepted basis, and can be reliably shown to be correct by third party investigators, i.e. in the hard sciences and engineering, the extra friction in exchange would hardly matter. If you mean when the ideas are contentious than yes the language barrier and different culture would add noticeable friction and probably put japanese academics in a disadvantageous position in debate. Though that degree of friction seems to be independent of closeness to the ideals of ancient Greece, unless you know of some correlation?
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      Well, anecdotally... As a member of a youth program I spent quite a bit of time around elders of the native population of Canada. These cultures have a pretty sophisticated system of refining and passing on knowledge, which I found fascinating to participate in. I found that fellow program members who were very immersed in the western system of scholarship had a very hard time benefiting from the Native system of scholarship. Assumptions that come out of the Western system of scholarship, such as around the value of debate or abstraction, just don't translate well. It required a different attitude to learning, one I was probably more prepared for than my peers in part due to my time studying Japanese martial arts. There are cultural assumptions around how knowledge is discovered and perpetuated that are so deeply ingrained it's hard to imagine they'd be different in a different culture. Now, the Canadian native population has lost a huge portion of its cultural base, they essentially have to adapt to the Western model. But Japan's system has experienced no such widespread damage. I don't know much about it, but I could see there being the same kind of deep differences with the western system that make moving products of thought between them difficult. Not just language barriers that make debate difficult, but assumptions such as the proper role of debate. The Academia is a common ancestor to most existing systems of scholarship today. Japan's system doesn't share it, so the water Japanese scholars swim in could be very different from the water the rest of us are used to.