I wish you a happy new year! This year I will try to update this weblog more frequently than ever, and put more information on the website, International network for Life Studies. I will revise the description of life studies on this page, and add some comments on "philosophy of life" I am now thinking about. Visitors, who are interested in philosophy of life, please come back again to check the new contents of that page.

The following entry was added to "About this site" page.

We are looking for volunteers to help improve the quality of the contents of this site. (1) An English language adviser to improve the text of this website, (2) Volunteer translators to translate articles on this website or Japanese website into their own native languages, and hopefully create a website on life studies (example), or simply publish them on this site. (3) Webmasters who hope to create his/her website on life studies, and place it in a subfolder of lifestudies.org. Please contact us.

If you are interested do not hesitate to contact us. These days I wake up in the afternoon and go to bed 3 or 4 a.m. This is not a good habit. We have New Year holidays until January 4 or 5 here, classes begin from the next week....

Photo: books in my office

What's New: About this page

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My essay on Painless Civilization was published in Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper. This is good news. Lots of comments are uploaded on the web. This book seems to be accepted by the Japanese audience. I think I will translate at least the first part of Chapter one as soon as possible this year, and see if visitors to this site would have an interest.

I added some links to academic journals on applied philosophy. These journals look very interesting; I will check them at a library. We need interdisciplinary oriented journals and researchers inside and outside of the ivory tower. I am now working on the reconstruction of our "What is life studies" page. It will take some more days to finish. The explanation of "philosophy of life" and "painless civilization" will be added to that page.

Photo: leaves in a picture

What's New: New links

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I have been working for the reconstruction of What is Life Studies page, and finally finished most of it, though "Core Concepts" section is not finished yet. Since I added "research programs" and the explanation of "philosophy of life," I believe the image of life studies became sharper than before. Probably the topics of "philosophical inquiry into some basic concepts concerning life, death, and nature" and "life and ownership" would be interesting to the visitors. I hope you will enjoy a new description of life studies.

A translation of my essay on an inner structure of a philosopher will be uploaded soon. You can find the Japanese original version here. Please wait until the translation is uploaded on Lifestudies.org. By the way, the fourth printing of Painless Civilization will be coming this month. Good news.

Photo: A leaflet for Namba Parks, Osaka

What's New: What is Life Studies.

If you have any comments please feel free to use this feedback form.

The entry "Essence of Life Studies" was added to What is Life Studies page. The explanation of "core concepts of life studies" and "methodology of life studies" will be helpful to visitors, I hope. It took a week to reconstruct the whole page of What is Life Studies. I will have to translate some book reviews of Painless Civilization, and put more information to the Books pages. But I am afraid that I have to prepare a presentation at Tsukuba TRT9 conference held in February...

It is very cold here today, the weather report said it would snow tomorrow morning.

Photo: Japanese cloth

What's New: What is Life Studies.

If you have any comments please feel free to use this feedback form.