On March 14, the first meeting of “Philosophy and Ethics of Enhancement” was held. The speaker was Prof. Jun Matsuda at Shizuoka University and the title of his talk was “Cyborg ethics and beyond.”

From March 1 to 3, the international symposium "The Public World Opened by Women" was held in Kobe. This symposium was co-organized by "Kyoto Forum" and UTCP.

The Japanese translation of Jacques Derrida's The University without Condition was published. This was translated by Yuji Nishiyama, and he wrote a long expository essay "Jacques Derrida and Education."

The third volume of the UTCP booklet Passages of the Epochs : Walter Benjamin Today under the edition of Kobayashi Yasuo came out.

Takanori Hayao published Between Jewish and Israel: Aporias of Nation (Seidosha).

Shiro Miyashita published Democracy Reading Books (Tosui Shobo).

This article exists only in Japanese.

New report on our activities:
In Session 10 of the 1st Seminar: "Reading Levy's Neuroethics", we discussed the chapter 7: "The neuroscience of free will".

New report on our activities:
In Session 11 of the 2nd Seminar: "Reading Gazzaniga's The Ethical Brain", we read the chapter 10.

The second volume of the UTCP booklet What are the Classics in Our Time? under the edition of Nakajima Takahiro and Kobayashi Yasuo came out.

The second meeting of the forum on the problematic of the “image” was held at the University of Kyoto under the sponsorship of Okada Atsushi’s laboratory of the University of Kyoto. The presenters were:
Hashimoto Azusa (The National Museum of Art, Osaka)
Yoneda Naoki (University of Tokyo Graduate School, The National Art Center, Tokyo)
Ueo Masamichi (Nagoya University of Art)
Morita Dan (UTCP)
Terada Kuniyuki (Osaka University, JSPS fellow)
Ohashi Kantaro (Assistant, University of Tokyo)

From the 21st to the 29th of February we had a series of seminars with the participation of Thomas Metzinger (University of Mainz) and Stephan Schleim (University of Bonn), where we were able to discuss a variety of problems in neuroethics. Below is their brief report.

Dan Morita is discussing Francisco Naishtat’s paper in relation to the difficulties and the possibilities of creating a passage from Walter Banjamin’s Passagenwerk to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis.

Montaigne Essais 3 translated by member of UTCP Miyashita Shiro.

If there is a possibility to recover a brain with decreased functions, doesn’t it mean that it is also possible to improve the functions of a healthy brain?
The development in neuroscience opens up new possibilities for its technological application to medicine, pharmacy and engineering.

At the end of February we had the opportunity to hear the presentations of Tom Cohen and Francisco Naishtat. Despite their different approaches the problematic they treated was surprisingly shared. It would be possible to discern here two approaches of self-criticism in the humanities of 21st century.

2008年2月23日，UTCP的专题讨论会“哲学与大学——人文科学的未来”在驹场校区召开（主持人：宫崎裕助、西山雄二）

The symposium was a part of the open joint study “Philosophy and the University” , whose main objective was to reexamine the understanding of the university of various philosophers as well as well as the relationship between philosophy and the system and ideals of the university.