Shozo Omori

Life

Born August 1, 1921, in the city of Okayama, Okayama Prefecture. After graduating from the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Science at Tokyo Imperial University, he re-entered the University of Tokyo in the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Letters, graduating in 1949, and also studied at Oberlin College in the United States. At the University of Tokyo's College of Arts and Sciences he served as assistant and lecturer before becoming professor in 1966, and was dean of the college from 1976 to 1977. He retired at the mandatory age in 1982 and became professor emeritus, after which he served as professor at the University of the Air, among other posts. He died on February 17, 1997.

Thought

From the 1950s to the end of the 1960s, drawing on the arguments of Berkeley, Hume and Wittgenstein, he published many essays in analytic philosophy and philosophy of science.

The major turning point was the 1973 essay "Kotodama-ron". From the 1970s onward, taking the concept of "appearing" (tachiaraware) as his axis, he advocated a "monism of appearing" that does not distinguish the act of perceiving, the content of perception, and the object perceived, and criticized mind-body dualism and the subject-object scheme.

He also argued that the relation between the everyday perceptual landscape and the description given by science is neither one of cause and effect nor a mere parallelism, but an "overpainting". In his late period he took up the problem of time, rejecting naive realism and depicting the past as something produced through language.

Major works and influence

His major works include Gengo, Chikaku, Sekai (Language, Perception, World, 1971), Mono to Kokoro (Things and Mind, 1976), Shin Shikaku Shinron (A New Theory of Vision, 1982), Jikan to Jiga (Time and Self, 1992), Jikan to Sonzai (Time and Being, 1994) and Toki wa Nagarezu (Time Does Not Flow, 1996). In 1992 he received the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize.

At the University of Tokyo he trained Keiichi Noe, Takashi Fujimoto, Shigeki Noya and Yoshimichi Nakajima, among others, and Shigeki Noya and Hitoshi Nagai have critically carried his philosophy forward.