Naturalism reconsidered from the standpoint of ancient thought

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The aim of this research was to re-consider the nature of naturalism (the doctrine that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be explained by the methods of natural sciences) from the ancient philosophers' viewpoints, especially from Aristotle's, and to bring out a much plausible picture of human language and mentality in relief.The results of this research were:1.Through three years of this research, I had prepared a new Japanese translation of Aristotle's De Anima with a detailed commentary, based on a re-examination of previously collated manuscripts. The translation will be published in 2000.2.The comparative study of Plato and Aristotle on the relationship between nature and value shows that Plato comprehends the relationship continuously, but Aristotle holds that values are sui generis and ethical outlook is autonomous.3.The study of the history of interpretations of Aristotle's philosophy of language and mind led to the tentative conclusions as follows : the designatum of a word is, for Aristotle, is noema (the thought) and the concept of noema is one of the historical antecedents of the idea of intentionally. Later Neo-platonists identified Aristotelian noema with phantasma, which is specified as mental image by them. Thus they transformed Aristotle's view of language into psychologism. The fundamental motive for the psychologistic interpretation is their non-causal understanding of mind and language. And this psychologistic outlook on Aristotle's philosophy of mind and language is one of the main sources of some troublesome features of intentionally.