40位に山中先生、47位に村上春樹

昨日のJapan Timesに哲学者のPeter Singerが哲学の重要性をアピールするエッセイを寄稿していました。スイスのGDIという研究所が発表した2013年のThought Leader100人のTOP５のうち３人、ハーバマスを入れれば4人が哲学者だったというのです。とはいっても、書き出しにあるように人文系を選考する人数は減っているそうですが。。。

COMMENTARY / GLOBAL-RELATED
Philosophers still vital to our high-tech world
BY PETER SINGER

Last year a report from Harvard University set off alarm bells because it showed that the proportion of bachelor degree graduates in the United States who had majored in the humanities fell from 14 percent to 7 percent.

Even elite universities like Harvard itself have experienced a similar decrease. Moreover, the decline seems to have become steeper in recent years. There is talk of a crisis in the humanities.

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GDI aims to identify “the thinkers and ideas that resonate with the global infosphere as a whole.” The infosphere from which the data are drawn may be global, but it is also English-language only, which may explain why no Chinese thinker is represented in the top 100.

There are three eligibility requirements: One has to be working primarily as a thinker; one must be known beyond one’s own discipline; and one must be influential. The ranking is an amalgam of many different measurements, including how widely the thinkers are watched and followed on YouTube and Twitter, and how prominently they feature in blogs and in the wikisphere.

The outcome indicates each thinker’s relevance across countries and subject areas, and the ranking selects those thinkers who are most talked about and who are triggering wider debate.

The rankings will no doubt vary from year to year. But we have to conclude that in 2013 a handful of philosophers were particularly influential in the world of ideas.

このランキングはあくまで2013年に影響力があったという意味ですが、

こちらがGDIのリンクです。日本人でどんな人がランキングされているのか調べたところ40位にiPS細胞の山中先生、47位に村上春樹の2人がランクインしていました。

専門家じゃない人が口を挟むのを嫌う傾向にありますが、深く考える必要がある問題には哲学のようなものが必要になるのでしょうか。加藤典洋さんがニューヨークタイムズに日本の核政策について寄稿していましたが、こういうのはまさに哲学的にしっかりと考えなければいけない問題ですね。

Ambiguities of Japan's Nuclear Policy
APRIL 13, 2014
Norihiro Kato

TOKYO — When Yasunari Kawabata became the first Japanese to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, he gave a speech called “Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself” that presented a benignly aesthetic portrait of the so-called Japanese spirit larded with references to classical poetry, the tea ceremony and ikebana. When Kenzaburo Oe received the prize in 1994, he titled his lecture, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” and offered a critical take on the country’s ambiguities, starting its being part of Asia and simultaneously aligned with the West.

I was reminded of the contrast between Japan the Beautiful and Japan the Ambiguous late last month when, during the third Nuclear Security Summit in the Hague, the Japanese government announced that it would hand over to the United States more than 700 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and a vast supply of highly enriched uranium. It struck me then that the ambiguities of Japan’s policy on nuclear weapons might be coming up against the nationalist agenda of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also the author of “Towards a Beautiful Country: My Vision for Japan.”