Takuya Nemoto

A language model supplied the mathematical content of a short series of preprints that were presented as a new "framework". Less than a year later, the same author, now working with a different language model, established that the central operator was a special case of the Friedkin–Johnsen model of opinion dynamics, a standard model that the first preprint had itself named as a neighbouring field without citing any of its literature. The route from the first publication ran through nine recorded stages, the last three recorded contemporaneously, and ended in that identification. This paper uses the case to ask what existing frameworks in the philosophy and sociology of science can and cannot say about novelty claims when the generating step is performed by a machine. I argue that (i) the case is neither a Mertonian multiple nor a rediscovery in the usual sense, because the arrival was neither independent nor human; (ii) when generation moves outside the human agent, the context of justification must absorb a task that was previously distributed across both contexts, namely the search for priority; and (iii) the correction that followed is best read as epistemic iteration from a defective starting point, in which implementation, not reflection, exposed the error that mattered. The correction was itself carried out with a language model, and the record does not separate the human share from the machine's share at each step. The paper makes no claim of mathematical novelty.

This paper develops Fragmentarian Spiritual Individualism, a philosophical framework that treats life, faith, society, ideas, and eschatology not as continuous narratives but as discrete, self-contained fragments. Rather than treating discontinuity as a problem to be repaired through narrative reconstruction or communal reintegration, the framework takes fragmentation as an ontological starting point and builds outward from it an ethic of internal discipline and spiritual autonomy. Synthesizing existentialist philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger), Christian mysticism (Eckhart, Boehme), the Japanese warrior ethic of Bushido, and postwar Japanese critical thought (Yoshimoto Takaaki, Karatani Kojin), the paper develops six interlocking fragments — existential solitude, institutional detachment in matters of faith, the fusion of intellectual and disciplinary "combat," an anti-modern aesthetics of work and form, an eschatology of finitude and glory, and a philosophical genealogy situating the framework within its sources — before turning to its contemporary significance and limitations. Throughout, the paper argues that modern rationalism, institutional religion, narrative selfhood, and capitalist self-realization share a structural flaw: each subordinates the singular, discontinuous individual to an external logic of continuity, whether bureaucratic, doctrinal, biographical, or economic. Fragmentarian Spiritual Individualism proposes the fragment itself as the basic unit of ethical and spiritual life, offering a disciplined stance — neither nostalgic re-institutionalization nor nihilistic dissolution — for individuals navigating post-capitalist, post-community conditions marked by institutional distrust and the erosion of shared metanarratives.

This essay develops personal imperialism as a heuristic framework for thinking about the integration of selfhood under conditions of late-modern fragmentation. The term does not denote empire as a form of state, still less any claim to dominion over other persons; it names a strictly reflexive project—the individual's cultivation of an internally sovereign order—assembled from three philosophically heterogeneous sources. From Immanuel Kant's Kingdom of Ends, the essay draws a legislative register: the self as simultaneously the author and the subject of its own governing law. From Friedrich Nietzsche's will to power, read cautiously and with attention to the contested editorial status of that phrase within his corpus, it draws an evaluative register: the ceaseless recreation of the values that legislation alone cannot supply. From Ernst Jünger's Gestalt of the Worker, it draws a mobilizational register: the total absorption of the self's capacities into lived, actual form.

This paper reconsiders celibacy not as a mere absence of sexual activity but as a substantive ethical and existential stance with a long history in Buddhist, Christian, and classical philosophical traditions. Drawing on antinatalist ethics, Epicurean hedonology, and Schopenhauerian pessimism, I argue that the conventional justification of sexual activity as a societal necessity-grounded in concerns about reproduction and demographic continuity-conflates descriptive biological function with normative ethical value. Once this conflation is set aside, I argue, the ethical evaluation of one's mode of living can be grounded instead in individual autonomy and self-sustaining quality of life (QOL) rather than reproductive obligation. Engaging with David Benatar's asymmetry argument, I suggest that the moral status of humanity's demographic continuity need not be treated as self-evidently overriding individual self-determination. I then draw on Epicurus's distinction between stable and transient pleasure, and on Schopenhauer's account of sexual desire as an expression of a species-oriented will-to-live, to argue that celibacy can constitute a coherent discipline of autonomous, self-sustained flourishing. Finally, I consider four objections-from relational psychology, from the alleged self-undermining character of universalized antinatalism, from the charge of theological parochialism, and from the subjectivity of QOL judgments-and offer replies. I conclude that celibacy, properly understood, merits recognition as one exemplary and defensible path of ethical self-cultivation, rather than as a deficiency to be explained away.