Tetsuaki Iwamoto

The iroha song of human concepts (2021) The iroha is a Japanese poem of a perfect pangram and isogram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. It also mimics an ultimate conceptual engineering, in that there is more and more restricted scope for meaningful expressions, given more and more condensed means of description. This culminates in crystallizations of human values by auto-condensations of meaningful concepts. Instead of distilling Japanese values of 11th century, I try for those of human concepts, given our merging mind, language and culture.

This is an attempt to view the most basic and fundamental part of modern logic from a perspective which shares no grounds with any established schools of philosophical logic, in that the truth and falsehood as judged by means of human interventions is denied and the notion of logical dimensions is introduced. It establishes the minimum irrefutable logical structure and proceeds to found the relations between logic and geometry. The description of symmetry creates and simultaneously constrains the logical structure, whereas symmetry itself can only be postulated.

A work on the philosophy of mathematics (2017) ‘Number’, such a simple idea, and yet it fascinated and absorbed the greatest proportion of human geniuses over centuries, not to mention the likes of Pythagoras, Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes and countless maths giants like Euler, Gauss and Hilbert, etc.. Einstein thought of pure maths as the poetry of logical ideas, the exactitude of which, although independent of experience, strangely seems to benefit the study of the objects of reality. And, interestingly as well as surprisingly we are nowhere near any clear understandings of numbers despite discoveries of many productive usages of numbers. This is - rightly or wrongly - a humble attempt to approach the subject from an angle hitherto unthought-of.

A work on the philosophy of logic (1980) This is an attempt to view the most basic and fundamental part of modern logic from a perspective which shares no grounds with any established schools of philosophical logic, in that the truth and falsehood as judged by means of human interventions is denied and the notion of logical dimensions is introduced. It establishes the minimum irrefutable logical structure and proceeds to found the relations between logic and geometry. The description of symmetry creates and simultaneously constrains the logical structure, whereas symmetry itself can only be postulated. What really symmetry is, is a riddle of the intellect. Please think of it for at least one hour before you open this book.

Be it Foucault’s insight into a society based on ‘power-knowledge’ or Fukuyama’s attempts to predict the future based on the end-game situation of ‘liberal democracy’, both are like trying to work out a curvature of a line from a given point by using pre-calculus maths. No amount of elaborate narratives based on a quasi-dynamic, phenomenological concept like ‘discourses’ or a static concept like ‘liberal democracy’ will capture the dynamism of moving events and their fluid directions called ‘future’. You need the methodology of operative concepts that process moving events. My essay is based on a holistic and dynamic concept with logical progressions. Instead of capturing movements as a still picture I try to record constantly changing situations in terms of modality of history. It is the necessity of tangencies and encompassments for Circles of Identity that forms history. The momentum of ‘self’ that bridges the past and the future is the propellant of CIs, which follows certain rules to suggest our destiny.