Profiles

Assistant Professor KURIYAMA Katsuyuki

Affiliations :

  • Graduate School Faculty of Arts and Letters
  • Division of Department of Integrated Human Sciences
  • Philosophy and Ethics Course
  • Department of Ethics

A Quest for a Unified Worldview

There appears to be a fundamental divergence between our everyday perspective and the scientific perspective.
For instance, in our daily lives, we generally assume that humans possess a degree of free will, enabling us to act voluntarily. Science, however, tends to fundamentally negate the concept of human free will. From a scientific standpoint, human will and actions are often considered to be determined by factors such as genetics, environmental conditioning, or neural information processing in the brain.
Furthermore, in our everyday experience, we perceive animals like dogs and cats, and even plants, not as mere machines but as entities endowed with life or a vital force. Science, conversely, generally does not acknowledge such a vitalistic principle. In the scientific framework, organisms are essentially complex collections of molecules that obey the laws of physics and chemistry, and in this sense, are not fundamentally distinct from machines.
This critical friction results in the divergence between the everyday and scientific ways of seeing and understanding the world, seemingly doomed to stay separated forever.
My research aims to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory perspectives. I intend to establish a coherent, unified viewpoint, and consequently a unified worldview by taking the philosophy of the French philosopher Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) as a key intellectual reference.
Ultimately, my objective is to construct a form of social theory or political philosophy grounded in this consolidated and integrated worldview.

  • Research, History
  • Books, papers, etc.
  • Personal History
    Education
    2022: Ph.D. in Literature, Tohoku University (Dissertation: The Philosophy of Raymond Ruyer: From Immediate Experience to Panpsychism)
    2012: M.A. in Ethics, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University
    2010: B.A. in Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University

    Professional Experience
    Assistant Professor at Tohoku University (October 2025 – Present)
    Served as a Research Assistant at the Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University.
    Degree
    Ph.D. in Literature
    Field
    French Philosophy, Mind-Body Problem, Philosophy of Biology
    Research Subject
    The Historical and Contemporary Significance of Raymond Ruyer's Philosophy
    Keywords
    French Philosophy (Raymond Ruyer), Philosophy of Mind (Panpsychism, Mind-Body Problem), Philosophy of Science (Teleology, Cybernetics), Value Philosophy (Axiology)
    Affiliation
    The Franco-Japanese Society of Philosophy, The Philosophical Society of Tohoku, The Association of the Philosophical Studies of Tohoku University
  • Academic Papers
    ・“The Concept of Absolute Surface in Ruyer and Its Significance," Annual of The Philosophical Society of Tohoku, No. 37, May 2021, pp. 17-31.
    ・“Raymond Ruyer's Inverted Epiphenomenalism," Revue de philosophie française (French Philosophy Journal), No. 25, September 2020, pp. 92-103.