Taketani Mitsuo

Taketani Mitsuo
武谷 三男
Taketani with his son in 1949
Born	(1911-10-02)October 2, 1911 Ōmuta, Empire of Japan
Died	April 22, 2000(2000-04-22) (aged 88)
Nationality	Japan
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Tōkai University Osaka University Kyoto University

Taketani Mitsuo (武谷 三男, October 2, 1911 – April 22, 2000) was a prominent Japanese physicist and Marxist. He published his Doctrine of the Three Stages of Scientific Development in 1936. This was the first Japanese contribution to the philosophy of science.

He was jailed in 1938 following making contributions to the Marxist journal Sekai Bunka (World Culture). However, following the intervention of Yoshio Nishina, he was released into the custody of his professor, Hideki Yukawa.^[1]

Doctrine of the Three Stages of Scientific Development[]

Taketani applied Hegel's theory of dialectics, with the triad Phenomenon, Substance, and Essence. Having worked with Yukawa as he developed his discovery of the meson, he used this as an example of a new substance.^[2] With his fellow peer and collaborator Shoichi Sakata, Taketani developed a Marxist philosophy of science known as the three-stages theory.^[1] According to the theory, science starts from a Phenomenal Stage where its role is to describe our experience. Next, science then asks what sort of substance may make up the objects of experience, and also what is the structure they may have, which he calls the Substantial Stage. However, he then argues the question of an essence of both substance and phenomenon emerges as the Essential Stage, which syntheses of the previous two stages. The process is then reiterated with a similar cycle repeated at a higher level.^[2]

References[]

• Is Philosophy of Science Alive in the East? A Report from Japan by Soshichi Uchii, accessed 12 January 2008

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