Taketani Mitsuo

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.

In this Japanese name, the surname is Taketani.
Taketani Mitsuo with his, 4 May 1949

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, Yukawa Hideki.[1]


Doctrine of the Three Stages of Scientific Development

He 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] According to Taketani, 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
  1. Brown, Laurie M.; Nambu, Yoichiro. "A History of Nobel Physicists from Wartime Japan". Scientific American. Scientific American. Retrieved 13 April 2019.
  2. Uchii, Soshichi. "Uchii Lecture". philsci-archive.pitt.edu. Retrieved 13 April 2019.
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