On October 21, 2004, a joint symposium was held at ICU with Professors Anne Walthall and Hitomi Tonomura. It was conducted in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere, which enabled a lively exchange of ideas and opinions by both presenters and participants. The discussion between Professors Walthall and Tonomura unfolded to reveal an entirely different picture of Japanese history to that which I had known so far.
In introducing himself, Professor Carver, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, mentioned that he was influenced by Judith Butler's books, Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender. He was also largely influenced by R.W. Connell's book, Masculinities. During his talk, he promised to hit on the following three points:
Are social scientists demonstrating their scientific ignorance by bringing a gender perspective into fields such as medicine and biology? Yet, perspectives from epistemology and scientific philosophy are crucial to a critical assessment of science and of objectivity.