Japanese philosophy can be viewed as consisting of three historical phases. In the first and classical phase, theoretical speculation in Japan is usually seen as a variation of East Asian intellectual tradition, which basically consists of Confucianism and Sinicized Buddhism. Some thinkers nevertheless start to depart from this framework by drawing either on the indigenous culture or on the knowledge of occidental civilization, which eventually leads to the Westernization of Japanese society. In the second, or modern, phase (...) of Japanese philosophy, there arises a theoretical task to synthesize Eastern and Western frameworks, and many pioneering works of modern East Asian philosophy are produced in the first half of the 20th century. The third and contemporary phase of Japanese philosophy spans from the postwar reconstruction of Japan to the present, when eminent researchers lead philosophical studies under the framework either of analytic or continental context. Recent philosophical research in Japan is increasingly getting free from such academic frameworks, producing some remarkable results-- although most of these contemporary works remain unknown overseas. (shrink)

An overview of Japanese philosophy from the seventh century to the present.

The first of 3 volumes of essays on Japanese philosophy, this work brings together essays that clarify its heritage and its practice, above all in the dynamic thought of Nishida Kitaro. Showing how philosophy takes shape through the translation of language and culture, the author examines the frameworks that have defined and confined Nishida’s thought and then charts new avenues of questioning Nishida and letting him question us. How should we envision the world at a time of (...) environmental crisis, how might we rethink our conceptions of history, religion and God; how is bodily awareness a way that the world knows itself, and just what can we make of Nishida'™s famous notion of nothingness—these are some of the questions that guide the meticulous explorations in this collection. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy covers, in detail and depth, the entire span of Japan’s philosophical tradition, from ancient times to the present. It introduces and examines the most important topics, figures, schools, and texts from the history of philosophical thinking in premodern and modern Japan. Each chapter, written by a leading scholar in the field, clearly elucidates and critically engages with its topic in a manner that demonstrates its contemporary philosophical relevance.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I would like to begin by thanking the Journal of Japanese Philosophy for making space in these pages for a review of my monograph Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. Although book reviews do not usually receive a reply from the author—much less one as lengthy as the article that follows—one seemed necessary in this instance because my ideas, unfortunately, (...) have been seriously mis-represented here. Moreover, the number and kinds of misreadings, mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are so extensive that even a brief attempt to address the main points at issue is no small task. But the primary problem is that the reviewer contends that I say the opposite of what I actually maintain with regard to some of the central claims of the book. These mistaken assertions are primarily the consequence of a failure to understand crucial philosophical concepts (especially metaphysical nondualism, being-in-the-world, intentionality, and disclosure). But they also stem from a series of errors ranging from the exclusion of some of the fundamental ideas and arguments of the book to the misreading of pivotal claims and the mistranslation of the Japanese-language primary sources.I begin with a single but telling example that is characteristic of the way the reviewer repeatedly portrays me as saying the opposite of what I actually say. Droz states that “For Johnson, while human beings taken collectively as a whole have the capacity to transcend the fūdo, individual human beings apparently do not” (Droz, 133). But what I actually say is that Watsuji “has not shown that this same capacity belongs to the individual human being” (Johnson, 191). I then give a series of examples of individual transcendence: “the forms of transcendence that are evident in, for example, the complex identities of immigrants, of those who have lived in multiple countries, of those who live in multiple milieus at the same time [...] of those who develop a very different character from their compatriots even as they live together in the same place” (Johnson, 191). [End Page 167] I go on to point out that “we also need a subtler account, on a much smaller scale, of the ways the self is both constituted by and is also able to transcend its fūdo. In what follows we will give an indication of some of the issues involved” (Johnson, 191). I then proceed to give such an overview, concluding with the point that “the strong identification with one aspect of one’s milieu rather than another shows that the self is much more than the simple expression of its fūdo. This form of transcendence, I suggest, can be studied with profit as an instance of what Watsuji calls the individual dimension of human beings” (Johnson, 192).Misrepresentations of this sort abound. The most serious instance of this kind concerns one of the central theses of this study. At the beginning of her review, the author purports to recount two criteria that I propose “to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails” (Droz, 129). But in fact, I list four criteria under two distinct categories. First, in order to determine the scope and boundaries of a fūdo, I propose the following two criteria:1. certain regions as articulated wholes found in nature itself, which is what Watsuji attempts to articulate with his taxonomy of basic types of fūdo (Johnson, 34).2. a relational whole of disclosure, self-interpretation, and natural locale (Johnson, 34).But the reviewer takes note of (1) and passes over (2) in silence—this omission is significant and, as we will see shortly, it leads her into later difficulties. Droz instead moves directly to a second topic, namely, what I intend by the term nature, which is a concept found in both of these criteria. Here I follow Mill in thinking that we need some way to distinguish between nature and nonnature if nature is not simply to be equated with everything. I therefore propose two criteria that we might use to distinguish nature from artifice within a fūdo: A. nature as all-encompassing space and place B. the sheerly given self-unfolding of things . (shrink)

This is a set of essays and translations that covers comprehensively all of Japanese philosophy.

Philosophy challenges our assumptions—especially when it comes to us from another culture. In exploring Japanese philosophy, a dependable guide is essential. The present volume, written by a renowned authority on the subject, offers readers a historical survey of Japanese thought that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Adhering to the Japanese philosophical tradition of highlighting engagement over detachment, Thomas Kasulis invites us to think with, as well as about, the Japanese masters by offering ample examples, (...) innovative analogies, thought experiments, and jargon-free explanations. He assumes little previous knowledge and addresses themes—aesthetics, ethics, the samurai code, politics, among others—not in a vacuum but within the conditions of Japan’s cultural and intellectual history. For readers new to Japanese studies, he provides a simplified guide to pronouncing Japanese and a separate discussion of the language and how its syntax, orthography, and linguistic layers can serve the philosophical purposes of a skilled writer and subtle thinker. For those familiar with the Japanese cultural tradition but less so with philosophy, Kasulis clarifies philosophical expressions and problems, Western as well as Japanese, as they arise. Half of the book’s chapters are devoted to seven major thinkers who collectively represent the full range of Japan’s historical epochs and philosophical traditions: Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. Nuanced details and analyses enable an engaged understanding of Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintō, and modern academic philosophy. Other chapters supply social and cultural background, including brief discussions of nearly a hundred other philosophical writers. In his closing chapter Kasulis reflects on lessons from Japanese philosophy that enhance our understanding of philosophy itself. He reminds us that philosophy in its original sense means loving wisdom, not studying ideas. In that regard, a renewed appreciation of engaged knowing can play a critical role in the revitalization of philosophy in the West as well as the East. (shrink)

Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida, by John C. Maraldo, is the first of three volumes collecting his essays in Japanese philosophy. This volume, which is divided into two sections, gathers together thirteen essays reflecting on the thought of Nishida Kitarō. The first section, “Pathways to Nishida,” is comprised of three essays clarifying some of the metatheoretical, intellectual and scholarly contexts around the study of Nishida’s thought. The remaining essays represent “Pathways Through (...) Nishida,” which engage Nishida’s philosophy from a variety of analytic, thematic, and comparative perspectives. These pathways are genuinely penetrating and unfold around a handful of fundamental... (shrink)

To answer the question of whether there is such a thing as Japanese philosophy, and what its characteristics might be, scholars have typi­cally used Western philosophy as a measure to examine Japanese texts. This article turns the tables and asks what Western thought looks like from the perspective of Japanese philosophy. It uses Japanese philo­sophical sources as a lens to bring into sharper focus the qualities and biases of Greek-derived Western philosophy. It (...) first examines ques­tions related to the reputed sole origin and the nature of philosophy in ancient Greece. Using the analyses of Robert Bernasconi, it con­cludes that this reputation is a bias instilled by philosophers such as Hegel in the modern era. It then uses the scholarship of Pierre Hadot to show that Greek philosophy was not argumentative discourse for its own sake, but a way of life where reason was in the service of spir­itual progress. This suggests a definition broad enough to accommo­date Asian and other non-Western philosophies. Under the lens of Japanese philosophy, however, Greek-based Western philosophy often displays a double detachment, from everyday life and from embod­ied existence. In contrast, Japanese Buddhist and Confucian philoso­phies evince an appreciation of embodied existence in the ordinary world. The article raises several questions for further investigation in the prospect that the lens of Japanese philosophy can refocus the task of philosophizing today. (shrink)

This important volume introduces the reader to a variety of schools of thought. Ideal for classroom use, this is the ultimate resource for students and teachers of Japanese philosophy.

The imperative that Japanese philosophy faces today, I assert, is the imperative of environmental philosophy. It is an imperative that has decidedly global origins and indisputable global significance. In discussing this imperative, I revive some age-old, perhaps idealistic, and even romantic themes from East Asian Confucian thinking in the hopes that they might become more central motifs of Japanese philosophizing, charting a way forward in the wake of Fukushima, toward a more sustainable future. In the process, (...) I critique admixtures of environmentalism and nationalism, seeking to elevate instead an ecologically sound philosophical perspective that is more globally inclined than narrowly nationalistic. (shrink)

The primary goal of this paper is not to argue for the “influence” of Cassirer, but rather to make known the reception of Cassirer in Japanese philosophy, illustrate the interconnection between Cassirer’s critique of culture and that of Japanese philosophy, and hopefully spark interest in what might be a fruitful dialog between Cassirer scholars and those working in Japanese philosophy. Historically, the paper defines Japanese philosophy and makes known its engagement with Western (...) philosophy and the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and its project of a critique of culture during its own self-development. Systematically, the paper points to the possible interconnection between Cassirer’s critique of culture and that of Japanese philosophy and makes the case for a mutually productive dialog between Cassirer scholars and those working in Japanese philosophy. Implicitly, the paper attempted to show that an engagement with Japanese philosophy from the perspective of a critique of culture forces us to question the Western dichotomy between philosophy and religion and the importance of this for the further development of a non-Eurocentric critique of culture. And by extension, that a critique of culture must be cognitive of the historicity of the culture from which it speaks. (shrink)

Building on his 2017 book, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida, John Maraldo continues to shepherd his readers through an encounter with Japanese philosophy in this second volume. Departing from Nishida as the presumptive center, Maraldo interrogates the "borderlines" in his engagement with the thinking of Watsuji Tetsurō, Tanabe Hajime, and Kuki Shūzō, in addition to confronting important issues pertaining to politics and ecology. To speak of "shepherding" here is intentional; but it (...) is not meant to indicate any kind of paternalism, either in form or content. Rather, it is meant to capture the tremendous care with which Maraldo leads his readers down the path of his thinking. In... (shrink)

Although it seems natural to consider the last fifty years the contemporary period, because this year (1995) punctuates a historical period celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, this essay will limit the term “contemporary” roughly to the last twenty‐five years. The reason for this demarcation is that at the beginning of the 1970s, we witnessed a new philosophical mood emerging in Japan. Prior to that period, the Japanese philosophical scene was dominated by the study (...) of European thinkers, such as Husserl, Heiddeger, Sartre, and Merleau Ponty. The end of the students' movement in the early 1970s also marked the end of the ideological disputes launched by Marxism since the early 1930s. Instead, it appears that the Japanese intelligentsia in the early 1970s began to acutely sense problems inherent in the Eurocentric philosophy which had served as a foundation for Western science and technology. This occurred largely through a recognition that scientific technology had yielded, as its unexpected byproduct, a “mind/heartless” society, pollution, and global ecological crises, which had permeated almost all parts of the Japanese archipelago to threaten the psyche of the Japanese people and their mode of living. In this essay, I should like to briefly introduce three representative contemporary Japanese thinkers who have addressed some aspects of these problems in their writings. They are Nakamura Yujiro, Sakabe Megumi, and Yuasa Yasuo. (Because of the limitations of space, this article will restrict itself to these three thinkers, but this should not suggest that there are no other representative thinkers in Japan. Consider particularly those belonging to the neo Kyoto school, such as Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaki, Koyama Iwao, Umehara Takeshi and Ueda Shizuteru. Nishitani's works are well known in the English speaking world, along with those of Abe Masao. Out side of the Kyoto school, we can also mention other thinkers, such as Matsumoto Masao, Hiromatsu Wataru and Ichikawa Hiroshi.). (shrink)

The paper provides an overview of the rise of Japanese philosophy during the period of rapid modernization in Japan after the Meiji Restoration (beginning in the 1860s). It also examines the controversy surrounding Japanese philosophy towards the end of the Pacific War (1945), and its renewal in the contemporary context. The post-Meiji thinkers engaged themselves with the questions of universality and particularity; the former represented science, medicine, technology, and philosophy (understood as ) and the latter, (...) the Japanese non-Western tradition. Within the context, the question arose whether or not Japan, the only non-Western nation to succeed in modernization at the time, could also offer a philosophy that was universal in scope? Could Japanese philosophy offer an alternative form of modernity to the global domination of Western modernity? In this historical context, the philosophies of Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji, two of the tradition's most prominent thinkers, are introduced. Nishida is considered the and his followers came to be known as the . The essay ends with a brief reflection on the influence of philosophy on culture, focusing on the aftermath of the tsunami catastrophe in 2011. (shrink)

When I first opened my copy of Thomas Kasulis's Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History, I had planned to skip around, as one might do when reading an edited volume. Initially, I was most interested in how I might excerpt various chapters for classroom use. And I have indeed come away with many ideas for reading this book with students. But, after making it through just the first few pages of Kasulis's highly informative and entertaining history of (...) class='Hi'>Japanese philosophy, I found that the book demands to be read in the order in which it was written. In addition to his role as philosopher and historian, in this book Kasulis is a storyteller. And so, as when enjoying a... (shrink)

"In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson's "Watsuji on Nature" reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960), situating it in relation both to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. Johnson shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called "fūdo". By (...) fully unfolding Watsuji's novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics. In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, "Watsuji on Nature" radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This essay consists of two parts. In the first part we show in general outline the development of modern Japanese philosophy since 1867. And as one of the typical products of that process we analyse in the second part the metaphysics of the late Prof. Nishida.

Since the role of the Asian countries is increasing in the modern world, their philosophical traditions attract more and more attention. Due to this trend, a more complete panoramic view of the development of world philosophy as a whole is accessible, and it has become possible to understand that any constructions of the human mind that have arisen in a particular cultural field of experience cannot be regarded as exemplary and absolute. The researchers of Asian philosophies concentrate mostly on (...) studying the texts of individual thinkers. As a rule, they do not set themselves the task of examining these texts from the point of view of intercultural interactions and transformations of significant ideas and concepts in various cultural and historical contexts, defining the direction and mechanisms of cultural borrowing, as well as revealing new approaches and growth points. To achieve these goals, the research should focus at the problem of the self-determination and development of philosophy as a separate science in non-Western cultures, which are based on intellectual traditions with different origin than Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. This article deals with the consideration of some topics that elucidate the features of the development of philosophical science in Japan, including the emergence of the concept of “philosophy” in this country, the definition of its subject, the formation of philosophical terminology, and various interpretations of what the term “Japanese philosophy” means. The author pays special attention to the characteristic of the main periods of progress of Japanese philosophical thought. In the conclusion, the author argues that the most important characteristic feature of the Japanese philosophy is its involvement in intercultural dialogue throughout its history. (shrink)

The tenth volume of the Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy focuses on the theme of “transition,” dealing with transitory and intermediary phenomena and practices such as translation, transmission, and transformation. Written in English, German and Japanese, the contributions explore a wide range of topics, crossing disciplinary borders between phenomenology, linguistics, feminism, epistemology, aesthetics, political history, martial arts, spiritual practice and anthropology, and bringing Japanese philosophy into cross-cultural dialogue with other philosophical traditions. As exercises in “thinking in (...) transition,” the essays reveal novel modes of doing philosophy as a way of boundary crossing that takes transition not only as an object of inquiry, but also as a method of philosophical practice itself. (shrink)

Life is short and transient--Japanese people call this sentiment mujokan. However, what if we could sweep away the "despair" looming over the present age by proactively accepting this mujo (transience)? Perusing the thought of mujo from the perspectives of philosophy, literature, art and religion, Takeuchi delves into the view of life and death unique to the Japanese people who have shared "grief" and "pain" with each other, as well as into the very core of their underlying spirit." (...) -- Publisher's description. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to present some examples of the philosophy of myth in Japan during the early Shōwa era (1926–1945), especially in works by Tanabe Hajime, Kihira Tadayoshi, Isobe Tadamasa, Kōsaka Masaaki and Miki Kiyoshi. While the concept of myth is closely linked to the question of nationality, I intend to show that the philosophical concept of myth is also related to a fundamental ambiguity that prevents an absolutisation of myth and offers specific conceptual tools for a (...) critique of nationality. (shrink)

In tackling the question of what is Japanese philosophy, the paper discusses: philosophy in general, the issue of Japanese philosophy, and the relevance of both philosophy and Japanese philosophy in our present age of globalization. Examining the definitions of philosophy provided by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and looking at the philosophies of Nishida and Nishitani among others, I argue the source of philosophy—its originary and universal motivation—to be the question of (...) meaning of existence. Japanese philosophy is no exception. I then discuss whether there is something unique to Japanese philosophy in particular and look into the question of the essence of Japanese philosophy. Furthermore, I argue that in order to be true to the original motivation of philosophy, the study of Japanese philosophy, if it is itself to be considered philosophy, cannot be reduced to biography, history, or philology. It must be relevant to our life. I then conclude with a discussion of the relevance of Japanese philosophy and the philosophical study of Japanese philosophy to our life today. (shrink)

Review of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy by Bret W. Davis (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2022.

When I deliver an introductory lecture on Japanese Philosophy, I always raise the following question: Is it appropriate to modify the word philosophy with an adjective such as Japanese? Philosophy is, after all, a discipline that addresses universal problems, and so transcends the restrictions implied in geographical descriptors. However, as Kuki Shūzō argues in his essay “Tokyo and Kyoto,” I think that this is only part, and not the whole truth of the matter.One’s thinking takes (...) place within the framework of one’s cultural heritage, and the different nuances of each of the words one uses can influence how one thinks. It is for this reason that every philoso­phy has its own unique character. As Otto Pöggeler suggests, there is something about the thought of Japanese philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji that does not fit easily into the framework of “philosophy” in the Western tradition. This is a conse­quence of the fact that they did not simply passively adopt, but rather attempted to critically challenge Western philosophy. I suppose that their grounding in Japanese and other Eastern traditions contributed to their critical challenge of Western philosophy. And I submit that there is a strong tendency in traditional East Asian thought to not simply grasp things within a presupposed framework of “knowledge,” but rather, since “knowledge” itself is understood to be a certain kind of restriction, to return to its roots.Needless to say, neither Nishida’s nor Nishitani’s thought is merely a philosophical reiteration of such traditional East Asian teachings. Nevertheless, we can say that the East Asian idea that knowledge is at root something restrictive lives on in their thinking. The radical­ity of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s thought can be understood to lie in the manner in which they cast light on the limits of the “knowledge” pursued by Western philosophy, problematizing the basis on which this knowledge is established as well as the framework it sets up.I think that the “character” of this or that philosophy arises from such different ways of seeing things and different attitudes toward “knowledge.” It is crucial to point out, however, that the gaps resulting from these differences need not become hindrances for philosophical thinking. Indeed, I think that the existence of such gaps, rather than hindering “dialogues” between different philosophies, is precisely what enables them to be meaningful. This is also what I have in mind when I stress the importance of dialogue in my lectures on Japanese philoso­phy. It is, after all, the creative dialogue engendered in this manner that enables philosophy to progress along its path of radical inquiry. (shrink)

L’acte de la philosophie japonaise est celui d’un évidement de soi: acte d’accueil des traditions philosophiques du monde, acte en résonance, créateur d’une terminologie, d’une logique, d’une conceptualité originales, s’alimentant aux sources d’une pensée mythique jamais tarie. Les textes présentés ici en feront sentir l’inclassable nouveauté: cette philosophie n’est ni purement shintoïste, bouddhique, chrétienne, néoconfucianiste ; elle n’est ni « orientale » ni « occidentale », mais proprement japonaise.

The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy is by all counts an ambitious work. Its primary goal is to provide the reader with a foundational framework in which to engage interpretively the tradition of Japanese philosophy. It would be impossible to summarize, let alone do justice to, the thirty-six rich and illuminating chapters written by many of the most prominent scholars in the field from Japan, Europe, Australia, and North America.Navigating between the "violence of inclusion" that would (...) reduce the philosophically other to our own conception of philosophy and the "violence of exclusion" that would fail to recognize what we share with this other, Bret Davis... (shrink)

There is a certain irony in Japan's foremost secular philosopher grounding his ontology and ethics in a term so infamously unclear as fūdo 風土, given that the Japanese word for philosophy itself denotes "clear thinking." One might make the case that Watsuji's concept of fūdo cannot but be unclear, since he is responding to Heidegger's Being and Time, which is hardly the model of lucid philosophy. That said, it is the philosopher's responsibility to clarify the unclear, and (...) that is the task David W. Johnson has appointed himself in Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. It is a daunting charge, and Johnson does an admirable job of what those outside academic philosophy might... (shrink)

Nishida Kitarô -- Tanabe Hajime -- Kuki Shûzô -- Watsuji Tetsurô -- Miki Kiyoshi -- Tosaka Jun -- Nishitani Keiji.

Nishida Kitaro is widely considered as the first original philosopher in modern Japan. Addressing this claim, Richard Stone critically examines Nishida's relation to his contemporary philosophers in the Meiji era (1868-1912), highlighting the continuity, difference and relationships between them. He argues that ideas starting from early Meiji philosophers were gradually given more rigorous treatment over the course of the era, eventually culminating in Nishida's early philosophy.The Origins of Modern Japanese Philosophy offers an engaging insight into the Meiji (...) period, bringing Nishida's work it into dialogue with his predecessors. (shrink)

The twelfth bi-annual symposium of the Nanzan Institute took up the problem of the philosophical tradition of Japan and how it has fared abroad. There were two principal foci of the meetings: the history and future prospects of the study and teaching of Japanese philosophy outside of Japan, and the preparation of a Sourcebook of Japanese Philosophy aimed at providing a solid anthology of Japanese philospohical resources from the earliest times up to the present. To (...) address these two questions, 16 participants from six language-groups— Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish—were invited to Nanzan to deliver papers and discuss projects of common interest, including the Sourcebook. The final day of the conference included a discussion with selected Japanese philosophers and intellectual historians at Kyoto University. (shrink)

The list of publications having to do with Japanese intellectual history in general and Kyoto School philosophy in particular has grown steadily over the past years, both inside and outside of Japan. This is due in no small part to the important contributions made by those whose papers are included in this volume, the proceedings of an international conference held in June 2009 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Although much remains to be done if Japanese (...) philosophy is to shed its esoteric and exotic image in order to take its rightful place in the curriculum as one of the many valuable sources of philosophical reflection, the ongoing dialogue among veterans in the field and younger scholars reflected in these pages is as promising as it has ever been. (shrink)

Thirteen scholars gather together to discuss current issues in Japanese philosophy, critically examine its ongoing dialogue with Western philosophy, and open new questions for future research.

he fourteen essays gathered together in this, the third volume of Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy, represent one more step in ongoing efforts to bring the concerns of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy into closer contact with philosophical traditions around the world. As its title indicates, the aims are twofold: to reflect critically on the work of leading figures in the modern academic philosophy of Japan and to straddle the borderlands where they touch on the work of their (...) counterparts in the West. -/- A first group of essays deals with the modern Japanese philosophers Kuki Shūzō, Nishida Kitarō, Nishitani Keiji, and Takizawa Katsumi. These are followed by three essays on comparisons with classical Western thought and three with contemporary philosophy. The final three contributions offer reflections on the role of Japanese philosophy today. (shrink)

What is the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese notion of kotoba (言葉) for Japanese philosophy? Was his conversation with Tezuka Tomio a real dialogue or not? To answer to these correlated questions, I elucidate Heidegger’s 1954 essay “A Dialogue on Language” by following a topological mode of thinking, and I inquire into the way-making of a “thinking conversation”. First, I problematize whether Heidegger engaged in a genuine dialogue with Tezuka. To that end, I distinguish (...) the hermeneutic horizon of the actual encounter between Tezuka and Heidegger from Heidegger’s essay which places Tezuka (the Japanese) and Heidegger (the Inquirer) in a fictional philosophical conversation. Second, I argue that Heidegger’s topological method of interpretating kotoba can be read as a poetic means of thematizing East-West dialogue. Third and finally, exploring the topological sense of kotoba, I engage with third generation Kyoto School thinker Ueda Shizuteru’sideaof“hollow words” of language, situated in a twofold view of the world. I conclude that the true character of Heidegger’s conversation with Tezuka can be identified neither in Heidegger’s “actual” encounter with Tezuka, nor merely in Heidegger’s “hollow” essay. Departing from Ueda’s account of kotoba, it appears that a genuine conversation with language can be located in the dialogue of actuality and hollowness, which finds it expression in poetic language. (shrink)

The present volume is the latest example of what scholars of Japanese philosophy have been up to in recent years. The papers collected here, most of them presented at conferences held in Barcelona and Nagoya during 2016, have been arranged in four thematic parts. The first two parts cover the history of Japanese philosophy, as their topics extend from premodern thinkers to twentieth century philosophers; the last two parts focus on Nishida and Watsuji respectively.

The coupling of 'self and other' as well as the issues regarding intersubjectivity have been central topics in modern Japanese philosophy. The dominant views are critical of the Cartesian formulation , but the Japanese philosophers drew their conclusions also based on their own insights into Japanese culture and language. In this paper I would like to explore this theme in two of the leading modern Japanese philosophers - Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji . I do (...) not make a causal claim that Japanese culture or language was responsible for these thinkers' philosophy, although without a doubt they were strong influences. The point rather is to show an interesting convergence of concerns regarding the fundamental nature of the relation between the self and others across different cultures and intellectual traditions, and to clarify further the ontological structure of the self-other relation. After the examination, the thesis I would like to defend here is the following: Intersubjectivity is indeed a condition, rather than an accident, of the structure of lived experiences as such but this relation also requires at the same time the recognition that the Other must remain a true negation-in-relation to the self. Let me first turn to Watsuji, although chronologically he was 20 years junior and was a student of Nishida, since Watsuji's phenomenology deals more directly with the topic of intersubjectivity. I will then turn to Nishida's broader ontological considerations. (shrink)

While many historians take the view that Japanese philosophy only started with the Meiji Restoration and the entrance of Western culture into Japan, Hajime Nakamura demonstrates that there has been a long history of philosophy in Japan prior to the Meiji. Beginning in 592 AD, when Japan first became a centralized state and continuing into the early modern era, this work deals with the important problems and salient feature of Japanese philosophical thought at all stages in (...) its development. (shrink)

The growing scholarship on the Kyoto School of Japanese Buddhist philosophy has brought it to the attention of more and more people in the West, but in the process, the Kyoto School has acquired a fixed identity. It is usually depicted as centered around three main figures—Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji—and concerned with the philosophy of nothingness. In fact, however, as the thirteen scholars in this volume show, the Kyoto School included several other members beside (...) the inner circle of three, and these members were concerned with a wide range of philosophical issues beyond the philosophy of nothingness. The range and variety of these essays give a much more realistic picture of the many fronts on which the Japanese encountered Western philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Reception of Husserl’s Phenomenology in Japanese PhilosophyShinji HamauzuWhen we talk about the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology, we should discuss in advance what can justify this talk. When we mention keywords— for instance, intuition of essence, intentionality, inner time-consciousness, rigorous science, natural attitude, phenomenological reduction, transcendental phenomenology, noesis-noema, my living body, genetic phenomenology, empathy, intersubjectivity, life-world, and so on—which keywords should we use when talking about the influence (...) Husserl’s phenomenology had on Japanese philosophy? But we should also ask the following question as well: Which of Husserl’s texts could be available for scholars of Japanese philosophy? Interestingly, there were few works, beyond attending Husserl’s lectures, that one could access, because he only published six books and six articles while he was alive. After Husserl died in 1938, many manuscripts were rescued from the Nazi’s hands and placed at Leuven University in Belgium where the Husserl Archive was first established. The manuscripts were edited and published as Husserliana beginning in 1950 (which now has 42 volumes). Given this, we can think of Husserl’s work as consisting of two periods: the period before and the period after the publication of Husserliana.I myself am interested in the problem of “intersubjectivity” within Husserl’s phenomenology. It is on the one hand the problem of “other-experience (Fremderfahrung)”—i.e., “how I experience the other”—which is the problem of other-experience in the empirical dimension. But it is on the other hand the problem of “intersubjective constitution”—i.e., “how the objective world is the correlate of intersubjective constitution through other-experience,”1 which is the problem of how the other participates in the transcendental dimension. It is characteristic of Husserl’s phenomenology that these two problems are discussed together inseparably. [End Page 1]The manuscripts on the problem of “intersubjectivity” from 1905 to 1935 are collected in volumes XIII to XV of Husserliana. Although the fifth meditation of Cartesian Meditations (first published in French translation in 1931) is often mentioned as the representative work on this theme, it is no more than the tip of the iceberg after Husserl struggled for many years on this problem. The genesis of this theme in the manuscripts dates back to 1905 when terms such as “other” (ein Anderer) and “foreign” (fremd) appeared in manuscript 1, or terms such as “empathy” (Einfühlung) and “intersubjective” appeared in manuscript 2. Husserl wrote later that he had discussed this theme to a relatively large extent in the lecture Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology (Hua XIII) in 1910–1911. In the period of 1905–1910, after the “problem of intersubjectivity” was first introduced, we can also find the idea of “phenomenological reduction” appear for the first time in the literature. This tells us that the problem of intersubjectivity and the idea of phenomenological reduction were born as two sides of the same coin.When Husserl’s phenomenology was first introduced to Japan, Japanese scholars were already reading the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, where the “intersubjective world” is thought to refer to a “correlate of experience mediated by empathy,”2 and so the task is to clarify the “intersubjective constitution of the objective world.”3 However, when we consider Husserl’s influence in the history of Japanese philosophy and examine whether the problem of intersubjectivity is discussed as a fundamental problem of philosophy, it can be doubted, in my opinion, whether or not there were any researchers who ever faced this problem seriously. In what follows, I survey several generations of philosophers in Japan who engaged with Husserl’s rehabilitation, to investigate the problem of intersubjectivity in his reception and extent of his influence.Nishida Kitarō’s Interest in PhenomenologyNishida Kitarō (1870–1945) looked back at the revision of his first book in 1936 and wrote,The standpoint of this book [An Inquiry into the Good (1911)] is that of consciousness, which might be thought of as a kind of psychologism... I came to realize that it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience. I... (shrink)