James W. Heisig

In recent years several books by major figures in Japan's modern philosophical tradition have appeared in English, exciting readers by their explorations of the borderlands between philosophy and religion. What has been wanting, however, is a book in a Western language to elucidate the life and thought of Nishida Kitaro, Japan's first philosopher of world stature and the originator of what has come to be called the Kyoto School. No one is more qualified to write such a book than Nishitani Keiji, whose lifetime coincides with the rise and flowering of the Kyoto School and whose own critical contribution to Japanese thought has been so important. _Nishida Kitaro_ is a translation of essays Nishitani wrote about his teacher from 1936 to 1968 and published as a book in 1985. This series of meditations by one master on another provides a remarkable, living portrait of Nishida the person and conveys the enthusiasm he aroused in his students. Examining Nishida's most important work, _An Inquiry into the Good_, Nishitani penetrates to the core of his thought and presents it in language that is a marvel of clarity.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 237 [Access article in PDF] News and Views The 1999 Meeting of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies James HeisigNanzan Institute for Religion and CultureThe 18th Annual Meeting of the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Kyoto from 21 to 23 August 1999. Discussions centered around three papers delivered under the general theme of "Nature, Self, and Spirituality."Watanabe Manabu addressed the strain of arbitrariness in Jung's idea of the Self, demonstrating how the meaning of the term changed according to context and to developmental stages of Jung's thinking, with religious dimension growing ever stronger. In a complementary paper, Jim Heisig suggested that prying Jung's notion of the Self open and liberating it from its monotheistic assumptions in the light of the experiences and worldview of present-day religious experience could serve not only to reawaken interest in analytical psychology but also to draw the Buddhist-Christian encounter closer to the spirituality of the age. Horio Tsutomu focused his paper on the notion of spirituality in the writings of D. T. Suzuki. As always, the papers, responses, and a selection of the discussions will be published in the pages of the Japanese journal Daijozen.The general theme will carry over to the annual meeting for the year 2000 and the sessions planned for the coming Sixth International Conference of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies in Tacoma....

Much Ado About Nothingness brings together 14 essays on Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime by one of the leading scholars of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy. With Nishida’s “logic of place” and Tanabe’s “logic of the specific” providing a continuity to the whole, the author writes from a conviction that “the overriding challenge for those doing philosophy in the key of the Kyoto School, with their sights set squarely on self-awareness like Nishida and Tanabe before them, is to turn its attention to the wider world….”

In December 2010 Kyoto University hosted a symposium honoring the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Nishida Kitarō’s An Inquiry into the Good. The following is an English version of a talk delivered on that occasion. In it I have tried to argue against the widely held view that this maiden work contains the germ of Nishida’s mature philosophy, and at the same time to suggest that an early strain of ambiguity regarding the notion of the will points to a neglect of the natural world in his “logic of place.”

The past twenty years have seen the publication of numerous translations and commentaries on the principal philosophers of the Kyoto School, but so far no general overview and evaluation of their thought has been available, either in Japanese or in Western languages. James Heisig, a longstanding participant in these efforts, has filled that gap with Philosophers of Nothingness. In this extensive study, the ideas of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji are presented both as a consistent school of thought in its own right and as a challenge to the Western philosophical tradition to open itself to the original contribution of Japan.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesJames W. HeisigThe Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies held its twenty-second annual conference this year, organized around the theme "Body, Place, and East-West Exchange." The meetings were held at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, 22-24 July 2003, with main presentations by Honda Masaaki ("From Body to Place"), Kawanami Akira ("The Body and the Pure Land"), and Hanaoka Eiko ("Body Theories East and West"). A research report was also given by Yagi Seiichi ("A Prolegomenon to Locus Theory"), following up on his presentation at the 2002 conference.Thepapersand discussionsofthe conferenceare publishedin the journal Tōzai shūkyō (Religion East and West), edited and published at the Nanzan Institute. It is available online at the Institute's Web site and may also be ordered directly.James W. HeisigNanzan Institute for Religion and CultureCopyright © 2004 The University of Hawai'i Press...

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.

The essay that follows is, in substance, a lecture delivered in Brussels on 7 December 2016 to the 2nd International Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy. In it I argue that the strategy of qualifying nothingness as an “absolute,” which was adopted by Kyoto School thinkers as a way to come to grips with fundamental problems of Western philosophy, is inherently ambiguous and ultimately weakens the notion of nothingness itself. In its place, a proposal is made to define nothingness in terms of “connectedness.” The discussion is bound on both ends by an apology for transgressing established academic boundaries. On one end, I open with a brief digression on a common ground for philosophies East and West as a mestizaje to which no tradition can claim dominance. On the other, I close with an appeal for restoring respect for the role of mythical narration as a way to bridge the connection between theory and practice without having to revert to moral absolutes, particularly as it relates to safeguarding this fragile planet of ours from the ongoing sepsis of economic “progress.”

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.