• Imagining and Reimagining Imagination via the Ontology of Imagination in Miki Kiyoshi
    International Journal of Social Imaginaries 2 (2): 239-272. 2023.
    The paper explicates what the World War 2 era Japanese philosopher, Miki Kiyoshi, of the Kyoto School, called the logic of imagination and of forms as an ontology. I understand this ontology as ultimately an “anontology”, where novelty and creativity are predicated upon the pathos of singularity and contingency that Miki calls “the nothing” (mu). Its productive function that is technological vis-à-vis the environment involves an embodied praxis that Miki, borrowing the terms of his mentor, Nishi…Read more
  •  3
    This chapter tracks the development of the concept of self-awareness (jikaku, 自覚) in the thought of the Japanese modern philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎) (Kitarō Nishida) (1870–1945), founder of the Kyoto School. Nishida’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, from the 1910s to the 1940s until his passing, during which he thematized and focused on different issues. Nevertheless, self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout. In the chapter we trace how Nishida develops this concept throu…Read more
  •  18
    The Holy in Heidegger: The Open Clearing as Excess and Abyss
    In Richard Capobianco (ed.), Heidegger and the Holy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 5-26. 2022.
    In the last century and a half, many have lamented the loss of a sense of the holy (or the sacred)—das Heilige in German—that is, the condition of modernity that Friedrich Nietzsche called the “death or God” or what Friedrich Hölderlin poetized as the “flight of the gods.” Martin Heidegger, even while speaking of the forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) in the history of Being, and even as he had discoursed on the nihilism of modernity, appropriated this term, das Heilige, as one of his man…Read more
  •  18
    The Kyoto School’s Wartime Philosophy of a Multipolar World
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 201 63-83. 2022.
    This article focuses on Kyoto School philosophy’s “philosophy of world history,” during World War II, and its arguments for a multipolar world order in opposition to the older Eurocentric and colonialist world order. The idea was articulated by the second generation of the Kyoto School—Nishitani Keiji, Kōyama Iwao, Kōsaka Masaaki, and Suzuki Shigetaka—in a series of symposia held during 1941 to 1942 and titled the “The World-historical Standpoint and Japan.” While rejecting on the one hand the m…Read more
  •  4
    John Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida (review)
    Journal of Japanese Philosophy 8 (1): 135-142. 2022.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida by John MaraldoJohn KrummelJohn Maraldo, Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida Nagoya: Chisokudō, 2017The present volume by John Maraldo is a collection of his essays, mostly on Nishida. It constitutes the first volume of a two-part collection on Japanese philosophy, this one focusing on Nishida while the second volume includes wor…Read more
  •  9
    Ueda Shizuteru’s Philosophy of the Twofold
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 14 (2): 153-161. 2022.
    In this paper, I explicate Ueda Shizuteru’s philosophy of the twofold being-in-the-world and the ethics he draws from it. Ueda provides an original reading of Nishida’s concept of pure experience and develops it together with an understanding of Nishida’s concept of place by combining it with the phenomenological notion of the horizon. This leads him to understand the world, or place wherein we are, as twofold, implying the semantic space or network of meanings within it, on the one hand, and, o…Read more
  •  9
    On Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire and the Wartime Politics of the Kyoto School (review)
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 14 (1): 99-109. 2022.
    In this review essay of Harumi Osaki’s book, Nothingness in the Heart of the Empire, about the Kyoto School’s wartime political philosophy, I examine the arguments and claims behind Osaki’s thesis that the Kyoto School tends to align itself with nationalist and imperialist formations that lead to political concerns. I focus on some of the concrete problems with her arguments, including the book’s lack of examination of the sociopolitical context behind and surrounding the philosophers’ wartime d…Read more
  •  1
    Robert E. Carter: The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation (review)
    Journal of Buddhist Philosophy 4 186-191. 2022.
  • The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity and Discourse in Wartime Japan
    Historical Sociology: A Journal of Historical Social Sciences 2021 (2): 83-104. 2021.
    Abstract: The symposium on overcoming modernity (kindai no chokoku) that took place in Tokyo in 1942 has been much commented upon, but later critics have tended to over-emphasize the wartime political context and the ideological connection to Japanese ultra-nationalism. Closer examination shows that the background and the actual content of the discussion were more complicated. The idea of overcoming modernity had already appeared in debates among Japanese intellectuals before the war, and was al…Read more
  •  48
    Zen and Anarchy in Reiner Schürmann
    Philosophy Today 66 (1): 115-132. 2022.
    This paper discusses Reiner Schürmann’s notions of ontological anarché and anarchic praxis in his readings of Heidegger and Eckhart, while bringing his philosophy of anarchy into dialogue with Zen-inspired Japanese thought. I thereby hope to shed light on his thought of anarchy in terms of what I call “an-ontology.” The inspiration for this project is the fact that Schürmann himself had practiced Zen as a young adult in France and had engaged in comparative analyses of Zen and Eckhart in his ear…Read more
  •  2
    Editorial Introduction
    with Paul Blokker, Saulius Geniusas, and Jeremy C. A. Smith
    Social Imaginaries 5 (2): 7-10. 2019.
  •  1
    Ueda writes in his Reading Nishida Kitarō (Nishida Kitarō o yomu) that to compare Heidegger’s entire thinking up to his last period with Nishida’s thought also up to his last period, including their multiple turns, would be “one of the most valuable paths to investigating the significance, potential, and problematics of Nishidian philosophy.” In this paper I examine the philosophy of Ueda Shizuteru through the juxtaposition of those two thinkers, of West and of East, who prove to be significant…Read more
  •  4
    4. Place and Horizon
    In Peter D. Hershock & Roger T. Ames (eds.), Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation, University of Hawaii Press. pp. 65-87. 2019.
  •  8
    Chōra in Heidegger and Nishida
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 8 107-112. 2018.
    In this presentation I discuss the concept of “place” in the Japanese twentieth century philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, Nishida Kitarō, in light of the ancient Greek concept of chōra, and compare it with the German thinker Martin Heidegger’s notion of “region” that was also inspired by chōra. We can point to Plato’s concept of chōra in his Timaeus as an important source for both twentieth century philosophers of the East and the West. But we can also draw connections t…Read more
  •  146
    Rethinking the History of the Productive Imagination in Relation to Common Sense
    In Suzi Adams & Jeremy Smith (eds.), Social Imaginaries: Critical Interventions, Rowman & Littlefield, International. pp. 45-75. 2019.
    The imagination—Einbildung—as its German makes clear is the faculty of formation. But this formative activity in various ways through the history of its concept has been intimately related to the concept of common sense, whether understood as the sense that gathers, orders, and makes coherent the various sense, or as the sensibility of the community. This contribution seeks to unfold that history of the concept of the creative or productive imagination while also tracing the parallel history o…Read more
  •  43
    In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that …Read more
  •  34
    Place and Horizon
    In Peter D. Hershock & Roger T. Ames (eds.), Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation, University of Hawaii Press. pp. 65-87. 2019.
    A chapter in the book, Philosophies of Place: An Intercultural Conversation, edited by Peter D. Hershock and Roger T. Ames, and published by University of Hawaii Press. In this chapter I present a phenomenological ontology of place vis-a-vis horizon and also alterity (otherness), discussing related themes in Heidegger, Kitaro Nishida, Shizuteru Ueda, Otto Bollnow, Karl Jaspers, Ed Casey, Günter Figal, Bernhard Waldenfels, and others. Wherever we are we are implaced, delimited in our being-in-t…Read more
  •  22
    In the paper/chapter, I examine Nishitani's appropriation of Buddhist thought as a response to nihilism and I regard his stance as an 'anontology' (neither ontology nor meontology), a neologism I've applied in my discussions of Nishida in other works as well.
  •  42
    Nishida Kitarō, the cofounder and central figure of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. Nishida’s second generation Kyoto School descendant and current representative of the Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru, furthered this concept to understand both place and implacement in terms of a twofold world or twofold horizon. Nishida initially understood the self in its unobjectifiability as a kind of place wherein subject and object correlate. But this placial self came to be see…Read more
  •  48
    Imagination, Formation, and Place: An Ontology
    In Hans-Georg Moeller & Andrew Whitehead (eds.), Imagination: Cross-Cultural Philosophical Analyses, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
    My contribution seeks to unfold an ontology of the imagination based on the history of the productive imagination in its relation to common sense and recent developments of the notion of the social imaginary, while making use of ideas found in both Western and Japanese thinkers. Kyoto School philosopher Miki Kiyoshi shows a connection between the imagination he inherits from Kant and a certain form-formlessness dynamic he inherits from Nishida Kitarō’s notion of a self-forming formlessness. The …Read more
  •  34
    The Philosophy of the Kyoto School
    Springer Publishing. 2018.
    This is an English translation of a book authored by Fujita Masakatsu. The main purpose of this book is to offer to philosophers and students abroad who show a great interest in Japanese philosophy and the philosophy of the Kyoto school major texts of the leading philosophers. This interest has surely developed out of a desire to obtain from the thought of these philosophers, who stood within the interstice between East and West, a clue to reassessing the issues of philosophy from the ground up…Read more
  •  45
    Philosophy and Japanese Philosophy in the World
    European Journal of Japanese Philosophy 2 9-42. 2017.
    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. …Read more
  •  22
    The Shifting Other in Karatani Kōjin’s Philosophy
    with Toshiaki Kobayashi
    Journal of Japanese Philosophy 4 17-31. 2016.
    In this article Kobayashi Toshiaki discusses the importance in all periods of Karatani’s oeuvre of the notion of an “exterior” that necessarily falls beyond the bounds of a system, together with the notion of “singularity” as that which cannot be contained within a “universal.” The existential dread vis-à-vis the uncanny other that Karatani in his early works of literary criticism had initially found to be the underlying tone in Sōseki’s works remained with Karatani himself throughout his career…Read more
  •  37
    Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader
    Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
    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.
  •  91
    On (the) nothing: Heidegger and Nishida
    Continental Philosophy Review 51 (2): 239-268. 2017.
    Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped w…Read more
  •  45
    Myth
    with Miki Kiyoshi
    Social Imaginaries 2 (1): 25-69. 2016.
    “Myth” comprises the first chapter of the book, The Logic of the Imagination, by Miki Kiyoshi.In this chapter Miki analyzes the significance of myth (shinwa) as possessing a certain reality despite being “fictions.” He begins by broadening the meaning of the imagination to argue for a logic of the imagination that involves expressive action or poiesis (production) in general, of which myth is one important product. The imagination gathers in myth material from the environing world lived by the s…Read more
  •  32
    ‘The Logic of Place’ and Common Sense
    with Nakamura Yūjirō
    Social Imaginaries 1 (1): 83-103. 2015.
    The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the College international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of place (basho) tha…Read more