John C. Maraldo

University of North Florida | UNF · Department of Philosophy

This chapter describes five partially overlapping frames of reference that have tended to define European-language presentations and translations of Nishida’s philosophy.* Nishida has appeared as Japan’s first (modern) philosopher, a philosopher of “the East,” Zen philosopher, founder of the Kyoto School and leading philosopher of nothingness, and...

Why have humans persisted in believing in gods throughout the ages, even in an era where scientific minds say we should know better? That is the single thematic question that winds its way through this book, first presented as the Duffy Lectures in Global Christianity at Boston College in 2019. But that single question is played out in rich variati...

The chapters in this book focus on a phenomenon that is named by a conjunction of three terms: Japanese, Buddhist, philosophy. Each of these terms implies a distinction demarcating one domain of inquiry from other related domains: Japanese as distinct from Chinese, Korean, or Indian; Buddhist as distinct from Confucian or Shintō; and philosophy as...

Nishida Kitarō shared with phenomenologists a concern to account for experience as it is lived, prior to how it is described objectively. His philosophy implies the phenomenological sense of experience, consciousness and self-awareness as dimensions of illuminating or revealing things. His engagement with Husserl in particular guided much of his qu...

In the past three decades in the West, literature about the Kyoto School and translations of its writings have proliferated. Yet the very scholarship that perpetuates the name has also created confusion about its reference. Which thinkers belong to the “Kyoto School”? What do they have in common? Do they represent something we can call Eastern phil...

Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253 ce) is one of the most revered figures in the history of Japanese culture. A Zen master regarded by the Sōtō School as its spiritual founder, Dōgen is also considered by many to be Japan's greatest philosopher. (The other major contender is kūkai, with whose philosophy Dōgen's shares a number of features.) Possessed of a prod...

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 philosophi...

This article re-orients Heidegger's analyses of things to cast light on two distinct ways of relating to things, one at the root of technological use and the other crucial to artistic creation. The first way, which we may call instrumental practice, denotes the activity of using something to accomplish some goal or objective. This practice underlie...

This book documents the richness and diversity of Japanese philosophy as it has developed throughout history. Writings of more than a hundred philosophical thinkers from all eras and schools of thought have been translated, many of them available in English for the first time. The book has been set out to represent the entire Japanese philosophical...

The life of the influential and innovative philosopher and public figure Miki Kiyoshi was cut short by his death in prison six weeks after the end of World War II. Ever since then, controversy over his alleged complicity in Japan's wartime policies has skewed Japanese evaluations of his work and dominated discussions of it outside Japan. Susan Town...

The Christian philosopher Jean-Luc Marion and the Buddhist philosopher Nishida Kitaro, as vast as their differences may be, have both proposed alternatives to thinking of God in terms of being and thinking of being in terms of ground. They both offer a way out of onto-theology that is markedly different from Heidegger's. Marion presents the alterna...

This article provides an introduction to the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida, widely recognized as the most important Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century and the founder of the Kyoto School, authored some twenty volumes of essays influenced by Buddhist thought and deeply informed by the Anglo-European philosophy that was just beginn...

This account of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō is lucid, insightful, and deeply informative—despite the highly questionable argument that gives the book its structure. In comparison with other, technically more accurate accounts of Nishida's philosophy, it is broader in scope than most but more single-minded in its approach. The analysis is for t...

The Journal of Japanese Studies 31.1 (2005) 223-227 Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) is considered the most important, and perhaps the most original, Japanese philosopher in the post-Meiji period. Indeed, he is widely regarded as the first truly Japanese philosopher, if philosophy names the traditionally Western discipline of rational inquiry that was in...