Philosophy

Nishida Kitaro

1870 to 1945, Mori, Ishikawa, Japan

Pure experience, the logic of place, and absolute nothingness - Zen realization brought into rigorous dialogue with Western philosophy.

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Lessons

Pure Experience: Before Subject and Object

Nishida’s starting point in An Inquiry into the Good (1911): pure experience ( junsui keiken ), the concrete happening that is prior to the split into a subject who experiences and an object experienced - and out…

The Good as Self-Realization

The ethics of An Inquiry into the Good : the good is the realization of the self - the actualization of the unified personality’s deepest demand - a self-realization ethic set against both hedonism and duty-for-du…

The Logic of Place: Fields Within Fields

Nishida’s mature breakthrough: the logic of basho (place). Things are not just substances but are implaced - held within fields that let them be - and the ultimate field, which can never itself be a thing, is the…

Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity

Nishida’s late logic of the historical world: reality is a self-identity of absolute contradiction - one and many, continuous and discontinuous, at once - and the world is creative, forming itself ‘from the…

Zen and Philosophy: Religion and the Ground of the Self

What Nishida founded: the Kyoto School , where Zen’s realization of emptiness is brought into rigorous, non-reductive dialogue with Western philosophy. Religion, in his last essay, is the standpoint where the self…

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