Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 29, 2008

Philosophy in Asia and the Pacific

Michel Dalissier
Pages 71-77

Nishida Kitaro and Japanese Philosophy

The remarkable destiny of Japan’s philosophical adventure during the XXI century invites us, in the person of its first great actor, Nishida Kitaro (1870‐1945), to consider a spiritual unification gesture, illustrated in the first place by a stunning reading of history of Western Philosophy, meditating in return the Oriental Thought as its nurturing soil. Second, these uncommon researches had a rather underground stake: to search for the very place in which a deeper understanding of metaphysics could spread in this beginning of the third Millennium. It seems that, for Nishida, the extent of such a project needs to question more radically a certain notion of « nothingness », irreducible to both Western ontologies as well as Confucians, Buddhist and Taoist philosophical speculations.