Nishida Kitaro, Japan's premier modern philosopher, was born in 1870 and grew to intellectual maturity in the final decades of the Meiji period (1868-1912). He achieved recognition as Japan's leading establishment philosopher during his tenure as professor of philosophy at Kyoto University. After his retirement in 1927, and until his death in 1945, Nishida published a continuous stream of original essays that can best be described as intercivilizational, a meeting point of East and West. His final essay, ""The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview,"" completed in the last few months before his death, is a summation of his philosophy of religion and has come to be regarded as the foundational text of the Kyoto school. It is one of the few places in his writings where Nishida draws openly and freely on East Asian Buddhist sources as analogs of his own ideas. Here Nishida argues for the existential primordiality of the religious consciousness against Kant, while also critically engaging the thought of such authors as Aristotle, the Christian Neo-Platonists, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Barth, and Tillich. He makes it clear that he is also indebted to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoievsky as well as to Nagarjuna, the Ch'an masters, Shinran, Dogen, and other Buddhist thinkers. This book--a translation of the most seminal work of Nishida's career--also includes a translation of his ""Last Writing"" (Zeppitsu), written just two days before his death.

Providing translations of and commentaries on primary source materials of modern Japanese philosophy, this sourcebook centers on the creative philosophical writings of the Kyoto School broadly conceived, featuring the thought of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Kuki Shuzo, Watsuji Tetsuro, Miki Kiyoshi, Tosaka Jun, and Nishitani Keiji. The 22 selections include unabridged whole works, essays, or chapters of books. Also included is exhaustive bio-bibliographical information as well as editorial commentary. For most scholars, this will be the first look in English at the thought of Kuki Shuzo, Miki Kiyoshi, and the Marxist critic Tosaka Jun. The sourcebook will be of interest to scholars, students, and general readers interested in Asian philosophy. The selections show the intensely dialogic character of the philsophical writing of the Kyoto School of the early Showa period (1926-1949) and are of particular interest as representing philosophical strains of a "golden age" of Japanese thought during the war years between 1935 and 1945. In the interstices of the thought of the seven authors, the reader will find a mine of commentary on, and assimilation of, the schools of Western thought and the world's religions, accompanied (with the exception of the internationalist Tosaka Jun) by very resilient affirmations of the strength of Asian traditions.

His final essay, "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview," completed in the last few months before his death, is a summation of his philosophy of religion and has come to be regarded as the foundational text of the Kyoto school. It is one of the few places in his writings where Nishida draws openly and freely on East Asian Buddhist sources as analogs of his own ideas. Here Nishida argues for the existential primordiality of the religious consciousness against Kant, while also critically engaging the thought of such authors as Aristotle, the Christian Neo-Platonists, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, Barth, and Tillich. He makes it clear that he is also indebted to Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoievsky as well as to Nagarjuna, the Ch'an masters, Shinran, Dogen, and other Buddhist thinkers. This book-a translation of the most seminal work of Nishida's career-also includes a translation of his "Last Writing" (Zeppitsu), written just two days before his death.

In this original work of systematic philosophy, David Dilworth places the major texts of Western and Oriental philosophy and religion, both ancient and modern, into one comparative framework. His study reveals affinities between thinkers who lived centuries and continents apart and produces numerous insights by bringing great philosophical texts together into a single purview. "This is a provocative and challenging book: far-reaching in scope and implication, worldwide in its vision, yet inescapably Aristotelian in its grounding. It is to be hoped that it will acquaint more Western readers with Chinese philosophy, while spurring Asian thinkers to offer counterproposals about the crucial issues of philosophy in their respective traditions and the best methods to compare them."-Carl Becker, Journal of Asian Studies "The work opens new interpretive possibilities for intra- and inter-textual reflection on a grand scale."-Edith Wyschogrod, Queens College "Philosophers East or West should buy and read this book."-Robert Magnolia, Tamkang University and National Taiwan University, Taiwan

The fiction of Mori Ogai, written after the death of Emperor Meiji in 1912, secured his promiment place in modern Japanese literature. This collection of stories, set in the Tokugawa Period, provide a means for Ogai to deal with contemporary moral and philosophical values and themes.