The Kyoto School's own reference literature treats it as an ongoing intellectual tradition rather than a closed historical episode: founder Nishida Kitaro died in 1945, the year of Japan's surrender, yet later thinkers such as Keiji Nishitani continued the school's project for decades afterward, so encyclopedic treatments decline to name a single end date.
What would resolve this Scholarly consensus on whether the school's identity is tied to a specific institutional marker, such as Nishida Kitaro's death in 1945, the same year Japan surrendered, or extends through the later generations, Nishitani and Tanabe's students among them, who continued the school's project for decades afterward under the same name.
OpenIntellectual history of modern Japan, history of philosophyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy