Tanabe Hajime

Tanabe Hajime, known in Western sources as Hajime Tanabe, lived from February 3, 1885 to April 29, 1962 and was a Japanese philosopher of science, particularly of mathematics and physics, whose work brought together elements of Buddhism, scientific thought, Western philosophy, Christianity and Marxism; in the postwar years he coined the concept of metanoetics, proposing that the limits of speculative philosophy and reason must be surpassed by metanoia. He was a key member of what became known in the West as the Kyoto School, alongside his teacher Nishida Kitaro and fellow philosopher Keiji Nishitani, taught at Tohoku Imperial University from 1913 and later at Kyoto Imperial University, and studied at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig and Freiburg in the 1920s under figures including Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; he became a member of the Japan Academy in 1947 and received the Order of Cultural Merit in 1950.