Schools of Philosophy
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A twentieth-century Japanese philosophical movement centered at Kyoto University, founded by Nishida Kitaro and carried on by Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji and later successors. The school developed a systematic philosophy of absolute nothingness (zettai-mu), a groundless ground or place (basho) in which being and its opposition to non-being both arise, synthesizing Mahayana Buddhist and Zen concepts with the European philosophical tradition, chiefly German idealism and phenomenology, into original and, at the time, unprecedented work.
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Start Year1911 marks the publication of Nishida Kitaro's An Inquiry into the Good, which secured his position at Kyoto University and is usually treated as the school's founding work; there was no single formal founding date or charter. Cross-Tradition Connections
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Open Questions (1 open question)
When Did the Kyoto School End?
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.
Intellectual history of modern Japan, history of philosophyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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