1st Edition

Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy

Edited By Christopher Goto-Jones Copyright 2008
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    In Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy Christopher Goto-Jones contends that existing approaches to the controversial Kyoto School fail to take it seriously as a school of philosophy, instead focussing on historical debates about the alleged complicity of the School’s members with the imperialist regime in Japan.

    The essays in this book take a new approach to the subject, engaging substantially with the philosophical texts of members of the Kyoto School, and demonstrating that the school developed serious and sophisticated positions on many of the perennial questions that lie at the heart of political philosophy. These positions are innovative and fresh, and are of value to political philosophy today, as well as to intellectual historians of Japan. In particular, the book is structured around the various ways in which we might locate the Kyoto School in mainstream traditions of political thought, and the insights offered by the School about the core concepts in political philosophy. In this way the book re-politicises the Kyoto School.

    With chapters written by many leading scholars in the field, and representing a contribution to political thought as well as the intellectual history of Japan, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese studies, philosophy and political thought.

    Preface, James W. Heisig; The Kyoto School and the History of Political Philosophy: Reconsidering the Methodological Dominance of the Cambridge School, Chris Goto-Jones; Turns to and from Political Philosophy: The Case of Nishitani Keiji, Bret W. Davis; The Individual and Individualism in Nishida and Tanabe, Matteo Cestari; Constituting Aesthetic/Moral National Space – The Kyoto School and the Place of Nation, Yumiko Iida; Time, Everydayness and the Specter of Fascism: Tosaka Jun and Philosophy’s New Vocation, Harry D. Harootunian; What was the ‘Japanese Philosophy of History’? An Inquiry into the Dynamics of the ‘World-Historical Standpoint’ of the Kyoto School, Christian Uhl; Romanticism, Conservatism and the Kyoto School of Philosophy, Kevin M. Doak; The Definite Internationalism of the Kyoto School: Changing Attitudes in the Contemporary Academy, Graham Parkes; Resistance to Conclusion: Kyoto School Philosophy under the Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai

    Biography

    Christopher Goto-Jones is Professor of Modern Japan Studies and director of the Modern East Asia Research Centre at Leiden University.  He has written widely on issues of the location of the non-European in political thought and philosophy, and is the author of Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School and Co-Prosperity (Routledge, 2005).