Kyoto School

The Kyoto School is the twentieth-century Japanese movement that brought Buddhist ideas of nothingness into dialogue with Western philosophy.

It formed around Nishida Kitarō at Kyoto Imperial University from the 1910s, and its leading members include Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji. Nishida developed the ideas of pure experience and a logic of place (basho) grounded in absolute nothingness, and Nishitani wrote on nihilism and emptiness. The political writings of some members during the Second World War remain a subject of debate. On this site it answers questions on consciousness and the hard problem (1.3.4) and on nihilism and how to overcome it.