Free Thinking

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Free Thinking: The Kyoto School

The Kyoto School

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, The Kyoto School

Chris Harding investigates the flourishing of Japanese philosophy in the 1930s and beyond.

Chris Harding discusses the group of Japanese thinkers who used European philosophy to reinvigorate native Japanese and East Asian intellectual traditions.

In the first decades of the 20th century the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida sent students to Europe and America to see what they could discover about Western philosophy. Keiji Nishitani went to Freiburg to study under Martin Heidegger, and became one of the leading figures in the Kyoto School, a project of synthesis that tried to read the Japanese intellectual tradition through the lens of European philosophy and vice versa. These thinkers took ideas from Christian mysticism, German idealism and Phenomenology, and combined them with an interest in direct experience shaped by Japanese Zen and other forms of Buddhism. But it was work carried out in Japan in the 1930s, in a society becoming increasingly militaristic and tending towards fascism. Chris Harding discusses the Kyoto School and its legacy with James Heisig, Professor Emeritus at Nanzan University, Graham Parkes, Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Raquel Bouso, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and Takeshi Morisato, Lecturer in Non-Western Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. 

Producer: Luke Mulhall 

On the Free Thinking programme website you can find other episodes exploring South and East Asian history including discussions about Japan and nature, the Vietnam-Paris connection, Tokyo Idols and Urban life, Kawanabe Kyōsai and Yukio Mishima

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