Paper short abstract:

This paper explains that NISHI Amane discovered the natural form of the proposition. His formula is : イハロナリ。イ stands for the Subject 、ロ stands for the Predicate. He put no quantifiers on the Subject . He realized that the subject word in Japanese sentences stands for the pattern.

Paper long abstract:

NISHI Amane is the champion of the Japanese Enlightenment in the Meiji Era. He was born and brought up in the Confucian stream. He was trained as a Syusi school boy and changed his mind to become Sorai student in his youth days.

Nishi was sent to Holland as a visiting fellow, where he studied Law and Economics, as well as Philosophy in general. As he discovered that the logic is the basis of all knowledge in the West, he was eager to introduce the Logic to the Japanese intellectual horizon. He wrote 致知啓蒙　introduction to the Logic and published it. Nishi was a student of Sir William Hamilton of Edinburgh,. Nishi encountered the Hamilton`s Lectures of Logic at Leyden, which he brought back to Japan. He studied them carefully and captured the spirit of both the Logic and the Hamilton's version of it.

Nishi`s Introduction of Logic form the two parts. First chapter explains the formal structure of the proposition. Second chapter illustrates the Syllogism as such. In his formulation of the logical structure of the proposition, Nishi adopted the Hamilton`s symbols which stand for the quantification of the terms. It is well known that Hamilton quantifies both the Subject and the Predicate in his formulation of the logical structure of the proposition. Nishi invented new signs for the Universals and the Particulars. Round mark for the former, half round mark for the latter. It is clearly shown that Nishi quantifies not only the Subject but also the Predicate, as he put those symbols both to イand ロ, イstands for the Subject ロ stands for the Predicate in his propositional form.

However, if you see the examples of he Japanese proposition, the scene changed drastically. Nishi put no quantifier, to neither the Subject nor the Predicate. He just omits them. These fact remains unexplained. I argue that Nishi grasps the sense and references of the Subject as patterns not as the individual objects. Patterns escape and remain beyond the quantification.

Paper short abstract:

My proposal is that Nishitani conceives of mind as a primarily pre-reflective gathering of reality itself qua self-awareness that materially manifests as a living body. This, I think, goes in line with the enactivist trend in the philosophy of mind and contributes to reinforcing its arguments.

Paper long abstract:

Within the broader project of assessing the relevance of Kyoto School's philosophy to contemporary philosophy of mind, the aims of my presentation will be to propose a reconstruction of Nishitani's view of the mind, and to suggest its potential contributions to contemporary philosophical discussions around the notion. This will require a bibliographical inquiry into some of his works, mainly 『宗教とは何か』 (Religion and Nothingness), 「空と即」 ("Emptiness and Sameness"), and 「般若と理性」 ("Wisdom and Reason").

Concerning the first objective, Nishitani's concept of mind is based on an existential approach to the following elements: "spirit" (the "bond of life" that sustains and holds all living things together), self-awareness (自覚　jikaku), and the way that both are related to (true) reality. Basically, for Nishitani the traditional notion of "spirit" points out that, despite its multiplicity, living things do not exist separately, hence (each individual) mind's existence is intrinsically relational from the very beginning; and self-awareness is not purely subjective or purely objective, but previous to the subject/object split. Consequently, on the side of the subject, self-awareness phenomenologically pre-exists and constitutes the self and not the other way around; and on the side of the object, mind is not an epiphenomenon of inert matter. In brief, mind is relational, non-egoic, and real. Even more, imagination and rationality are not reducible to sheer psychological states: they are grounded on reality itself. The place of self-awareness, consciousness, imagination and rationality is not simply the brain nor the body, but reality itself; here, the (living) body is the point where they gather together as mind.

Concerning the second aim of this contribution, I remark that Nishitani's views are congenial to the enactivist trend in the philosophy of mind (v. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Andy Clark, etc), according to which the mind continually co-creates itself and its world by enacting both: mind is not "in the brain" or "out there," but in this field of co-creation. I will suggest that the dialog between both sides may help to strengthen the enactivist case.