Paper short abstract:

What can we learn from Nishitani Keiji's understanding of meaningful and sustainable human interaction? By investigating a fictional work of family tragedy, I argue his position contains suggestions for navigating through our public duties and existential demands.

Paper long abstract:

Nishitani Keiji (西谷啓治 1900-1990) has described meaningful and sustainable human interaction as an egoteki-kankei (回互的関係), wherein we gather with other people and the things of the world, each "in the service (tsukaeru, 仕える)" of the other. One way of reading this relationship is to emphasize the freeing spontaneity that it brings and the parallels Nishitani makes to Nietzsche's image of the child at play (Bret W. Davis). Focusing on the child, however, might lead us to the problems Doi Takeo (土居健郎 1920-2009) indicates in his famous The Anatomy of Dependency (『「甘え」の構造』). The child-at-play image, for its part, draws our attention to the importance of feeling at home in the world. For a child to play, they need to feel secure, like the things in the world can immediately call out to them with wonder and possibility. If there is a failure in this sense of security, the world will appear very differently. To clarify the possibilities of Nishitani's egoteki-kankei, I propose taking up Doi's issues directly by turning to the family. Specifically, I would like to offer a reading of Oshimi Shūzō's (押見修造 1981-) recent, domestic-horror hit, Chi no Wadachi 『血の轍』. Informed by the field work of Anne Allison and Amy Borovoy, I develop a conflict between Kantian and Hegelian/Nishitanian understandings of integrity and commitment. I argue that a reading of the story couched in terms of heteronomy/autonomy misses how the institution of the family provides a space for developing a basic sense of self-integration. The tragedy of Oshimi's work can be seen only when we understand how public demands can come into conflict with the "existential demands" (David V. Ciavatta) that appear in the family. I would like to conclude by suggesting how Nishitani's egoteki-kankei opens up some further questions and possibilities for coping with the interpersonal breakdowns that arise in our most familiar and intimate spheres of life.

Paper short abstract:

The relationship between society and the individual is central to Tanabe Hajime's philosophy. In this paper, I will explore the logical underpinnings of Tanabe's social theory. Specifically, I will clarify how Tanabe connects the Aristotelian syllogism with our socially informed perceptions.

Paper long abstract:

Tanabe Hajime (田邉元 1885-1962) stands shoulder to shoulder with Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎 1870-1945) as a founding figure of the Kyōto School. It is well known that Tanabe focused on the relationship between society and individuals. In this paper, I would like to explore the mechanics, so to speak, of Tanabe's logic that underlie his social theory. Specifically, my goal is to clarify how Tanabe's interpretation of the Aristotelian syllogism functions in his argument that the society we live in holds sway over our simplest perceptions and judgments.

Tanabe arrives at this conclusion by tackling the perennial question of how the objects of cognition relate to the contents thereof. He believes that an answer to this question can be found through an epistemological analysis of the role of judgments in Aristotelian logic. Thus, in a judgment, say, "this table is wooden," the logical subject "this table" corresponds to the object of cognition, whereas the logical predicate "wooden" corresponds to the content of cognition. Thus, he reformulates the epistemological question of cognition with logical notions: i.e. how does the copula "is" relate the subject to the predicate? His novel solution lies in the identification of the copula with the middle term X of a syllogism. Thus, our cognition of a given table is enabled through the form of a syllogism: "this table is X," "X is wooden," "therefore, this table is wooden." The middle term, which mediates the major and minor premises, is transformed into the copula of the concluding judgement.

Tanabe conceives this implicit middle term as the social and historical burden that forms our perceptual content. This term, which develops in the history of a society, forces itself into our perception in the form of customs. In other words, Tanabe insists that, although it does not appear in the content of our cognition, it nevertheless mediates the world and our thoughts. His conclusion can be stated as follows: what we take to be spontaneously thought is actually a manifestation of social customs.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will contend that the Kyōto School's founding figures based their philosophical views of relations on Aristotelian logic. This, in turns, renders the nature of relations mysterious, since Aristotelian logic cannot account for two-place predicates.

Paper long abstract:

In 1952, Ueda Yasuharu published a comprehensive introductory textbook on logic (Ronrigaku), co-authored with Kōyama Iwao, a renowned successor of the Kyōto School. The textbook comprises of two parts: "Fundamentals of logic" — covering a wide variety of topics that pertain to historical and philosophical developments in logic — and "Formal logic and symbolic logic," which starts from Aristotelian term-logic and gradually introduces first-order predicate logic. The first chapter, supposedly written by Iwao, is remarkable in that it contains philosophical distinctions that the Kyoto School deemed essential for logic, such as the distinction between the object of thought and the activity of thinking or the noematic and noetic directions of conscious activity. The 1967 edition, however, was substantially revised and restructured. The new edition omits Iwao's contributions, focusing mostly on the introduction of first-order predicate logic. Aristotelian term-logic is treated in the second part and in considerable detail but mostly as a matter of historical curiosity.

The Kyōto School's post-war fall from grace is often attributed to its ties with imperialist ideology as exemplified by the ousting of Nishitani Keiji during the Purge (kōshoku-tuihō). In this paper I will offer and defend an alternative hypothesis, which explains this decline of the Kyōto School with the philosophers' overreliance on Aristotelian term-logic. That is, I claim that a substantial part of the philosophies of Nishida and Tanabe is a by-product of the inability to account for relations between individuals in term-logic. As I will show, this overreliance is most evident in the metaphysics of Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, both of whom adopted a Leibnizian view of individuals as monads that "have no windows through which anything could come in or go out." To defend this hypothesis, I will review Nishida's paper "Logical and mathematical understanding" (1912) and Tanabe's handbook Outlines of Science (1918). Although both texts agree in that the world has an essentially syllogistic structure, Tanabe's work is remarkable in that it argues for this view even after introducing the great developments of logic during his day.