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.