The Kyoto School Explained: Japanese Philosophy, Marxism, and Nothingness

About this episode

Enroll here: acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses. Use code 3FOR2FALL2026 at checkout for three courses at the price of two. Were the philosophers of the Kyoto School fascist collaborators, or were they meeting in secret with the Imperial Navy to try to stop a war? Fernando Wirtz and Takeshi Morisato join Craig for a primer on Japan's most influential and most contested philosophical tradition, from Nishida and Tanabe through Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun. The conversation covers what "nothingness" actually means in Japanese thought and why it isn't Heidegger's, how Miki tried to collapse reason and unreason into a logic of imagination, and what tenkō, or forced ideological conversion, did to a generation of Marxist intellectuals. It closes on the newly surfaced Ōshima Memo and the question of what it costs to think under fascism. Books mentioned in this episode Miki Kiyoshi, The Logic of Imagination, translated by John W. M. Krummel (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies) Itabashi Yūjin, Nishidian Philosophy of the Body (Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies) Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū) By our guests Ōhashi Ryōsuke, The Kyoto School and the J