Hajime Tanabe


Hajime Tanabe was a Japanese philosopher of science, particularly of mathematics and physics. His work brought together elements of Buddhism, scientific thought, Western philosophy, Christianity, and Marxism. In the postwar years, Tanabe coined the concept of metanoetics, proposing that the limits of speculative philosophy and reason must be surpassed by metanoia.
Tanabe was a key member of what has become known in the West as the Kyoto School, alongside philosophers Kitarō Nishida and Keiji Nishitani. He taught at Tōhoku Imperial University beginning in 1913 and later at Kyōto Imperial University, and studied at the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Freiburg in the 1920s under figures such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1947 he became a member of the Japan Academy, and in 1950 he received the Order of Cultural Merit.

Biography

Tanabe was born on February 3, 1885, in Tokyo to a household devoted to education. His father, the principal of Kaisei Academy, was a scholar of Confucius, whose teachings may have influenced Tanabe's philosophical and religious thought. Tanabe enrolled at Tokyo Imperial University, first as a mathematics student before moving to literature and philosophy. After graduation, he worked as a lecturer at Tohoku University and taught English at Kaisei Academy.
In 1916, Tanabe translated Henri Poincaré’s La Valeur de la Science. In 1918, he received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University with a dissertation entitled ‘Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics’.
In 1919, at Nishida’s invitation, Tanabe accepted the position of associate professor at Kyoto Imperial University. From 1922 to 23, he studied in Germany — first, under Alois Riehl at the University of Berlin and then under Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg. At Freiburg, he befriended the young Martin Heidegger and Oskar Becker. One can recognise the influence of these philosophers in Tanabe.
In September 1923, soon after the Great Kantō Earthquake, the Home Ministry ordered his return, so Tanabe used the little time he had left — about a couple of months — to visit London and Paris, before boarding his return ship at Marseille. He arrived back in Japan in 1924.
In 1928, Tanabe translated Max Planck’s 1908 lecture, ‘Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes’ for the Philosophical Essays translation series, which he co-edited, for his publisher Iwanami Shoten.
After Nishida's retirement from teaching in 1928, Tanabe succeeded him. Though they began as friends, and shared several philosophical concepts such as the absolute nothing , Tanabe became increasingly critical of Nishida's philosophy. Many of Tanabe's writings after Nishida left the university obliquely attacked the latter's philosophy.
In 1935, Tanabe published his essay The Logic of Species and the World Schema wherein he formulated his own ‘logic of species’ for which he became known.
During the Japanese expansion and war effort, Tanabe worked with Nishida and others to maintain the right for free academic expression. Though he criticized the Nazi-inspired letter of Heidegger, Tanabe himself was caught up in the Japanese war effort, and his letters to students going off to war exhibit many of the same terms and ideology used by the reigning military powers. Even more damning are his essays written in defense of Japanese racial and state superiority, exploiting his theory of the logic of species to herald and abet the militaristic ideology. This proposed dialectic argued that every contradictory opposition is to be mediated by a third term in the same manner a species mediates a genus and an individual.
During the war years, however, Tanabe wrote and published little, perhaps reflecting the moral turmoil that he attests to in his monumental post-war work, Philosophy as Metanoetics. The work is framed as a confession of repentance for his support of the war effort. It purports to show a philosophical way to overcome philosophy itself, which suggests that traditional Western thought contained seeds of the ideological framework that led to World War II.
His activities, and the actions of Japan as a whole, haunted Tanabe for the rest of his life. In 1951, he writes:
He lived for another eleven years after writing these words, dying in 1962 in Kita-Karuizawa, Japan.

Thought

As James Heisig and others note, Tanabe and other members of the Kyoto School accepted the Western philosophical tradition stemming from the Greeks. This tradition attempts to explain the meaning of human experience in rational terms. This sets them apart from other Eastern writers who, though thinking about what life means and how best to live a good life, spoke in religious terms.
Although the Kyoto School used Western philosophical terminology and rational exploration, they made these items serve the purpose of presenting a unique vision of reality from within their cultural heritage. Specifically, they could enrich a discussion of the ultimate nature of reality using the experience and thought of various forms of Buddhism like Zen and Pure Land, but embedded in an analysis that calls upon conceptual tools forged and honed in western philosophy by thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Heidegger.
Tanabe's own contribution to this dialog between Eastern and Western philosophy ultimately sets him apart from the other members of the Kyoto School. His radical critique of philosophical reason and method, while stemming from Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, which emerges in his work Philosophy as Metanoetics, easily sets him as a major thinker with a unique position on perennial philosophical questions. Some commentators, for example, suggest that Tanabe's work in metanoetics is a forerunner of deconstruction.
Tanabe engaged with philosophers of Continental philosophy, especially Existentialism. His work is often a dialogue with philosophers like Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Because of his engaging these thinkers, especially the first two, Tanabe's thought has been characterized as Existentialist, though Makoto Ozaki writes that Tanabe preferred the terms "existentialist philosophy of history", or "historical existentialism". In his masterpiece, Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe characterized his work as "philosophy that is not a philosophy", foreshadowing various approaches to thinking by deconstructionists.
Like other existentialists, Tanabe emphasizes the importance of philosophy as being meaning; that is, what humans think about and desire is finding a meaning to life and death. In company with the other members of the Kyoto School, Tanabe believed that the foremost problem facing humans in the modern world is the lack of meaning and its consequent Nihilism. Jean-Paul Sartre, following Kierkegaard in his Concept of Anxiety, was keen to characterize this as Nothingness. Heidegger, as well, appropriated the notion of Nothingness in his later writings.
The Kyoto School philosophers believed that their contribution to this discussion of Nihilism centered on the Buddhist-inspired concept of nothingness, aligned with its correlate Śūnyatā. Tanabe and Nishida attempted to distinguish their philosophical use of this concept, however, by calling it Absolute Nothingness. This term differentiates it from the Buddhist religious concept of nothingness, as well as underlines the historical aspects of human existence that they believed Buddhism does not capture.
Tanabe disagreed with Nishida and Nishitani on the meaning of Absolute Nothingness, emphasizing the practical, historical aspect over what he termed the latter's intuitionism. By this, Tanabe hoped to emphasize the working of Nothingness in time, as opposed to an eternal now. He also wished to center the human experience in action rather than contemplation, since he thought that action embodies a concern for ethics whereas contemplation ultimately disregards this, resulting in a form of monism, after the mold of Plotinus and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. That is, echoing Kierkegaard's undermining in Philosophical Fragments of systematic philosophy from Plato to Baruch Spinoza to Hegel, Tanabe questions whether there is an aboriginal condition of preexisting awareness that can or must be regained to attain enlightenment.
Tanabe's insistence on this point is not simply philosophical and instead points again to his insistence that the proper mode of human being is action, especially ethics. However, he is critical of the notion of a pre-existing condition of enlightenment because he accepts the Kantian notion of radical evil, wherein humans exhibit an ineluctable propensity to act against their own desires for the good and instead perpetrate evil.
Tanabe's Demonstration of Christianity presents religion as a cultural entity in tension with the existential meaning that religion plays in individual lives. Tanabe uses the terms genus to represent the universality of form that all entities strive for, contrasting them with the stable, though ossified form they can become as species as social systems.
Tanabe contraposes Christianity and Christ, represented here as the opposition between Paul and Jesus. Jesus, in Tanabe's terms, is a historical being who manifests the action of Absolute Nothingness, or God understood in non-theistic terms. God is beyond all conceptuality and human thinking, which can only occur in terms of self-identity, or Being. God becomes, as manifested in human actions, though God can never be reduced to being, or self-identity.
For Tanabe, humans have the potential to realize compassionate divinity, Nothingness, through continual death and resurrection, by way of seeing their Nothingness. Tanabe believes that the Christian Incarnation narrative is important for explaining the nature of reality, since he believed Absolute Nothingness becoming human exemplifies the true nature of the divine, as well as exemplar to realization of human being in relationship to divinity. Jesus signifies this process in a most pure form, thereby setting an example for others to follow.
Ultimately, Tanabe chooses philosophy over religion, since the latter tends toward socialization and domestication of the original impulse of the religious action. Philosophy, understood as metanoetics, always remains open to questions and the possibility self-delusion in the form of radical evil. Therefore, Tanabe's statement is a philosophy of religion.

Collected works

  • Collected Works , 15 Vols. .
  • Selected Philosophical Works , 4 vols. .

    Monographs

  • Modern Natural Science , reprinted in
  • Philosophy of Science , reprinted in
  • Kant’s Teleology , reprinted in
  • Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics , reprinted in
  • Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic , reprinted in
  • General Philosophy , reprinted in
  • The Two Sides to Natural Science Education , reprinted in
  • The Meaning of Historical Study , reprinted in
  • Science as Morality , reprinted in
  • My View of the Philosophy of Shōbōgenzō , reprinted in
  • Between Philosophy and Science , reprinted in
  • Historical Reality , reprinted in
  • The Direction of Philosophy , reprinted in
  • Philosophy as a Way to Repentance: Metanoetics , reprinted in and SPW2:33-439.
  • Urgent Matters for Political Philosophy , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of the Logic of Species , reprinted in
  • Existence, Love and Practice , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of Christianity , reprinted in
  • Introduction to Philosophy: The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy , reprinted in and SPW3:11-216.
  • The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Appendix 1: Philosophy of History and Political Philosophy , reprinted in
  • The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Appendix 2: Philosophy of Science and Epistemology , reprinted in
  • Valéry’s Aesthetics , reprinted in
  • Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Appendix 3: Philosophy of Religion and Ethics , reprinted in
  • Historicist Development of Mathematics: A Memorandum on the Foundations of Mathematics , reprinted in and SPW3:217-399.
  • Proposition of a New Methodology for Theoretical Physics: The Necessity of Theory of Functions of Complex Variables qua Method of Theoretical Physics and Its Topological Character , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of the Theory of Relativity , reprinted in
  • A Memorandum on Mallarmé , reprinted in and SPW4:63-218.

    Chronological list of works

1910
  • ‘On Thetic Judgement’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Critical Notice of Theodor Lipps’s Bewusstsein und Gegenstände’ , reprinted in
1911
  • ‘Critical Notice of Wilhelm Jerusalem’s Der kritische Idealismus und die reine Logik’ , reprinted in
1912
  • ‘The Problem of Relativity’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Kant and Natural Science’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Critical Notice of Émile Boutroux’s De l’idée de loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contemporaines’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Critical Notice of Kuwaki Ayao’s ‘The Problem of Knowledge in Physics’’ , reprinted in
1913
  • ‘Critical Notice of Max Planck’s ‘Die Einheit des physkalischen Weltbildes’’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Natorp’s Criticisms of the Principle of Relativity’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Significance of Descriptions in the Epistemology of Physics: A Critique of Kirchhoff and Mach’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Critical Notice of Henri Poincaré’s ‘L'espace et le temps’’ , reprinted in
1914
  • ‘The Limits of Logicism in Epistemology: A Critique of the Marburg and Freiburg Schools’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On Kuwaki’s Essay on the Method of Physics’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On the Existence of Mathematical Objects: Reading Medicus’ Essay’ , reprinted in
1915
  • ‘The Natural Sciences versus the Social and Cultural Sciences’ , reprinted in
  • ‘A Theory of Natural Numbers’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
  • Modern Natural Science , reprinted in
  • ‘Preface to the Third Printing of Modern Natural Science’ , reprinted in
1916
  • ‘Continuity, Derivative, Infinity’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
  • ‘On Universals’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Translator’s Preface to Poincaré, La valeur de la science’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Negative Numbers and Imaginary Numbers’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
1917
  • ‘The Epistemology of Mathematics’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
  • ‘Variables and Functions’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
  • ‘Moral Freedom’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Theory of Time’ , reprinted in
1918
  • ‘The Logical Foundations of Geometry’ , revised and reprinted in Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics.
  • ‘The Problem of Philosophical Knowledge in German Idealism’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Reading Dr. Sōda’s Problems in the Philosophy of Economics’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The World of Infinity’ , reprinted in
  • ‘A Request to Dr. Sōda’s for Clarification regarding the Logic of Individual Causality’ , reprinted in
  • Philosophy of Science , reprinted in
  • ‘On Kant’s Theory of Freedom’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Significance of Leibniz’s Philosophy , reprinted in
  • ‘Lecture on Idealism’ , reprinted in
1919
  • ‘The Meaning of the Word ‘Truth’’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Araragi's Tradition’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On Consciousness as Such’ , reprinted in
  • ‘A Remark on Passages Quoted in Kihira’s Essay’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Problem of the Subject of Knowledge’ , reprinted in
1920
  • ‘The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences’ , reprinted in
  • ‘An Amateur's Opinion’ , reprinted in
1921
  • ‘Tanka’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Reading Shimaki Akahiko’s Hio’ , reprinted in
1922
  • ‘On Historical Knowledge’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Concept of Culture’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Infinite Continuity of Existence’ , reprinted in
  • Entries in The Iwanami Dictionary of Philosophy , reprinted in
1924
  • ‘Letter from Paris’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Relationship Between Intuition and Thought in the Transcendental Deduction’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Kant’s Teleology’ , revised and reprinted in Kant’s Teleology, CW3:1-72.
  • ‘A New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Life’ , reprinted in
  • Kant’s Teleology , reprinted in
  • ‘Reading Shimaki Akahiko’s Kadō Shōken’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Lecture on the Development of Phenomenology’ , reprinted in
1925
  • ‘Epistemology and Phenomenology’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Intuitive Knowledge and the Thing in Itself’ , reprinted in
  • Investigations into the Philosophy of Mathematics , reprinted in
  • ‘On Shimaki Akahiko’s Taikyoshū’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Lask’s Logic’ , reprinted in
1926
  • ‘Reminiscences of Shimaki Akahiko’ , reprinted in
1927
  • ‘On Circular Reasoning in the Critical Method’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Logic of the Dialectic’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:234-369.
  • ‘Reflection’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On the Concept of Sensation’ reprinted in
  • ‘Translator’s Preface to Planck, ‘Die Einheit des physkalischen Weltbildes’’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Blurb for Tsuchida Kyōson’s Studies on Contemporary Japanese and Chinese Thought’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Reminiscences of Sōda Ki’ichirō’ , reprinted in
1928
  • ‘Knowledge of the Past in the Study of History’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Role of Concepts in the Historical Knowledge’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Location of Evidence’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On Confucian Ontology’ , reprinted in
1929
  • ‘Action and History and Their Relation to the Dialectic’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:211-233.
  • ‘On Shimaki Akahiko’s Art’ , reprinted in
1930
  • ‘On the So-Called Class Aspect of Science’ , reprinted in
  • ‘A Request to Professor Nishida for Clarification’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Subject of Morality and Dialectical Freedom’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:195-210.
  • ‘The Significance of the New Physics’ World Picture’ , reprinted in
1931
  • ‘The Identity of the Rational and the Real in Hegel’ in Hegel and Hegelianism , Iwanami Shoten , , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:173-194.
  • ‘Synthesis and Transcendence’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Standpoint of Anthropology’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Hegel’s Philosophy and the Absolute Dialectic’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:152-172.
  • ‘Hegel’s Absolute Idealism’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:85-135.
  • ‘Understanding Hegel’s Theory of Judgement’ , revised and reprinted in Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic, CW3:136-151.
1932
  • Hegel’s Philosophy and the Dialectic , reprinted in
  • ‘Dialectic of Individual Essence’ , reprinted in
  • ‘From the Time Schema to the World Schema’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Lecture on the Meaning of Dialectic’ , reprinted in
1933
  • ‘The Way to Philosophy’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Philosophy of Crisis or Crisis of Philosophy?’ , reprinted in
  • General Philosophy , reprinted in
1934
  • ‘The Relationship Between Mathematics and Philosophy’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Re-Examining the Foundations of Mathematics: On Konno’s Essay’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Relationship Between Religion and Culture: On the Debate Between Barth and Brunner’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On Intellectual Thought Today’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Remembering Nakamura Kenkichi’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Logic of Social Existence’ , reprinted in and SPW1:9-186.
1935
  • ‘Quo Vadis’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Letter to Saitō Mokichi’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Uniqueness of Iwanami Shoten’s Kokugo’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Logic of Species and the World Schema’ , reprinted in and SPW1:187-333.
  • ‘The Third Stage of Ontology’ , reprinted in
1936
  • Entries in the Dictionary of Pedagogy , reprinted in
  • ‘Answer to the Questionnaire ‘What Do You Want the University’s Students to Read?’’ , reprinted in
  • ‘On Humanism’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Social Ontological Structure of Logic’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Development of Mathematics in the History of Thought’ , reprinted in
1937
  • The Two Sides to Natural Science Education , reprinted in
  • ‘Response to Minoda’s and Matsuda’s Criticisms’ , reprinted in
  • The Meaning of Historical Study , reprinted in
  • ‘Response to Criticisms of the Logic of Species’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Clarification of the Meaning of the Logic of Species’ , reprinted in and SPW1:335-448.
1938
  • Science as Morality , reprinted in
  • ‘Logic from Kant to Hegel’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Expansion of Scientism’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Limits of Existentialist Philosophy’ , reprinted in
  • ‘My View on the Principle Underlying the Direction of Japan’s Cultural Policy Towards China’ , reprinted in
1939
  • ‘On Scientific Thinking’ , reprinted in
  • My View of the Philosophy of Shōbōgenzō , reprinted in
  • ‘Physics and Philosophy’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Logic of National Existence’ , reprinted in
  • Between Philosophy and Science , reprinted in
1940
  • Historical Reality , reprinted in
  • ‘Eternity, History, Action’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Ethics and Logic’ , reprinted in
1941
  • The Direction of Philosophy , reprinted in
  • ‘The Morality of the State’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Way of Patriotic Thinking’ , reprinted in
  • ‘The Development of the Concept of Existence’ , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of the Logic of Species , reprinted in
1942
  • ‘Lecture on Philosophy’ , reprinted in
1943
  • ‘Life and Death’ , reprinted in
1944
  • ‘The Limits of Culture’ , reprinted in
  • ‘A Way to Repentance: Metanoetics’ and SPW2:11-31.
1945
1946
  • ‘The Establishment of Democracy in Japan’ , reprinted in
  • Philosophy as a Way to Repentance: Metanoetics , reprinted in and SPW2:33-439.
  • Urgent Matters for Political Philosophy , reprinted in
  • ‘The Standpoint of the Absolute Nothing and the Materialist Dialectic’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Lecture on Philosophical Thinking’ , reprinted in
1947
  • ‘The Present Task of the Intellectual Classes’ , reprinted in
  • ‘Christianity, Marxism and Japanese Buddhism: Predictions for the Second Reformation’ , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of the Logic of Species , reprinted in
  • Existence, Love and Practice , reprinted in
1948
  • ‘A Theoretical Solution to Class Warfare’ , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of Christianity , reprinted in
  • ‘Localised and Microscopic: Characteristics of Contemporary Thought’ , reprinted in
1949
  • Introduction to Philosophy: The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy , reprinted in and SPW3:11-216.
  • ‘Dialectic of Classical Mechanics’ , reprinted in
  • The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Appendix 1: Philosophy of History and Political Philosophy , reprinted in
1950
  • ‘Science, Philosophy and Religion’ , reprinted in
  • The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Appendix 2: Philosophy of Science and Epistemology , reprinted in
1951
  • Valéry’s Aesthetics , reprinted in
1952
1953
  • ‘Special Lecture at Kita-Karuizawa , reprinted in
  • ‘Philosophy, Poetry and Religion: Heidegger, Rilke, Hölderlin’ , reprinted in
1954
  • A Historicist Further Development of Mathematics: A Memorandum on the Foundations of Mathematics , reprinted in
1955
  • ‘Oskar Becker, Die Grundlagen der Mathematik in geschichtlicher Entwicklung’ , reprinted in
  • Proposition of a New Methodology for Theoretical Physics: The Necessity of Theory of Functions of Complex Variables qua Method of Theoretical Physics and Its Topological Character , reprinted in
  • Dialectic of the Theory of Relativity , reprinted in
1958
  • ‘Memento Mori’ , reprinted in and SPW4:11-29.
1960
  • ‘My Interpretation of the Chan Preface’ , reprinted in and SPW4:31-62.
1961
  • A Memorandum on Mallarmé , reprinted in and SPW4:63-218.
1962
  • ‘Ontology of Life or Dialectic of Death?’ , reprinted in and SPW4:219-295.

    English translations

Early works
  • "The Logic of the Species as Dialectics," trans. David Dilworth and Taira Sato, in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 24, No. 3 : 273–288.
  • "Kant's Theory of Freedom," trans. Takeshi Morisato with Cody Staton in "An Essay on Kant’s Theory of Freedom from the Early Works of Tanabe Hajime" in Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 5 : 150–156.
  • "On the Universal," trans. Takeshi Morisato with Timothy Burns, in "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Deductive Reasoning: The Relation of the Universal and the Particular in Early Works of Tanabe Hajime" in Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 5 : 124–149.
Middle Work
  • "Requesting the Guidance of Professor Nishida," trans., Richard Stone and Takeshi Morisato, Asian Philosophical Texts: Exploring Hidden Sources, eds., Roman Pasca and Takeshi Morisato, 281–308. Milan: Mimesis, 2020.
Logic of Species
  • "The Social Ontological Structure of the Logic," Tanabe Hajime and the Kyoto School: Self, World, and Knowledge. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Later works
  • Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans. Takeuchi Yoshinori, Valdo Viglielmo, and James W. Heisig, University of California Press, 1987.
  • "Demonstration of Christianity", in Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe: According to the English Translation of the Seventh Chapter of the Demonstratio of Christianity, trans. Makoto Ozaki, Rodopi BV Editions, 1990.

    Books and theses

  • Adams, Robert William, "The Feasibility of the Philosophical in Early Taishō Japan: Nishida Kitarô and Tanabe Hajime." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1991.
  • Dilworth, David A. and Valdo H. Viglielmo ; with Agustin Jacinto Zavala, Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.
  • Fredericks, James L., "Alterity in the Thought of Tanabe Hajime and Karl Rahner." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1988.
  • Heisig, James W., Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School, Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture, University of Hawaii Press, 2002.
  • Morisato, Takeshi, , London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
  • Ozaki, Makoto, Individuum, Society, Humankind: The Triadic Logic of Species According to Hajime Tanabe, Brill Academic Publishers,,.
  • Pattison, George, Agnosis: Theology in the Void, Palgrave Macmillan,..
  • Unno, Taitetsu, and James W. Heisig, The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime: The Metanoetic Imperative , Asian Humanities Press,,.

    Articles

  • Cestari, Matteo, "Between Emptiness and Absolute Nothingness: Reflections on Negation in Nishida and Buddhism."
  • Ruiz, F. Perez, "Philosophy in Present-day Japan," in Monumenta Nipponica Vol. 24, No. 1/2, pp. 137–168.
  • Heisig, James W., in Eastern Buddhist, Autumn 95, Vol. 28 Issue 2, p. 198.
  • Sakai, Naoki, "SUBJECT AND SUBSTRATUM: ON JAPANESE IMPERIAL NATIONALISM," in Cultural Studies; July 2000, Vol. 14 Issue 3/4, pp. 462-530.
  • Viglielmo, V. H., "An Introduction to Tanabe Hajime's Existence, Love, and Praxis" in Wandel zwischen den Welten: Festschrift für Johannes Laube, pp. 781–797.
  • Waldenfels, Hans, "Absolute Nothingness. Preliminary Considerations on a Central Notion in the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto School," in Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 21, No. 3/4, pp. 354–391.
  • Williams, David, "In Defence of the Kyoto School: Reflections on Philosophy, the Pacific War and the Making of a Post-White World," in Japan Forum, Sep2000, Vol. 12 Issue 2, pp. 143–156.