bibliography on philosophy

Japanese scholars usually employ two different terms (and therefore two different categories) to refer to Japanese philosophical debate. The first is shisô 思想. Sometimes translated as "thought", "way of thinking", or more recently "intellectual history", it point to the intellectual debate before 1862. The second, tetsugaku 哲学, is generally used to translate the English "philosophy" and refer to the philosophical debate in the West as well as in Japan according to the European tradition. The term kitetsugaku 希哲学, then simplified in tetsugaku, was "invented" in 1862 by the rationalist Nishi Amane 西周 (1829-97) in order to distinguish Western philosophy from Buddhist and Chinese thought. As Gino Piovesana put it, "Kitetsugaku was a new word, the result, maybe, of discussion between Nishi and his friend and colleague at the Center [Center for the Investigation of Barbarian Books, Bansho Shirabesho 蕃書調所], Tsuda Mamichi [津田真道] (1821-1903), who developed an early interest in philosophy. The new term became known in 1874, when Nishi printed it in his work Hyakuichi shinron [百一新論] (A New Theory on the Hundred and One Doctrine)". (from Gino K. Piovesana, Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought, 1862-1996: A Survey. Tokyo: Japan Library, 1997, p. 1). While today shisô and tetsugaku are quite precisely distinguished in usage in Japanese scholarly writings, the categorization is not shed of theoretical problems. I will list them before dealing with the bibliographical sources in both fields.

1. If shisô refers mainly to the traditional intellectual debates before the introduction of the concepts of Western philosophy, how shall we deal with original thinkers like Nishida Kitarô 西田幾多郎 (1870-1945) or Watsuji Tetsurô 和辻哲郎 (1889-1960) who actually mixed both traditions?

2. What about the rangaku 蘭学 intellectuals that came into contact with, and discussed texts of Western philosophy before 1862?

3. While tetsugaku is evidently accepted as the Japanese equivalent of "philosophy", the term shisô maintains a high degree of ambiguity and vagueness. It is usually translated with fairly general terms like "thought", "way of thinking" or "intellectual debate". I suspect that two main forces lie behind this tendency: first, the Eurocentric (and now quite anachronistic) belief that since Japan never developed a theoretical debate comparable to European intellectual enterprises, it is therefore inappropriate to "elevate" it to the status of "philosophy"; and second, the inability of both Japanese and Western scholars to compile an organized and systematic study of Japanese philosophy up to the Meiji period.

4. Shisô is often ambiguously utilized by Japanese scholars both as a generic term for the intellectual debate and as an analytical approach. With this I mean that among Japanese scholars is quite common, for example, to add a "philosophical analysis" of, say, Shinran to the more traditionally exegetical or doctrinal studies on the founder of the Shin school of Amidism. Consequently, we notice that for many premodern intellectuals with Buddhist affiliations there are a parallel set of scholarly inquiries, one from the perspective of "religious studies" and the other from a "philosophical approach" ( shisô).
It is on the basis of these theoretical problems that I decided not to distinguish pre- and post- Meiji intellectual debates of Japanese thinkers and intellectuals. I will treat them together, and I will translate both terms shisô and tetsugaku as "philosophy". I believe in fact that it would not make much sense to ignore the "philosophical" character of Dôgen's or Suzuki Shôsan's works just as it would be reductive to study Decartes or Pascal only in a class of religious studies.

15-B: Philosophy

Contents

Theoretical Premises

Preliminary Research

Dictionaries

Primary Sources

Selected Manuals

Selected Journals