Philosophy of Science and The Kyoto School

Dean Anthony Brink is Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

This primer on the thought of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Tosaka Jun deconstructs the conventional divide between a scientifically minded West and a religiously inspired East. Approaching the philosophy of modern physics through the lens of the Kyoto School, Dean Brink's work breaks new ground in the history of ideas and champions the rights of cross-cultural "scientific humanism".

• 1. Introduction: Relativity and quantum physics in the Kyoto School2. Nishida Philosophy, place, field, and quantum phenomenaNishida’s method and the physical site of active intuitionOperationalism and the logic of place in Nishida’s Empirical ScienceGlossaryDiscussionFurther Reading3. Mediation in Tanabe’s dialectical vision of competing fields within physicsTanabe’s dialectics of classical and modern physicsSituating modern physics in the Kyoto School: From Aristotle to DiracGlossaryDiscussionFurther Reading4. Modern physics and ideology in Tosaka JunFrom Kantian to Marxist approaches to space and matterTosaka’s critique of the crisis in modern physicsGlossaryDiscussionFurther Reading5. What we can learn from the Kyoto SchoolThe philosophy of physics and competing conceptions of materiality in Nishida, Tanabe, and TosakaImplications for critical materialisms todayGlossaryDiscussionFurther ReadingAnnotated BibliographyWorks in European languagesWorks in Japanese and ChineseIndex