Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945 ce ) was the first modern Japanese philosopher to develop a philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history. He studied under nishida and tanabe in Kyoto, and 1922–3 in Germany with Rickert and heidegger . In 1924, he moved to Paris, where he began his innovative work on pascal . In 1927, he was appointed a professor at Hōsei University in Tokyo, but because of his increasingly Marxist orientation he lost his position three years later under a political purge by the Japanese government. He worked as a journalist and in 1936 became a member of Prince Konoe Fumimaro's research group on national policy. Miki died in prison shortly after being arrested for giving asylum to a communist sympathizer. Miki's Study of Man in Pascal (1926) interpreted the French thinker in order to clarify how experience underlies concepts and concepts inform experience. In contrast to Nishida's notion of “pure experience” prior to all conceptualization, Miki argued for a “fundamental [but historically conditioned and social] experience” that reconciled logos and pathos, the rational and the irrational. Marxist thought encouraged Miki's interest in history, but his application of Marxism was unorthodox. Prior to ideology, a derivative form of discourse, came philosophical anthropology, the primary articulation of fundamental experience. Miki's Historical Materialism ... log in or subscribe to read full text