Miki Kiyoshi 1897 – 1945
Miki Kiyoshi was a Japanese philosopher of the Kyoto School and one of the most original Japanese interpreters of Marx, Heidegger, and Pascal. After studies under Nishida Kitaro and a sojourn in Heidelberg and Marburg, he developed an anthropological philosophy that took the historically situated, imaginative human being as its center, expressed in The Logic of Imagination and The Philosophical Anthropology. Briefly imprisoned in the 1930s for support of a former student, he was rearrested in 1945 and died in prison in September of that year, after Japan's surrender. His work has been a touchstone for postwar Japanese philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Japanese
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental, Marxism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Miki Kiyoshi:
“Imagination is the constitutive principle of human historical existence.”
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Attributed to Miki Kiyoshi:
“The logic of history is the logic of human beings making themselves.”
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Attributed to Miki Kiyoshi:
“Philosophy must serve the practical task of culture.”
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Attributed to Miki Kiyoshi:
“True freedom is the formative power that shapes the chaotic given.”
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Attributed to Miki Kiyoshi:
“Anthropology in the philosophical sense is the science of the historical human being.”