Nishitani Keiji 1900 – 1990

Nishitani Keiji was a Japanese philosopher and one of the principal figures of the second generation of the Kyoto School. A student of Nishida Kitaro at Kyoto and of Heidegger at Freiburg, he combined Mahayana Buddhist thought, especially the Zen concept of emptiness, with the Western philosophical tradition in works such as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism and Religion and Nothingness. His central concern was the problem of nihilism in the modern world and the religious response to it through what he called the standpoint of emptiness or absolute nothingness.