Watsuji Tetsuro 1889 – 1960

Watsuji Tetsuro was a Japanese moral philosopher and cultural historian and one of the principal figures of twentieth-century Japanese thought. Drawing on Heidegger, Kant, and the Confucian and Buddhist traditions, he developed a distinctive ethics centered on the relational human being and the mutual constitution of person and fellow-person. His Climate and Culture argued that the natural environment is intrinsic to the structure of human existence rather than an external setting for it, and his three-volume Ethics, Rinrigaku, remains a touchstone of modern Japanese moral philosophy.