Philosophy East and West

There is certainly a lot of academic buzz these days around the relationship between Buddhism and physics. Of course, as we learned from Donald Lopez's famed book Buddhism and Science (2008), there is a long history, beginning in the nineteenth century, to this proclamation that Buddhism is compatible with modern day science. Indeed, Dean Anthony Brink's book Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun is one of many contemporary examples of this effort to forge this intimate connection--except that this effort is launched from the perspective of the Kyoto School's approach to physical phenomena. Unlike Lopez's work, which is less interested in verifying the accuracy of this relationship and more about exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of inquiry have been so persistently linked throughout history,¹ Brink's work is aimed at exploring "the implications of new developments in physics and related dialogues among Japan's leading philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century" (p. 1). And so, in all fairness, this book is not just another attempt at smoothing out the relationship between Buddhism and science, but rather an effort to examine the leading Kyoto School thinkers' assimilation, as well as contestation, of the latest developments and discoveries within physics in order to provide "opportunities for rethinking a range of issues touching on political philosophy as well as the philosophy of the foundation of physics" (p. 3). In this regard, Brink's book, for the most part, succeeds, but mainly because it sidesteps the romantic orbit many of the Buddhologists and philosophers have established in their quest to affirm their spiritual identity. Instead, what scholars and students will find in this short text is how these leading Kyoto School thinkers approach the problem of materiality and the sort of implications that could be derived therefrom that speak to issues in critical materialism and posthumanism (pp. 144–147).

The book consists of five chapters, with three of them entirely devoted to Nishida Kitarō's, Tanabe Hajime's, and Tosaka Jun's engagement with physics [End Page 1] or science. The first chapter provides the historical background to the Kyoto School and sketches out the relationship the Kyoto School has had with the scientific and philosophical discoveries and innovations occurring in the Western world. From beginning to end, which is clear after reading the first chapter, the Kyoto School is framed as a unique world philosophy that comes close to the insights formulated within the theory of relativity and quantum physics. And while the last chapter, "What We can Learn from the Kyoto School," summarizes the central points of the book, it is also the venue where Brink ceremoniously crowns Nishida and Tanabe as the true champions of cross-cultural scientific humanism. As Brink ponders, "Nishida and Tanabe have dedicated their thoughts and schematic forays into definitions of modern modes of relationality in ways that stand apart from the work of others attempting similar definitions in ontologies and epistemologies inflected by modern physics" (p. 137). What about Tosaka Jun? For Brink, Tosaka never stayed up to date on the research developments of physics and therefore defaulted to a position that refuses "to situate dialectics in a post-causal way" (p. 136).

In the second chapter, Brink discusses the areas of Nishida's philosophy that engage scientists like Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Lotze, and Herman Minkowski. According to Brink, Nishida borrows from these scientists, as well as from many other philosophers of the day, in order to clarify the quasi-dialectical relation between subject and object (p. 16). Nishida was dedicated to establishing a nondualistic relationship between subject and object from the very beginning, and as his work evolved over time, he would begin, for instance, to incorporate...