Customer Reviews

Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitaro (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture)

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In this book, Wargo aims to uncover the structure of Nishida's system of thought and clarify it, especially by examining his concept of Basho ("topos" or "locus" or whatnot). All in all, he does a fine job of this, and by the end of the book when we come to a translation of an essay by Nishida, the latter's prose--usually all but opaque to me--actually started to make sense in spots. Still, the book as a whole is tough reading, and a strong background in the academic field of philosophy is probably necessary to really get what's going on. (In fact, Wargo displays many of the characteristic biases and nervous ticks of philosophy majors in his writing, which gets just a bit annoying in spots).

On the minus side, the book is badly infested with typographical errors, about one every other page. The editing here is just utterly shoddy, and given the care philosophers usually take with precise language, almost blasphemously ironic. Worst of the worst can be found in chapter 1: Inoue Tetsujiro is most of the time referred to by his first name here (to distinguish him from Inoue Enryo), but the name is incorrectly given as Tetsuro countless times. Inexcusably sloppy.