Histories of Philosophy and Thought in the Japanese Language

This bibliographical guide gives a comprehensive overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language through an extensive and thematically organized collection of relevant literature. Comprising over one thousand entries, the bibliography shows not only how extensive and complex the Japanese tradition of philosophical and intellectual historiography is, but also how it might be structured and analyzed to make it accessible to a comparative and intercultural approach to the historiography of philosophy worldwide. The literature is categorized and organized according to thematic focus areas such as geographical regions and continents, nations and peoples, religious traditions and philosophical teachings such as Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, or Confucianism, as well as disciplines such as ethics, aesthetics, or political thought. The bibliography is accompanied by an introduction outlining the research method as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyzing the material, followed by a chronological overview of the historiography of philosophy and thought in the Japanese language as well as of the Japanese tradition of writing "world histories of philosophy". As a first step towards a "history of the historiography of philosophy" in non-European languages, the guide provides useful tools for interculturally oriented scholarship aimed at a non-Eurocentric and diversified historiography of philosophy in a global perspective.