Background
Tosaka, Jun was born on September 27, 1900 in Tokyo.
Tosaka, Jun was born on September 27, 1900 in Tokyo.
Dai-ichi High School, Tokyo, and Kyoto University (graduated 1924).
Professor of Philosophy, Otani College, 1929-1931. Lecturer in Philosophy, Hosei University, 1931-1935. Frequently in trouble for his opposition to militarism, and died in prison.
Tosaka's starting-point as a thinker was the academism of the Kyoto School of philosophy, represented by Nishida Kitaro and Tana be Hajime, but the process of his philosophical development was destined to cause him to part from this school. In his earlier essays, through thinking deeply about space, he departed from Kantian and neo-Kantian views and came to adopt a materialist position. In 1927 he published an essay. On Space as Character, with the subtitle The Outline of Theory. The key concept in this work is that of character. It means that this standpoint is based not on intuition or understanding but on the commonsense things in our daily life. Thus he writes: When people live ordinarily, in conformity to convention, not to scientific thinking, they discover Nature as what they can just depend on. For people the concept of Nature will be nothing else than their dependence on reality. This is the motive by which Nature as common sense is brought into existence: thus this is the first step in the character of this concept. The concept of Matter will be understood frequently and also justly as such a character of Nature, that is, materialistically. Further, he pays attention to the way in which its method affects the character of science. This he discussed in Analysis of the Concept of Space (1928), as follows: The relation of the mutual implication between Method and Object is not a partial condition like a thing that is subsumed and understood by means of one established category, if possible; rather it must belong to the radical relation that unifically conditions the understanding of all categories. Hence now, independently of the concept of interaction or Gemeinschaft, it is necessary for this mutual implication to be analyzed. In order to complete this theory of science based on his materialism, Tosaka needed to make the structure of mutual implication as one process of cognition clear, replacing the question ‘Does the category of space belong to either actual existence or to intuition?’ with the question concerning mutual implication between method and object; but he died before this work could be completed. Sources: Nakaoka Tetsuro (1976) Tosaka Jun shu, Tokyo: Cikuma-shobo.