Having been born in the third year of the Meiji Era, Nishida was presented with a newly unique opportunity to contemplate eastern philosophical issues in the fresh light that western philosophy shone on them. Nishida's original and creative philosophy, incorporating ideas of both Zen and western philosophy, was aimed at bringing the East and West closer. Throughout his lifetime, Nishida published a number of books and essays including "An Inquiry into the Good" and "The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview." Taken as a whole, Nishida’s life work was the foundation for the Kyoto School of Philosophy and the inspiration for the original thinking of his disciples. The most famous concept in Nishida's philosophy is the logic of basho (Japanese: ??; usually translated as "place" or "topos"), a non-dualistic concrete logic, meant to overcome the inadequacy of the subject-object distinction essential to the subject logic of Aristotle and the predicate logic of Kant, through the affirmation of what he calls the "absolutely contradictory self-identity", a dynamic tension of opposites that, unlike the dialectical logic of Hegel, does not resolve in a synthesis, but rather defines its proper subject by maintaining the tension between affirmation and negation as opposite poles or perspectives.

According to Masao Abe, "During World War II right wing thinkers attacked him as antinationalistic for his appreciation of Western philosophy and logic. But after the war left wing thinkers criticized his philosophy as nationalistic because of his emphasis on the traditional notion of nothingness. Nishida was, however, neither antinationalistic nor nationalistic. He recognized a kind of universality in Western philosophy and logic but did not accept that it was the only universality."Regardless of Nishida´s role during the military regime, he remains as one of the most significant Japanese philosophers of the Twentieth Century.

Partial bibliography

• An Inquiry Into the Good (ISBN 0-300-05233-2), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives
• Last Writings (ISBN 0-8248-1554-8), Nishida Kitaro, Translated by David Dilworth

Secondary resources

• Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-8248-2459-8), Michiko Yusa
• Philosophers of Nothingness (ISBN 0-8248-2481-4), James Heisig
• Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-520-07364-9), Nishitani Keiji
• The Logic Of Nothingness: A Study Of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 0-8248-2969-7), Robert J. J. Wargo
• The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro (ISBN 1-55778-761-1), Robert E. Carter