Nishitani Keiji on Nihilism and Absolute Nothingness

Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) entered Kyoto Imperial University's philosophy department in 1920, studied directly under Nishida, and graduated in 1924 with a thesis on Schelling and Bergson; he later succeeded to Nishida's former chair at Kyoto in 1943 and remained the most philosophically productive member of the second generation of the Kyoto School. Between 1937 and 1939, on a Ministry of Education scholarship, Nishitani studied in Freiburg under Martin Heidegger, attending his seminars and absorbing existentialist and phenomenological method directly, an experience that shaped the vocabulary of anxiety, finitude, and nihilism running through his mature work.