Tomonaga Sanjūrō
Tomonaga Sanjūrō was a Japanese academic and esteemed professor emeritus of medieval, renaissance, early modern, and Kantian philosophy at the University of Kyoto during the early 20th century. He was one of the leading thinkers of the Kyoto School.
His son, Shinichirō Tomonaga, is also renowned for receiving the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of quantum electrodynamics.Life
Tomonaga was born in Nagasaki Prefecture the second son of Tomonaga Jinjirō, a samurai of the Ōmura Domain, in 1871. After graduating from Nagasaki Ōmura Junior High School and then First Higher School, he entered the Tokyo Imperial University. After graduating, he became the assistant professor of philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University in 1907 and then full professor in 1913. He mainly lectured on Western philosophy and history of philosophy, and along with Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, constituted the important intellectual Kyoto School movement of modern Japan.
Tomonaga was well known to be an unprolific writer but left a prestigious body of work and was mentor to many renowned Japanese philosophers, including Amano Teiyū, Obara Kuniyoshi, Yamauchi Tokuryū and Kosaka Masaaki. He retired from Kyoto Imperial University in 1931 and then became full professor at Ōtani University.Works
- An Introduction to Philosophy.
- A Dictionary of Philosophy.
- Philosophy and Life.
- Philosophy of Person and Philosophy of Beyond Person.
- The History of Self-consciousness in relation to the Self of Modernity: New Idealism and Its Context.
- Kant's Theory of Peace.
- Decartes.
- Meditations of Descartes
- A Short Work for the History of Philosophy: Rousseau, Kant, and Lotze.
- "Philosophy From Renaissance to Kant" in Vol. 1 of the History of Western Philosophy.
;Collected essays
- Tomonaga Sanjūrō, The Collected Essays of Prof. Tomonoga in Honor of His 60th Birthday, eds. Amano Tenyū.
