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(MOVING TO FRONT FROM LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 2/20/26)
Professor Ishiguro, who was emerita at Kyoto University in her native Japan, also taught for many years at University College London and Columbia University, before returning to Japan. She was best-known for her work on Leibniz, and also wrote on Wittgenstein. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Ishiguro or for those would like to comment on the significance of her work.
(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)
On the back jacket of the 1992 Yale University Press edition of Nishida Kitarō’s An Inquiry into the Good (trans. Abe Masao and Christopher Ives) there is a succinct endorsement from Hidé Ishiguro (Ishiguro Hidé), attributed to the Times Literary Supplement: “A welcome new translation of a work by probably the most original and influential of modern Japanese philosophers.” That line will be familiar to anyone who tried to introduce Nishida in Anglophone, largely analytic settings in the 1990s. It is hard to say how many readers in those circles would have opened the book at all without that kind of signal from a philosopher whose work on Leibniz and Wittgenstein commanded such wide respect.
Hidé Ishiguro was a beautiful person and a beautiful teacher. I took a class from her at Barnard (I was a Columbia College undergraduate) in what was my beginning semester as a philosophy student. She warmly praised the first essay I handed in (on Hintikka’s analysis of the cogito as a performative) and, as I recall, found everything else I wrote that semester disappointing in comparison. But her positive response to that first essay was thrilling to me and I felt invited to pursue philosophy seriously. I ended up taking other classes with her. She was an unusual teacher. She was utterly present in the classroom; she took her students seriously and shared her love for philosophy. Philosophy felt open to me, and to all of us, in her classes, even if she also demonstrated that doing philosophy well was not easy. At her encouraging, I went to Oxford to do the BPhil. When I was there I had the chance to meet her at her home in Holland Park in London. I recall bringing her the catalog from a Rothko exhibition that I had visited earlier the same day; I remember she seemed baffled and somehow skeptical of the pictures and she set the book aside rather demonstratively as if to say, enough of that. (That’s how I interpreted her, at least.) It was on that same visit, if I am remembering this right, that she pointed to the couch I was sitting on and explained that Gareth Evans had been sitting right there, where I was sitting, when he experienced such physical discomfort that he needed to lie down on the floor. She said that this was the first time, or one of the first times, he experienced symptoms of the illness that would soon lead to his death. Years later I visited Hidé in Tokyo, where we had the opportunity to engage each other philosophically. I remember that she took me to see a performance of Kabuki and we both fell asleep. I am grateful to have known Hidé and for everything she did for me and for philosophy. I mourn her passing.
I didn’t know her myself, nor do I work in her fields of philosophical study. But an old colleague once told me she was the most interesting colleague he himself had ever had, and looking her up I came across this lucid discussion of The Tale of Genji and why it matters so much, which was what convinced me to read the book myself – https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n09/hide-ishiguro/access-to-the-shining-prince .
Hidé was on my dissertation committee at Columbia in the mid-80s. As brilliant as she was, she was not intimidating — on the contrary, she was warm, kind, and soft-spoken, and very straightforward, no messing around.
I was a graduate student at Columbia in the late 80s and early 90s and took at least one graduate seminar with Hide and had many discussions with her outside of class. Hide was an unusually accessible, generous, and engaging graduate faculty member, who taught seminars on a wide range of topics, notably one on Emotion, which was very well attended and generated some of the most intense and insightful discussions of my graduate career.
She was also well-known for her, shall we say, creative use of the English language, especially her notorious malapropisms. A famous, possibly apocryphal story, has it that she was once hosting a dinner party at her apartment in Morningside Heights on the occasion of a visit from Richard Wollheim, who was a friend and former colleague of hers. Excited to show off all her illustrious New York friends, she led him around the room, introducing him to each of the famous philosophers in turn. Then, realizing in characteristically self-deprecating manner that her guest might think she was a superficial social butterfly, she turned to him and said: “Oh dear, I hope you don’t think I’m a name-sucker.” Without skipping a beat, Wollheim replied: “Not at all — as long as you don’t think I’m a cock-dropper.”
She was also very interested in talking to me about Palestine-Israel and was genuinely interested in hearing my views as a Palestinian who was involved in student politics at the time. I remember that at the end of a conversation about the prospects for a two-state solution, I expressed skepticism that the Israeli political establishment was genuinely willing to withdraw from the occupied territories. In exasperation, she exclaimed: “They have such a demagogic problem!” To this day, I don’t know if she was referring to the fact that the number of Palestinian Arabs was approaching that of Israeli Jews living under Israeli rule, or to the extremist positions of Israeli politicians, or possibly both.
🌹女風土記🌹 兵庫県神戸市 教義や神話に光を投げた分析哲学者 石黒ひで(英子) 女史 / Analytic Philosopher Illuminating Dogma, Ms. Hide(ko) Ishiguro
https://note.com/happywomen_jp/n/n8eb99ad9eab4?sub_rt=share_sb
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