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I’d like to add on this: 1. Anyone who read a bit of the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat, that…
For me, the worry about anachronism still basically holds. But (as Hans Joas[1] might put it, and as Evan Thompson…
I’ve read part 1 of this series (the one in which the axial age is covered); I would certainly not…
In general terms, Habermas takes the Axial Age to have introduced new theoretical attitudes that include second-order thinking (thinking about…
You have Egyptian texts describing the equality of men as early as 2000BC. Henri Frankfurt has some tomb writings describing…
I’m neither a scholar of the period nor a Habermasian. Yet it bears emphasis that Habermas (and the Frankfurt School,…
The idea of the “Axial Age” was introduced by Karl Jaspers. It’s been used by some anthropologists, intellectual historians, and…
(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.
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