Felipe Ferrari
Felipe Ferrari Gonçalves holds a degree in Philosophy from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and has resided in Japan since 2011. There, he earned his Master’s and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nagoya, defending his thesis The Topology of “True Nothingness”: A Genealogy of Kitarō Nishida’s Concept of ‘Basho’.
Currently, he serves as Adjunct Professor at the University of Nagoya and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Policy Management, Yokkaichi University, where he directs the Laboratory of Public Philosophy and teaches courses in Philosophy, Japanese Thought, History of Social Thought, Introduction to Psychology, and Portuguese Language
His academic leadership roles include, Executive Secretary of the Nishida Philosophy Association, Editorial Board Member of Tetsugaku, the international journal of the Philosophical Association of Japan and Co-organizer of the Permanent Seminar on Nishida Philosophy (collaboration with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture)
A specialist in intercultural philosophy and Japanese philosophy—particularly the Kyōto School—he has published widely on these subjects. He is also a translator of works by Nishida Kitarō and Tosaka Jun into Portuguese.
For an illogical logic: The logic of contradiction as a discursive form of Nishida Kitarō's thought
In his final manuscript, entitled About My Logic, written in the last week of his life, Nishida Kitarō lamented the fact that his logic seemed to not have been understood by his contemporary critics. According to Nishida, when analyzing his work, Japanese academic circles, overly attached to Aristotelian predicate logic, were unable to admit a “logic of contradictory identity” as a proper logic, claiming that it was nothing more than a “religious experience”.
This presentation is proposed as a hermeneutic retrospective of the characterization of non-binary logic that was dealt with by the Japanese philosopher in the last two decades of his intellectual production; as well as an analysis of the bibliography produced on the subject since then, with the aim of clarifying whether now, 80 years after Nishida's death, his logic has finally been understood in the terms originally proposed by him.
©2025 by The XI International Conference of Eastern Philosophy at Unicamp
Brazil-China Study Group