ABSTRACT
Is philosophy the final home of the European spirit? After all the batterings of the old century, Europe even now retains its philosophic centrality. Thus, France may have lost the bulk of her empire, but in the kingdom of the mind, much of the world remains a suburb of Paris. This centrality has prompted Naoki Sakai to observe that Japanese writers on the intellectual history of their country are haunted by a presence that is almost always an absence: the Western reader.3 For the ambitious Japanese thinker, it is the European reader who has, by tradition, embodied the highest standards.
