Shinichirō Nishi (西晋一郎, Nishi Shinichirō, March 1873 – November 1943) was a Japanese philosopher and ethicist, and a contemporary of Nishida Kitaro. Although a prolific and well-known writer during his lifetime, in the post-war era he fell into posthumous obscurity due to his perceived ideological support for Japanese ultra nationalism. As a student, Nishi belonged to the very first cohort who undertook degrees at the newly established philosophy department at Tokyo University (then known as Tokyo Imperial University), studying western philosophy and European languages under figures such as Raphael von Koeber. Nishi would become well read when it came to Western philosophy, studying Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Herbart, Lotze, Wundt, Windelband, Rickert, Cohen, Bergson, Poincaré, and many others. Together with Nishida Kitaro, Nishi was referred to as one of the "Two Nishi's" (両西, ryō-nishi). In Hiroshima prefecture, where Nishi taught classes on ethics, he was a particularly respected figure. A phrase bandied about was "there is a Nishi in the West" (“西に西あり”, nishi ni, nishi ari). Nishi’s similarities with Nishida do not end here. He also started out in a similar fashion with respects to his own research, focusing on Kant, and, later, attempting to overcome the problems he saw in Kantianism by proceeding on to Bergson. Nishi even shared with Nishida an admiration of the educator Hōjō Tokiyuki (北条時敬). It was Hōjō who had recommended to Nishida that he undertake Zen training, and he actually made the same recommendation to Nishi. In fact, Nishi would earn a degree of public recognition sooner than Nishida, by producing the first Japanese translation of Thomas Hill Green’s book, Prolegomena to Ethics, nearly a decade before the publication of Nishida's An Inquiry Into the Good (善の研究 Zen no Kenkyū.) Nishi also received significant public attention for his contribution in calming down a national furor in 1931, regarding the government’s proposal to restructure the system of higher education and abolish some of the old high schools.
Source: “Nishi Shinichiro”, English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), excerpt