 In contrast to interpreting Nishida’s thought as presenting a system that would preempt problems, one can also read it as a series of attempts to clarify for himself the activity of living a philosophical life. From this perspective, critique appears as a constant feature of Nishida’s personal development. During his lifetime Nishida took his critics seriously and sometimes changed course because of their criticisms. Takahashi Satomi, while still a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, criticized Nishida’s notion of pure experience and spurred him to clarify it in an article published soon after An Inquiry Into the Good. His colleague at Kyoto University, Sōda Kiichiro, criticized the lack of clarity in his initial formulation of basho (place) in 1926 and prompted him to remove Neo-Kantian comparisons. More significantly, in the early 1930s his younger colleague Tanabe Hajime and his former student and Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun criticized Nishida’s focus on consciousness and lack of attention to history and social being; Nishida subsequently developed his notions of the historical world and the historical body. In the last years of his life, he seemed to anticipate his death and recognize human finitude more strongly as an inevitable disruption of any comprehensive systematic account. Two years before his death in 1945, he wrote, “Our life and our existence are not our own. They are the determinations of absolute nothingness…. Philosophy begins with the self set on living truly. It is a way for the self to become self-aware and to live” (NKZ 10, 401,  472).[5]   Nishida’s philosophy continues to live in the profusion of critical engagements indicated in the list of secondary literature below. 