  This article presents Nishida’s work in a roughly chronological order. We may understand his philosophical project overall as an attempt to restore to experience and consciousness the rigor, necessity and universality accorded to logic. This project developed in a direction quite opposite to that of psychologism, which would reduce logic to the contingencies of the individual mind or brain. It also differed from efforts to establish pure logic as a self-explanatory realm, in that Nishida insisted on the starting point of experience, a priority he shared with Husserl’s phenomenology and William James’ radical empiricism. We might characterize his philosophy in general as a phenomenological metaphysics for its universalizing of first-person experience. It can also be considered an ontology of logical forms for its investigations of their experiential basis, with one qualification: although Nishida proposed a unitary source of such forms, that source is neither exclusionary nor positive; in other words the source itself cannot be described monistically as a single, more basic form or thing.  Nishida eventually called this source “mu” (nothingness), a notion he found particularly prominent in Asian traditions.  His interests led him to develop a philosophy of culture, and his status as Japan’s premier philosopher led government officials to call upon him for justification of Japanese expansionism in the late 1930s and early 40s. His last work recapitulated his non-dualistic account of world and self, but also reinterpreted the meaning of death.