 When Japanese philosophers emphasize engaged over detached knowing, their treatment of standard philosophical themes assumes distinctive nuances. One example will illustrate. Because of its roots in praxis, Japanese philosophy approaches mind-body issues differently from how they have typically been addressed in the West, especially the modern West. As the postwar philosopher, Yuasa Yasuo (1925–2005) analyzes in detail (Yuasa 1987), the preference in modern Western philosophy has been to think about the mind and body as discrete (that is, as external to each other) and the issue then becomes what connects the two. If no third external connection can be found, the only obvious alternative is to eliminate the dualism by reducing one of the polarities to the other, for example, by making the mind an epiphenomenon of the body. Yuasa found such formulations of the mind-body problem alien to the Japanese philosophical tradition, both ancient and modern.