 Among Western scholars, John Maraldo has most thoroughly probed the question of Kyoto School identity and membership. He isolates six criteria that scholars have used to include and exclude thinkers from the Kyoto School: (1) connection with Nishida; (2) association with Kyoto University; (3) stance toward Japanese and Eastern intellectual traditions; (4) stance toward the interrelated matters of Marxism, the nation state, and the Pacific War; (5) stance toward Buddhism and toward religion in general; and (6) stance toward the notion of absolute nothingness. Maraldo shows how each one of these criteria have been used in various ways, consciously or unconsciously, since the 1930s to either promote the philosophical significance or disparage the political ideology of the Kyoto School (Maraldo 2005, 33–38).