Cassirer and Nishida: Mathematical Crosscurrents in Their Philosophical Paths

“Kyoto in Davos” is a perceptive thought-experiment which encourages reviewing Nishida’s philosophy against the background of the notorious Davos disputation between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in 1929. Rather than imagining Nishida as a possible mediator between Cassirer and Heidegger, I suggest considering Nishida’s mathematical way of thinking in relation to that of Cassirer. In his «A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger», Michael Friedman traces to the Davos meeting the origin of the intellectual divergence between the analytic and continental traditions which has characterized the development of Western philosophy afterwards. Nevertheless, he appreciates Cassirer's work as "a heroic attempt to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the scientifically oriented approach to philosophy championed by Carnap and the decisive attempt to move philosophy in a quite contrary direction represented by Heidegger." In tune with Friedman's reading of Cassirer, my purpose in the following is to shed light on some "Wahlverwandtschaften" between Cassirer’s catholic approach to the “problem of knowledge” and Nishida’s original attempt to work out a self-mirroring model of “the individual and the cosmos” through a genuine confrontation with European philosophy. Those affinities find common ground in a shared mathematical sensibility.