Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy focuses on two philosophers, one from the Western tradition, William Desmond, and one from the Japanese tradition of the Kyoto school of philosophy, Tanabe Hajime. It is thus both a significant contribution to the dialogue of Western and Eastern thinking, or more specifically to the dialogue of Desmond's metaxological and Tanabe's metanoetic thinking, and the philosophical area of comparative philosophy in general. In short metaxological thinking focuses on mediation, on what is ‘between’ interrelated philosophical ideas (5), while Tanabe himself characterizes metanoetic thinking, as the denial of philosophy, as ‘a philosophy that is not philosophy’, thus realizing the limits of reason (41). The overall goal in Morisato's thesis is to explore the relationship between faith and reason by studying and applying the philosophies of Desmond and Tanabe. Morisato believes that this relationship is central to the philosophy of religion.

In the introduction, Morisato explains his motivation for his choice of philosophers in this study. First, he argues that there is a closeness and even a similarity in Desmond's metaxological and Tanabe's metanoetic approach to philosophy. Second, both Desmond and Tanabe explicitly refer to and discuss Kant and Hegel, who, according to Morisato, have both failed in successfully addressing the problems of the relationship between faith and reason. For readers trained in the Western philosophical tradition, the choice of Tanabe is also motivated by the fact that despite the influence and importance of Tanabe in the Kyoto school, he is far less well known than, for example, Nishida Kitaro or Nishitani Keiji.

Subsequently, the book is divided into four major parts with two chapters each and a final concluding chapter. The first part focuses on methodological aspects in Desmond's and Tanabe's work; the second part introduces the fundamental problem of the philosophy of religion. In parts 3 and 4, Desmond's and Tanabe's metaxological and metanoetic approaches, respectively, are presented and discussed in relation to Morisato's central goal.

In the first chapter, Morisato introduces Desmond's distinction between univocal, equivocal, dialectic, and metaxological thinking. The last form of thinking is developed explicitly by Desmond in his philosophical writings. Morisato describes the metaxological approach as a way of demonstrating ‘the full significance of the univocal, the equivocal, and the dialectical sense of being by showing both their indispensable importance and undeniable limitations’ (20–21). After a brief interlude about how Western philosophy often privileges itself (Morisato uses the examples of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Jacques Derrida), and an analysis of the univocal, equivocal, and dialectic from the point of view of the metaxological, Morisato introduces the concept of ‘agapeic mindfulness’, as the ‘metaphysical attentiveness to the openness of the mediation between self and other’ (34). He concludes that metaxological thinking, as suggested by Desmond, is a fruitful approach in comparative philosophy that bridges the gap between the self and the other (36).

Similarly, Morisato discusses the philosophy of Tanabe and its advantages in comparative philosophy in chapter 2. Initially, he provides a short historical background of the Japanese history of philosophy, emphasizing the significance of the Kyoto school for comparative philosophy (37–38). Morisato accounts for Tanabe's struggle with Kant's and Hegel's ideas, which leads Tanabe to the development of what he denotes as ‘metanoetic intermediation’ and ‘absolute dialectic’. It is subsequently argued that absolute dialectic overcomes the limitations of Hegelian dialectic in four ways (49–52). Importantly, the ultimate in Tanabe's understanding of absolute dialectic is closely related to ‘nothingness’ in Mahayana Buddhism (50). Morisato explicates how Tanabe's ‘metanoetic conversion’ makes a movement from the immanent to the transcendent. In its tolerance and affirmation of the other, Morisato concludes that both Desmond's and Tanabe's metaxological or metanoetic approaches are similar: both suggest a tolerance of otherness, both suggest approaches which can be regarded as further developments of Hegelian dialectic, thus overcoming its limitations. Morisato finally concludes that the method in Tanabe's philosophy can serve as a fruitful starting point in comparative philosophy.

In the following two chapters, Morisato argues that both Kant and Hegel fail in not reducing religion to philosophy. In his reasoning Morisato applies Søren Kierkegaard's five concerns with Kant's and Hegel's approach to religion: (1) the reduction of divine transcendence to human immanence, (2) the rejection of a robust sense of divine transcendence, (3) the ‘extirpation of the single individual in its relation to the rational universal as the immanent absolute’ (62), (4) ‘[t]he self-negating self-transcendence of the finite individual to the infinite universal [as] a one-way movement’ (62), and (5) the worth of the individual as only granted in relation to the universal (62). In particular, Morisato believes that Kant's approach essentially results in the primacy of reason and that Hegel, in his dialectical approach, also reduces the divine to the human. Thus Morisato turns to the philosophies of Desmond and Tanabe with the central issue of finding an approach that does not reduce faith to reason or religion to philosophy.

In chapter 5, Morisato elaborates on how Desmond applies his metaxological approach to the relationship between the absolute and the singular (87–91). Morisato identifies four metaxological ways, four kinds of ‘hyperboles of being’, for reaching the absolute from the relative: (1) the idiocy of being, (2) the aesthetics of happening, (3) the erotics of selving, (4) the agapeics of community (90–91). Most importantly, Morisato works out in which way all four hyperboles show how signs of the transcendence can be found in the immanent with the singular remaining singular, and the singular retaining its relativity to the divine absolute (109–111).

In the following chapter, Morisato initially describes three metaxological characterizations of the absolute: ‘(1) intimate overdeterminacy, (2) agapeic transcendence beyond dualism, and (3) radical origination of the finite for the finite’ (114). He also introduces three forms of transcendence in Desmond's metaxology: (T1) externality of beings, (T2) self-transcendence, (T3) the superior beyond the distinction of the exterior and the interior (115). Morisato argues that Kant almost always understands transcendence in the sense of T1, that Hegel conflates transcendence with T2, while Desmond suggests T3 as the proper sense of understanding transcendence (115–116). In the concluding section of the chapter Morisato returns to the five concerns of Kierkegaard mentioned above and argues that Desmond's metaxological approach has the resources to address all five of them: (1) the metaxological divine both reveals its intimacy to human being and becoming in immanence (130), (2) metaxology realizes the necessity of a robust sense of divine transcendence without ending up in dualism (131), (3) the single individual is not subordinated ‘to the rational universal as the immanent absolute’ (131), (4) the movement of ‘the self-negating self-transcendence of the finite individual to the infinite absolute’ (132) is always a two-way communication, and (5) the metaxological approach ‘strives to account for the worth of the singular for the singular’ (133). Thus, so Morisato, metaxology responds to the problems in the interrelation of the ultimate and singular, reaching beyond Kant's and Hegel's approaches, and remaining truly ‘in-between’ (134).

Morisato proceeds with an overview of the philosophy of Tanabe. Morisato states that he will mainly focus on later works by Tanabe, namely the writings Philosophy of Metanoetics, Existence, Love and Practice, and Dialectic of Christianity (137–141). Before elaborating in the eighth chapter on how Tanabe can address the central question in the thesis, Morisato describes a general problem in the relationship between Buddhism and Western philosophy of religion: the idea of no-self, no-soul seems to stand in contrast to the concepts of the eternal substance of the self, the soul, or God. He also points out that he subsequently will focus mainly on Tanabe's ideas within the Pure Land/Shin Buddhist tradition (141–147).

In the penultimate chapter Morisato identifies two layers in Tanabe's philosophy: first, the ‘absolute critique’ which via the ‘absolute dialectic’ in metanoetics ends up in ‘nothingness’ (150–154), and second, ‘the reconfiguration of philosophy through its openness to religion’ (154, my emphasis). Importantly, Morisato claims that the erroneous view that self-thinking thought ‘thinks itself to be the absolute infinite in immanence’ (154) is overcome by Tanabe's metanoetics and its absolute dialectic. He further claims that nothingness as an absolute in Buddhism can be reduced neither to reason nor to being (154). However, Morisato also emphasizes that Tanabe criticizes self-power philosophy or salvation through self-power, as in Zen-Buddhism, mysticism, the philosophy of Heidegger, or Nishida. Metanoetics instead is based on a dynamic interrelation between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of faith, on ‘self-power-qua-other power’ (155–164). In this dynamic, nothingness acts as a middle way, as neither thesis nor antithesis, and thus conceiving of divine transcendence in opposition to the immanence of living beings is avoided (165–168). Finally, Morisato, in parallel to his expositions on Desmond's metaxology, recapitulates the implications of metanoetics in relation to Kierkegaard's five concerns: (1) there is no reduction of divine transcendence to human immanence or dualism in Tanabe's metanoetic philosophy; (2) the notion of nothingness as the divine absolute grants that transcendence is irreducible to human reason, and there is no philosophy of self-power; (3) we should be attentive to the singular status of the finite in relation to the transcendent; (4) the relation of the finite to the absolute is always a two-way communication; and (5) an evil person can be saved because s/he is ordinary and ignorant, that is, the finite finds its openness to the absolute as the foundation of finite existence; thus the value of the singular for the singular is realized (176–180).

In conclusion, Morisato states that he has not come up with his own solution but has explicated the consonance between Tanabe's metanoetics and Desmond's metaxology (181–182). There is, according to Morisato, a striking convergence between Desmond's and Tanabe's philosophy: both conceive the absolute as selfless compassion or agapeic love, neither lets the absolute relative relation ‘fall victim to the notion of heteronomy or dialectical instrumentalization’ (183) as in Kant's and Hegel's philosophy, and both praise the ordinary and the ignorant, to name some examples.

Morisato's work is well structured and follows a clear and internally logical line of reasoning. His thesis is an excellent example of how Western philosophy can be enriched by Eastern philosophy in comparative philosophy and vice versa. Furthermore, Morisato shows how a central problem in Western philosophy of religion – in this case, the relation of faith and reason – can successfully be addressed by two philosophies from entirely different traditions. However, it should be noted that Morisato throughout his book uses several terminological ‘pairs’ more or less as synonyms of faith and reason: for example, the absolute and the singular, philosophy and religion, divine transcendence and human immanence, the infinite and the finite. These are undoubtedly all in a broader sense related to faith and reason; however, a more analytically oriented philosopher may have hoped for precise definitions of faith and reason. The lack of such definitions may seem to be a problem, yet I believe that the use of these conceptual pairs in Morisato's work is a strength since it hints that the methods of metaxology and metanoetics can successfully be applied to all of these pairs, not only to faith and reason.

Be that as it may, the book also serves as an introduction to Desmond's and Tanabe's thinking. In particular, the choice of Tanabe emphasizes his position as one of the most important Japanese philosophers. Although Morisato humbly does not wish to take credit for the highly original approach to the problem of faith and reason presented by him, his work certainly opens up novel and creative ways of approaching this problem. In particular, philosophers of religion and theologians interested in the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent should benefit from reading Morisato's work and studying the metaxology and metanoetics as they are depicted in this book. Also, philosophers of religion who are engaged in problems in the field of religious diversity or who strive for the development of a more global philosophy of religions, as has been suggested in recent years, may benefit from this excellent example of creative comparative philosophy.