James Heisig

James Wallace Heisig (born 1944) is a philosopher who specializes in the field of philosophy of religion. He has published a number of books ranging from the notion of God in analytical psychology, the Kyoto School of Philosophy (including the works of Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime) to contemporary inter-religious dialogue. His books, translations, and edited collections, which have appeared in 12 languages, currently number 78 volumes.

He was a lecturer at the Divine Word College (Epworth, Iowa) even when he was a BA student and graduated with a BA degree in philosophy from the same college in 1966. Then he received his master's degree in philosophy from Loyola University Chicago and another master's degree in Notre Dame University at the same time in 1969. After receiving a PhD in Religious studies at Cambridge University in 1973, he went back to Divine Word College to teach philosophy and religion as a lecturer. Between 1974 and 1978, he was a visiting lecturer at Catholic Theological Union, Instituto Superior de Studios Eclesiásticos (Mexico City) and Old Dominion University (Norfolk, Virginia). In September 1978, he moved to Japan (first in Nagano and then to the city of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture) and thereby became a Permanent Research Fellow at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture at the Nanzan University. He served as the director of the Nanzan Institute between 1991–2001 in following the footsteps of the former director and Belgian philosopher, Jan Van Bragt. In 2015, Heisig received an honorary doctoral degree from the Tallinn University in Estonia.

Heisig still resides in Nagoya, where he continues to conduct research at the "Japanese Philosophy Reference Materials" at the Nanzan Institute, publishes a number of books and travels around the world to give his lectures on philosophy and religion. He is also famed among students of the Japanese and Chinese languages for his Remembering the Kanji and Remembering the Hanzi series.