Master of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Social and Political Studies, Southern Federal University

This article adresses the problem of the emergence of theoretical thought in Japan, for which we study the work of Fabian Fucan, as the fi rst theorist and natural philosopher. He adopted a critical approach to Shinto, Confucian and Buddhist doctrines using categories that are quite homologous to the categories of European philosophy and as the author shows, this was not a criticism of Eastern doctrines from a European position, but a theoretical criticism directed also against European doctrines, i.e, criticism from the position of an original theory that was forged in this process. The article shows that a new direction of theoretical thought, which
arose as a result of these efforts, led to the formation of the natural sciences, as well as a rethinking of the world and the place of man in it, who becomes an active subject in relation to nature as an object of cognition.