Born in Tokyo on February 3, 1885, he studied at the Imperial University of Tokyo, first mathematics, and then philosophy and literature. After completing his studies, he worked as a lecturer at the Imperial University of Tohoku in Sendai while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of mathematics, which he submitted to the Imperial University of Kyoto in 1918. At the invitation of Nishida—with whom he shared not only an interest in scientific thought but also common problems and concepts—he began working at Kyoto University in 1919. From 1922 to 1924, he went to study in Germany, first in Berlin under Riehl and then in Freiburg with Husserl. It was in Freiburg that he met Heidegger and Oskar Becker. After taking over Nishida’s chair in 1928, he broke with his mentor in 1930, proposing his own original dialectical interpretation of the concept of absolute nothingness and, beginning in 1934, developing the so-called “Logic of the Species” in dialogue with the philosophies of Hegel and Marx. Caught up in the events of World War II, Tanabe retired in 1945 and withdrew to Kitakaruizawa, where he devoted himself to developing his thought, which took the form of a philosophy as metanoetics. The theme of religion—in particular Christianity and Buddhism—occupied him until his final days. He died in Kitakaruizawa on April 29, 1962.

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