The purpose of this paper is to compare the differences in academic methodology and attitude toward war between Nambara Shigeru (1889-1974), who formulated a political philosophy based on philosophy of value, criticized the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and after the war became the president of the University of Tokyo, and Otaka Tomoo (1899-1956), who formulated a legal philosophy based on phenomenology, defended the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and after the war participated in the UNESCO General Assembly. The conclusion of this paper is as follows. From the formal viewpoint of methodology, their difference arose from the difference between philosophy of value, which interprets reality from what should be, and phenomenology, which constructs what should be from reality. From the content perspective of the knowledge on which they relied, their difference arose from the difference between the knowledge of national self-determination after World War I and the knowledge of the Austrian imperial order before World War I. They interpreted Fichte, but while Nambara’s Fichte was an advocate of the nation-state and a critic of an imperial order that included alien peoples, Otaka’s Fichte was distorted to conform to that imperial order.
