Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy

The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy will be part of the handbook series Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy, published by Springer. This series is being edited by Professor Huang Yong, Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown University and Editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. This volume includes original essays by scholars from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China, discussing important philosophical writings by Japanese Confucian philosophers. The main focus, historically, will be the early-modern period (1600-1868), when much original Confucian philosophizing occurred, and Confucianism in modern Japan.

The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy makes a significant contribution to the Dao handbook series, and equally to the field of Japanese philosophy. This new volume including original philosophical studies will be a major contribution to the study of Confucianism generally and Japanese philosophy in particular.

Chapter 1: Introduction; Huang Chun-chieh and John Allen Tucker.- Chapter 2: The Meanings of Words and Confucian Political Philosophy: A Study of Matsunaga Sekigo’s Ethics; John Allen Tucker.- Chapter 3: Spirits, Gods, and Heaven in Confucian Thought; W. J. Boot.- Chapter 4: Making Destiny in the Kingdom of Ryuku; Gregory Smits.- Chapter 5: The Somaticization of Learning in Edo Confucianism: The Rejection of Mind-Body Dualism in the Thought of Kaibara Ekken; Tsujimoto Masashi (translated by Barry D. Steben).- Chapter 6: Ogyu Sorai: Confucian Conservative Reformer: From Journey to Kai to Discourse on Government; Olof G. Lidin.- Chapter 7: The Philosophical Moment Between Ogyu Sorai and Kaiho Seiryo: Indigenous Modernity in the Political Theories of Eighteenth-Century Japan? Olivier Ansart.- Chapter 8: Human Nature and the Way in the Philosophy of Dazai Shundai; Peter Flueckiger.- Chapter 9: Kokugaku Critiques of Confucianism and Chinese Culture; Peter Nosco.- Chapter 10: Saints as Sinners: Ando Shoeki’s Back-to-Nature Critique of the Saints, Confucian and Otherwise; Jacques Joly.- Chapter 11: Moral and Philosophical Idealism in Late-Edo Confucian Thought: Oshio Chusai and the Working Out of his “Great Aspiration”; Barry D. Steben.- Chapter 12: Divination and Meiji Politics: A Reading of Takashima Kaemon’s Judgment on the Yijing; Wai-Ming Ng.- Chapter 13: “Orthodoxy” and “Legitimacy” in the Yamazaki Ansai School; Maruyama Masao (translated by Barry D. Steben).- Chapter 14: Zhu Xi and “Zhu Xi-ism:” Toward a Critical Perspective on the Ansai School; Koyasu Nobukuni (translated by Barry D. Steben).

Chun-chieh Huang completed his PhD at the University of Washington in 1980. He is currently the Distinguished Professor of General Education, Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, and Director of the Program of East Asian Confucianisms at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. Huang is also a Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy. He is past president of the Society for Cultural Interaction in East Asia. Huang has been awarded the Wang Fellowship in Chinese Studies (1988), Outstanding Scholar Award (1997-2002), the Hu Shih Chair Professorship (2005-6), the Sun Yatsen Academic Award (2006), the National Taiwan University Award for the best book (2006, 2007, 2010), the National Taiwan University Award for the best article (2008, 2009), and the National Award for Teaching Excellence in General Education by the Taiwan Ministry of Education (2011).

John A. Tucker completed his PhD at Columbia University in 1990. After teaching at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida from 1990-2000, Tucker joined the History Department at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He is a full professor of history, director of the Asian Studies Program, and serves as East Carolina’s University historian. He also directs the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences’ Voyages of Discovery Lecture Series. He has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Kyoto University; a visiting researcher at Nanzan University, Nagoya; and a visiting research scholar at National Taiwan University. Tucker’s specialization is in the history of Japanese and East Asian Confucian thought. He is currently working on a study of the Ako vendetta in Japanese intellectual history and another study of the Confucian thought of Shibusawa Eiichi.