Tetsugaku Companion to Ogyu Sorai

This book contains short analyses (kaidai) of Ogyu Sorai’s (1666-1728) most important works, as well as a biography and a number of essays. The essays explore various aspects of his teachings, of the origins of his thought, and of the reception of his ideas in Japan, China, and Korea before and after "modernization" struck in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Ogyu Sorai has come to be considered the pivotal thinker in the intellectual history of Early Modern Japan. More research has been done on Sorai than on any other Confucian thinker of this period. This book disentangles the modern reception from the way in which Sorai's ideas were understood and evaluated in Japan and China in the century following his death. The joint conclusion of the research of a number of the foremost specialists in Japan, Taiwan, and the West is that Sorai was and remains an original, innovative, and important thinker, but that his position within East-Asian thought should be redefined interms of the East-Asian tradition to which he belonged, and not in the paradigms of European History of Philosophy or Intellectual History. The book represents up-to-date scholarship and allows both the young scholar to acquaint himself with Sorai, and the intellectual historian to compare Sorai with other thinkers of other times and of other philosophical traditions.

Chapter 1. Introduction (W.J. Boot).- Part 1. Kaidai / Introductions.- Chapter 2. Yakubun sentei ???? (Aihara Kosaku).- Chapter 3. Sorai’s Military Studies (Kojima Yasunori).- Chapter 4. Ken’en zuihitsu ???? (“Jottings from the Miscanthus Garden”), Ken’en jippitsu ???? (“Ten Writings from the Miscanthus Garden”) (Takayama Daiki).- Chapter 5. Gakusoku ?? (“School Rules”), Sorai-sensei tomonsho ??????? (“Master Sorai’s Responsals”) (Takayama Daiki).- Chapter 6. Bendo and Benmei (John A. Tucker).- Chapter 7. Rongo-cho ??? (“Proof of the Analects”), Daigaku-kai ??? (“Explanation of the Great Learning”), Chuyo-kai ??? (“Explanation of the Mean”) (Sawai Keiichi).- Chapter 8. Seidan ?? (“Discourse on Government”) and Taiheisaku ??? (“A Plan for the Great Peace”) (Tajiri Yuichiro).- Chapter 9. Ogyu Sorai’s Collected Works (Sorai-shu) (Sawai Keiichi).- Part 2. Essays.- Chapter 10. An “Intellectual-Historical” Biography of Ogyu Sorai (Sawai Keiichi).- Chapter 11. Sorai’s Theory of Learning (Kojima Yasunori).- Chapter 12. Gods, Spirits and Heaven in Ogyu Sorai’s Political Theory (Olivier Ansart).- Chapter 13. Ogyu Sorai and the Forty-Seven Ronin (John A. Tucker).- Chapter 14. “The Reception of Sorai’s Thought in the Second Half of the Edo Period” (W. J. Boot). Chapter 15. “Sorai’s Teachings in East-Asia: The Formation of His Methodology of Studying the Classics and the Reception of His Works on the Classics” (Lan Hung Yueh).- Chapter 16. The Study of Sorai’s Thought in Modern Japan (Takayama Daiki).

W.J. Boot studied Japanese, Korean and Chinese Studies at Leiden University and Kyoto University. He specialised in the history of Japanese Thought. He took his PhD in 1983 (The Adoption and Adaptation of Neo-Confucianism in Japan: The Role of Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan), and was appointed professor of Japanese and Korean studies at Leiden University in 1985 (until 2012). He published numerous papers on the intellectual history of Early Modern Japan and on Japanese poetics.

Daiki Takayama studied at the University of Tokyo (College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) and took his PhD at the same university (School of Humanities and Sociology) in  2011. After being employed as postdoctoral researcher for several years, he was recently appointed at Komazawa University as lecturer of Chinese literature (Kanbun) in Early Modern Japan and the History of Thought of this same period. He recently published Kinsei Nihon no 'reigaku' to 'shuji': Ogyu Sorai igo no'setsujin' no seido koso  (2016).