John Makeham 
Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy 

John Makeham Early in 2007, HUANG Yong approached me to see if I might be interested in editing a volume on Neo-Confucian philosophy as part of the new Springer book series, ‘‘Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy. ’’ Unhampered by any realistic sense of what such a task might entail, somewhat naively I accepted the invitation and began to approach potential contributors to solicit advice on how the volume might be structured. The question of whether the volume should be arranged on the basis of philosophical themes and topics or organized on the basis of the philosophical thought of individual thinkers proved to be the first challenge. Intellectually the first option seemed to be the most rewarding (and difficult); it was also the one on which there was little consensus among contributors to the project about just how a thematic volume might be structured. The eventual decision to structure the volume on the basis of the philosophical thought of individual thinkers, in addition to being organizationally more straightforward, had the benefit of enabling authors to address issues of historical context more directly, and also to explore more systematically how individual thinkers had used particular combinations of concepts to frame their philosophical views. The choice of which thinkers to include was made through a combination of inviting the participation of contributors with acknowledged expertise on particular thinkers and also allowing contributors to choose the thinkers and ideas they wanted to introduce.

Table of Content

Zhou Dunyi’s Philosophy of the Supreme Polarity.- Shao Yong’s Numerological-Cosmological System.- Zhang Zai’s Theory of Vital Energy.- Cheng Yi’s Moral Philosophy.- The Thesis of Single-Rootedness in the Thought of Cheng Hao.- Hu Hong’s Philosophy.- Zhang Shi’s Philosophical Perspectives on Human Nature, Heart/Mind, Humaneness, and the Supreme Ultimate.- Zhu Xi’s Cosmology.- Zhu Xi’s Moral Psychology.- Lü Zuqian’s Political Philosophy.- Neo-Confucian Philosophy and Genre: The Philosophical Writings of Chen Chun and Zhen Dexiu.- Lu Xiangshan’s Ethical Philosophy.- “The Four Masters of Mingzhou”: Transmission and Innovation among the Disciples of Lu Jiuyuan (Xiangshan).- Metaphysics and the Basis of Morality in the Philosophy of Wang Yangming.- Wang Yangming as a Virtue Ethicist.- Liu Zongzhou on Self-Cultivation.- Wang Fuzhi’s Philosophy of Principle (Li) Inherent in Qi.- Li Guangdi and the Philosophy of Human Nature.- Dai Zhen on Human Nature and Moral Cultivation.

About the author

John Makeham teaches in the China Centre at The Australian National University. He is a specialist in Chinese intellectual history with a particular interest in Confucian philosophy. In 2005 he was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for his monograph, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects. He is a past President of the Australasian Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and is editor of the new monograph series, Modern Chinese Philosophy (Brill). Current research undertakings including editing a volume on the formation of Chinese philosophy as an academic discipline and also preparing an annotated translation of Xiong Shili’s Xin Weishi lun (New Treatise on Cognition-only), a seminal text in twentieth-century Chinese philosophy.