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 in terms 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.
