Readings in Korean Confucian philosophy

Godzilla, in yesterday's entry, brought our attention to east Asia and we will stay there today. Hackett Publishing has come out with a book with the title I've just given this blog post. Again (as with the Godzilla movie), I haven't partaken myself, and I'm working simply from a review.

It turns out that the Korean peninsula has produced a distinctive school of neo-Confucianism, and eight individuals within that line are featured in this anthology.

Jeong Dojeon and Gwon Geun kicked off this party in the late 14th and 15th centuries.

Seo Gyeongdeok and Yi Eonjeok seem to have been more original figures than their precursors. They have the air not of people bringing something Chinese into a new place, but of people making something new out of it.

A third group in the 16th century broadened the issues that such philosophizing covered, focusing among other things on the role of emotions in causing behavior.

There was a fourth and final group (final at least in the coverage of this book) daringly pressing the boundaries of Confucianism. This group includes Jeong Jedu (1649-1736) and Jeong Yakyong (1762-1836).

One theme of Jeong Jedu's writings seems to correspond to nominalism in the western world: the issue is whether li (translated here as "pattern") can be found in the world outside the human heart and mind. Jeong says, in nominalistic fashion, that li operates only within the heart-mind, although it tells us how to interact with the external world.

I am struck by Jeong's nominalism about patterns, though, and by his birth and death dates, 1649-1736. This puts him chronologically right between Thomas Hobbes and George Berkeley, both philosophers active in the British isles and strongly of the view that pattern operates only within a mind, though neither would have put it quite that way.

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