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: Ogyū Sorai: Confucian Conservative Reformer: From Journey to Kai to Discourse on Government; Olof G. Lidin.- Chapter 7: The Philosophical Moment Between Ogyū Sorai and Kaiho Seiryō: 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: Andō Shōeki’s Back-to-Nature Critique of the Saints, Confucian and Otherwise; Jacques Joly.- Chapter 11: Moral and Philosophical Idealism in Late-Edo Confucian Thought: Ōshio Chūsai 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).