Recovering the Nature: Ma Yifu's New Confucian Thought and Its Intellectual Background - (Modern Chinese Philosophy) by Yu Yihong (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book is the first English-language monograph on the Confucian thinker Ma Yifu. Through comparative research, contextual analysis, and intensive textual reading, it offers an in-depth and comprehensive account of the modern transformation of the Confucian tradition in modern China.

Book Synopsis

Numerous great Chinese thinkers attempted to realise a transcendent ontological foundation in order to live an ideal life informed by the Confucian way. To this end, they sought answers to how the unconditioned foundation could be realised through cognitive awareness that is circumscribed by the conditioned nature of human existence. Inspired by earlier Confucian and Buddhist thinkers, Ma Yifu attempted to offer more refined responses to these two questions. In addressing them, Ma and other modern thinkers also sought to justify the contemporary significance of the Confucian way in a modernising China. This book presents a rich landscape of these ideas. Many primary materials translated and analysed here are introduced in English for the first time.

About the Author

YU Yihong, Ph.D. (2021), La Trobe University, is an associate professorial research fellow at Hainan University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of late imperial and modern China. He has published books and articles on Confucianism and China's modernisation.