Israel, “The Trouble with Wang Yangming”

George Israel published a lovely on-line essay titled “The Trouble with Wang Yangming” a little over a year ago, but it remains highly relevant. If you are interested in all the enthusiasm about Wang in the contemporary PRC, or about Wang more generally, this is essential reading.

4 thoughts on “Israel, “The Trouble with Wang Yangming”

  1. Stephen, thanks so much, I mean, that really does mean a lot to me, even if I now have some reservations about aspects of the essay, in retrospect. That said, more important is a host of new books and articles, including your lovely book Growing Moral, Justin Tiwald’s article “Coming to Term with Wang Yangming’s Strong Ethical Nativism,” David Bartosch’s “Plotinus and Wang Yangming on the Structures of Consciousness and Reality,” Zheng Wang’s study of Wang and Giordano Bruno, Bao Xueming on Wang and Bernard Lonergan, and of course Harvey Lederman’s articles, among others. Oh, and Yao Huiqiao (who was at the conference) will defend her dissertation tomorrow, “Popularizing the Sage: Wang Yangming and Vernacular Confucian Hagiographies in Late Imperial China.”

  2. Regarding long-standing Chinese interest in Japanese appropriations of Wang Yangming thought for its “traditionalized modernity” during the Meiji Era, I heard that a Chinese translation of Inoue Tetsujiro’s 1900 book 日本陽明學派之哲學 (The Philosophy of the Wang Yangming School) was recently published. Does anyone know who the publisher is, and what the reception to it has been?

    • I didn’t know that, very interesting. I’m a bit behind on what is going on nowadays, even over the last couple of years. Oh, just some shameless self-promotion, I discuss this history about which you are so familiar just a bit in Studying Wang Yangming: History of a Sinological Field, which is freely available at philpapers, https://philpapers.org/rec/ISRSWY-4

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