Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning

These essays explore the continuities and discontinuities between the Neo-Confucian thought of Ming China and early Tokugawa Japan and the practical learning of the 17th and 18th centuries, underlining the need for a deeper examination of the complex relationship between traditional and modern thoughts and values.

Wm. Theodore de Bary (1919-2017) was John Mitchell Mason Professor Emeritus and provost emeritus of Columbia University. His many books include Waiting for the Dawn, Message of the Mind, and Learning for One’s Self, as well as Sources of Japanese Tradition and Sources of Korean Tradition, all published by Columbia University Press.

Irene Bloom (1939-2010) was Wm. Theodore and Fanny de Bary and Class of 1941 Associate Professor of Asian Humanities at Columbia University and Anne Whitney Olin Professor Emerita in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. She edited and translated Knowledge Painfully Acquired: The K’un-chih chi of Lo Ch’in-shun and coedited, with Joshua A. Fogel, Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought.