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The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought. By Michael C. Kalton, with Oaksook C. Kim, Sung Bae Park, Young-chan Ro, Tu Wei-ming, and Samuel Yamashita. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xxxv + 217.
The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought is an important contribution to the scholarship and literature on Chinese and Korean NeoConfucianism. The translation is precise and done with great attention to the conceptual implications of the key terminology. The discussion in the introduction gives the reader a strong sense of both the historical background and the philosophical content of the debate. Professor Kalton has also included helpful explanatory comments, footnotes, and a glossary of terms in both their Chinese and Korean transliterations. Aside from the fact that this important philosophical document has now been made available to a wider audience, and beyond the quality of the translation and its explanatory apparatus, this volume makes a most valuable contribution to understanding what is perhaps the single most important philosophical issue of the Neo-Confucian tradition: the conflict between "monistic" and "dualistic" conceptions of the good nature and the mind-heart.
In contrast to most writing on this topic, Kalton makes two crucial points: (1) that the issues of...