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Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei. By John A. Tucker. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and the University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. Pp. 496. Hardcover $56.00.
John Tucker's Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei is an important contribution to the field of Japanese philosophy. Not only does it offer readers a complete and annotated translation of this leading Japanese Confucian's two most important works, the Bendo (Distinguishing the way) and the Benmei (Distinguishing names); it also includes a lengthy introduction presenting Tucker's own interpretation of these two works, summarizing their content and reviewing the history of Sorai's philosophy in the Tokugawa period and the pertinent Japanese and English-language scholarship. Specialists will find the introduction useful, and firsttime readers of the Bendo and Benmei will learn what they need to know to make their way through these difficult works.
Tucker's interpretation of the Bendo and Benmei is both original and provocative. He begins with the bold assertion that the ''conceptual analysis'' in these works is comparable to that found in three other philosophical traditions: the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and continuing through Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, Leibniz, Diderot, and Voltaire; the Confucian tradition, starting with the Analects and continuing up through Neo-Confucianism; and the Buddhist tradition after Nagarjuna. Even though this comparative point seems obvious, no one has put it quite this way.
Tucker argues, too, that the Bendo and Benmei were modeled on the Xingli ziyi (The meaning of Chinese terms), a philosophical dictionary written by the Song Neo- Confucian Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Apparently a 1552 Korean edition of Chen's Ziyi was transmitted to Japan in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and inspired the pioneering Japanese Confucian Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) to write Seiri jigi genkai (Vernacular explication of Beixi's Ziyi ), which was published in 1659. Tucker points out that Hayashi often differed with Chen, as did others, such as Ito Jinsai (1627-1705), who wrote their own philosophical dictionaries. Writing about this new genre's significance in the Tokugawa context, Tucker observes that ''it served as an open medium, structurally and methodologically, for contesting philosophical terrain wherein increasingly diverse semasiologies of the Confucian way vied for patrons and authority'' (p. 6). Tucker...