Tokugawa Philosophy: A Socio-Historical Introduction

This chapter situates in the social context of Tokugawa Japan the emergence of a class of scholars who engaged in the production of texts and in practices that aimed at developing authoritative inquiries on the nature of reality and the laws that govern it (metaphysics); the motivations, norms, and aims of moral life (ethics); the function and rules of language (philology and linguistics); the principles of good government (politics); and the legitimation of cognitive claims (epistemology), among others. Operating within different institutional frameworks and through texts circulating in a variety of formats (manuscript and printed commentaries, treatises, glossaries, dictionaries, collected lecture notes, etc.), these scholars (generically known as jusha) developed a philosophical archive that should be regarded as a qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented event in Japanese history outside Buddhist institutions.