ABSTRACT
Dai Zhen (Dai Dongyuan, 1723-1777) was perhaps the most important critical-minded neo-Confucianist of the Qing era. He stood out as a critic of Song-Ming neo-Confucianism and made original contributions to a critical exposition of the classical Confucian philosophy of Mencius. Although he was not known as a philosopher during his own time, his neo-Confucian critique and exposition have been much discussed and quoted since Hu Shi wrote about him in the 1930s. Dai imbued his critique with a modern spirit of humanistic rationalism and naturalistic morality, which offered a new, modern perspective for understanding and evaluating classical and Song-Ming Confucianism. To understand him, we need to appreciate his textual, critical, and philological background as well as his methodology.
