Philosopher
Shao Yong
1011–1077
Northern Song thinker, sometimes counted a fifth founder of Neo-Confucianism, known for mathematical and numerological laws and for warning that subjectivity blocks knowledge of things.
Shao Yong lived in the Northern Song, the period that produced the founders of Neo-Confucianism, and some scholars add him as a fifth founding figure to Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the Cheng brothers. He knew the Cheng brothers personally and talked with them.
Zhu Xi did not include him in his canon of founders, though a modern scholar of Neo-Confucianism remarks that any list of the Song masters would be incomplete without him.
Key ideas
- Laws of number
- Shao Yong is remembered above all for the laws of number and mathematics he worked out for the cosmos.
- Subjectivity against knowledge
- He held that some forms of human subjectivity get in the way of knowing things as they are.
- Outside the canon
- Compared with the Cheng brothers, his writings show little concern with theories of virtue and self-cultivation, and the standard anthology of the Northern Song masters, Reflections on Things at Hand, left him out.
- Tradition
- Chinese
- Region
- China
- Schools
- Confucianism
- Period
- Song–Ming
Sources
- Justin Tiwald, Song-Ming Confucianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- John H. Berthrong, Neo-Confucian Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy