Abstract

Sokjong was a scholar who introduced Kant and Bacon into Korea. He was also good at language, astronomy, geography, medicine, and calligraphy. Furthermore, he presented a systematic theory on wen lun and shi lun. In spite of his scholarly contribution, his thoughts are not well-known to us. The number of papers on Sokjong's thoughts is a few in Korea. In this paper, I research how Neo-confucians of Choson understood Yang ming's philosophy by examining Sokjong's Lun wang yang ming(論王陽明) in his posthumous works. I examine it from a critical perspective. Sokjong as a Neo-confucian criticized Yang ming's philosophy from a Neo-confucian perspective. So, I am very skeptical of his accuracy of his criticism on Yang ming. I do not agree with his criticism on the whole. For I have lots of counter-arguments against his arguments on Yang ming. As a matter of fact, we can find many misunderstandings of the later scholars on their preceding scholars. For example, Chu hsi misunderstood Mencius; Chu hsi called Hsiang shan's philosophy Chan philosophy and Hsiang shan criticized that Chu hsi did not understand Tao of saints due to lack of understanding each other; Yang ming also did not understand the value of Chu hsi's philosophy properly. However, I think that the important thing are not misunderstandings themselves. What is important is that we find the logical ground of misunderstandings and the differences of their theoretical systems, and we prevent the third misunderstanding by revealing the propriety of criticism.