This volume is the follow-up to Understanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-Ming, which presented the first two Epochs of Confucian philosophy. The third Epoch, presented in this book, is that of Contemporary Neo-Confucian philosophy. It notes a paradigm shift from the late Ming to the early Ch'ing, which shows us how the line of Sung-Ming Neo-Confucian philosophy was broken. Then, background information is given to answer the question of how the phoenix was reborn from the ashes; at the height of the iconoclast May Fourth Movement in 1919, Liang Sou-ming, the forerunner of the movement, developed his ideas about East-West cultures and their philosophies.
During the darkest moments of Chinese history, three generations of New Confucian scholars developed their ideas and achieved great scholarship. Shu-hsien Liu presents a framework of four groups to portray the movement. And, the philosophies of Fung Yu-lan, Hsuing Shih-li, Thome H. Fang, T'ang Chun-I, and Mou tsung-san are reviewed and analyzed. The international dimension of the third generation of New Confucians is also introduced. In the conclusion, Shu-hsien Liu comments on the relevance of this trend of thought today with a view toward the future.