Mou Zongsan has been widely recognized for decades as the most renowned speculative philosopher of the second generation of the New Confucian movement. Sébastien Billioud, complemented in the same Brill series on Modern Chinese Philosophy by additional monographs devoted to Mou by Jason Clower and N. Serina Chan, has authored a superb study of the critical concept of moral metaphysics in Mou's magisterial intercultural revival of Confucian philosophy. The designation “magisterial” is justified because Mou has reshaped the way scholars study the Confucian tradition, and this judgment holds whether one agrees or disagrees with Mou's creative philosophical synthesis of the history of Chinese philosophy.
Mou is notoriously difficult to read because he moves effortlessly between discussions of classical Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, and modern Western philosophy, sometimes within a single page, paragraph, or even sentence. Although it was probably not Billioud's intent, his copious and meticulous translations of Mou's original...
