Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a growth in the literature in Western languages devoted to Mou Zongsan 牟宗三.1 Among the New Confucians, Mou's writings are regarded as the most argumentative and the most systematic. He is also one who has engaged with Western philosophers such as Kant, Wittgenstein, Russell, Whitehead, Hegel, and Heidegger. This essay addresses a more primordial theme: how does Mou Zongsan compare with Heidegger when they come to the central issue of the self-transformation of traditions and the question of cultural communication and integration? In relation to these concerns, they respectively formulate the notion of the self-reversal of moral reason (or of liangzhi 良知...