Itō Jinsai

Itō Jinsai was a Japanese Confucian philosopher of the Tokugawa period, born in Kyoto in 1627 as the eldest son of a merchant and counted among the most influential Confucian scholars of seventeenth century Japan. Having first devoted himself to the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, he turned against it, and the school he founded, known as Kogigaku, advocated a philosophy grounded in the meanings of key terms in the Analects and the Mencius. He is widely known for his outspoken affirmation of the validity of human emotions and for a metaphysics that stresses the pervasiveness and creative potential of a unitary generative force. In 1662 he opened a private school, the Kogidō, in Kyoto, which attracted some three thousand students, and after his death in 1705 his son Tōgai led it. His ideas were strongly criticised by Ogyū Sorai.