Dai Zhen was a notable Chinese

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 scholar of the Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....

 from Xiuning, Anhui

Xiuning County

Xiuning County is a county in Anhui Province, People's Republic of China, under the jurisdiction of Huangshan City. It has a population of 270,000 and an area of...

. A versatile scholar, he made great contributions to mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, geography

Geography

Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

, phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

. His philosophical and philological critiques of Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism is an ethical and metaphysical Chinese philosophy influenced by Confucianism, that was primarily developed during the Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty, but which can be traced back to Han Yu and Li Ao in the Tang Dynasty....

 continue to be influential.

Dai's philosophical contributions included contributions to the Han Learning

Han learning

Han Learning , or the Han school of classical philology, was an intellectual movement that reached its height in the mid-Qing dynasty in China.-Nature and origins:...

 school of Evidential Learning (Evidentialism

Evidentialism

Evidentialism is a theory of justification according to which the justification of a belief depends solely on the evidence for it. Technically, though belief is typically the primary object of concern, evidentialism can be applied to doxastic attitudes generally...

) which criticized the Song Learning school of Neo-Confucianism. In particular, two criticisms that Dai made was that Neo-Confucianism focused too much on introspective self-examination whereas truth was to be found in investigation of the external world.

Second, he criticized the Neo-Confucian drive to eliminate human desire as an obstacle to rational investigation. Dai argued that human desire was a good and integral part of the human experience, and that eliminating human desire from philosophy had the bad effect of making it difficult to understand and control one's emotions as well as making it impossible to establish empathy with others.