Silhak: The Korean School of Practical Learning

Silhak ("practical learning") names a loosely connected reformist current within later Joseon Confucian scholarship, emerging from roughly the 17th through the 19th centuries, whose exponents grew critical of what they saw as the increasingly abstract, factionalized, and socially unproductive preoccupations of mainstream Neo-Confucian metaphysical debate, exemplified by disputes such as the Four-Seven controversy and the later Horak debate, and who instead urged closer attention to concrete institutional reform, economic administration, and empirical investigation of the natural and social world. Silhak scholars did not reject the Confucian classical canon or the fundamental legitimacy of li-qi metaphysics outright; rather, they argued that genuine Confucian learning required demonstrating its moral principles through workable, verifiable improvements in governance, agriculture, and technology rather than through increasingly rarefied philosophical disputation divorced from the concerns of statecraft (gyeongse chiyong, "ordering the world and benefiting practical use").