This paper attempts to put Mou Tsung-san's (1909-1995) reflection on humanism in early 1950s back into a more complicated post-war intellectual and philosophical context. Jean-Paul Sartre's " Existentialism as Humanism", Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jacques Derrida's "The Ends of Man" are woven as the backdrop in which Mou's Neo-Confucian metaphysics of moral subjectivity is highlighted. This paper concludes that the insights and oversights implicit in Neo-Confucian writing of man as exemplified by Mou can be made explicit through Derridean grammatology.
