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Wm. Theodore de Bary | |
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| Born | William Theodore de Bary August 9, 1919 The Bronx, New York, U.S. |
| Died | July 14, 2017 (aged 97) Tappan, New York, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Main interests | Chinese literature, Neo-Confucianism |
William Theodore de Bary (Chinese: 狄培理; pinyin: Dí Péilǐ; August 9, 1919 – July 14, 2017) was an American Sinologist and scholar of East Asian philosophy who was a professor and administrator at Columbia University for nearly 70 years.
De Bary graduated from Columbia College in 1941, where he was a student in the first year of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course. He then briefly took up graduate studies at Harvard University before leaving to serve in American military intelligence in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Upon his return, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1953.
In order to create textbooks for the non-Western version of the Columbia humanities course, he drew together teams of scholars to translate original source material, Sources of Chinese Tradition (1960), Sources of Japanese Tradition, and Sources of Indian Tradition. His extensive publications made the case for the universality of Asian values and a tradition of democratic values in Confucianism. He is recognized as training the graduate students and mentoring the scholars who created the field of Neo-Confucian studies.