 Other than the Northern Song Neo-Confucians described in  section 2.1,  every philosopher mentioned heretofore has been a Neo-Confucian in the narrow sense associated with Daoxue (see  section 1  on the differences between the broad and narrow senses of “Neo-Confucian”). That is, each has been someone who takes most of his cues from the Cheng brothers, most notably by adopting their robustly metaphysical accounts of human nature and the fundamental unity or oneness of things. But philosophers of this sort did not have a monopoly on Confucian discourse, and over the course of the roughly seven centuries of Song, Yuan, and Ming thought there were a number of talented and innovative Confucian philosophers at the borders or outside of these mainstreams.