[4] Ivanhoe was raised in New Jersey by parents who owned a variety of small businesses, including a butcher shop, where he worked until leaving for college.
He left the army at the rank of sergeant, with an honorable discharge, and returned to Stanford to pursue his doctorate in Religious Studies (awarded 1987), also completing the requirements for a minor in Asian Languages.
Ivanhoe developed Nivison's insight in great detail in his doctoral dissertation, a revised version of which was later published as a book, Ethics in the Confucian Tradition: The Thought of Mengzi and Wang Yangming.
In the first edition of this book, Ivanhoe argued that Chinese philosophers can be categorized in terms of whether they use a "development," "discovery" or "re-formation" model of ethical cultivation.
According to a discovery model, humans have within themselves everything that is necessary for full virtue, but this capacity is somehow impeded or obscured, and cultivation is a process of realizing what is present within oneself.
(Ivanhoe argues that Chinese Buddhists and Neo-Confucians, despite their genuine differences on many topics, share a discovery model of ethical cultivation.)
Finally, in a re-formation model, human nature is originally resistant to cultivation, and must be laboriously re-shaped in order to create virtue.