Feng Youlan
Feng Youlan (; also: Fung Yu-Lan; 1895–1990) was a
Chinese philosopher who was important for reintroducing the study of
Chinese philosophy.
Feng Youlan was born on
4 December 1895 in
Tanghe,
Henan Province,
China, to a middle-class family. He studied philosophy at
Shanghai University, then at
Beijing University where he was able study Western philosophy and
logic as well as
Chinese philosophy.
Upon his graduation in
1918 he travelled to the
United States, where he studied at
Columbia University on a
Boxer Indemnity grant. There he met, among many philosophers who were to influence his thought and career,
John Dewey, the
pragmatist, who became his teacher. Feng gained his
Ph.D. from Columbia in
1925, though he spent the last two years working on his thesis (
A Comparative Study of Life Ideals) back in China.
He went on to teach at a number of Chinese universities (including
Guangdong,
Yanjing, and
Tsinghua (in
Beijing). It was while at Tsinghua that Feng published what was to be his best-known and most influential work, his
History of Chinese Philosophy (1934, in two volumes). In it he presented and examined the history of Chinese philosophy from a viewpoint which was very much influenced by the Western philosophical fashions prevalent at the time, which resulted in what
Peter J. King of Oxford describes as a distinctly
positivist tinge to most of the philosophers he described. Nevertheless, the book became the standard work in its field, and had a huge effect in reigniting an interest in Chinese thought.
In
1939 Feng brought out his
Xin Li-xue (
New Rational Philosophy, or
Neo-Lixue). Lixue was a philosophical position of a small group of
twelfth-century neo-Confucianists (including
Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and
Zhu Xi); Feng's book took certain metaphysical notions from their thought and from
taoism (such as
li and
tao, analysed and developed them in ways that owed much to the Western philosophical tradition, and produced a rationalistic neo-Confucian metaphysics. He also developed, in the same way, an account of the nature of morality and of the structure of human moral development.
When the
Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and staff of Tsinghua, Beijing, and
Nankai Universities fled Beijing. They went first to
Hengshan, where they set up the
Changsha Temporary University, and then to
Kunming, where they set up
Southwest Associated University.When, in
1946 the three Universities returned to Beijing, Feng instead went to the U.S. again, this time to take up a post as visiting professor at the
University of PennsylvaniaWhile he was at Pennsylvania, news from China made it clear that the
communists were on their way to seizing power. Feng's friends tried to pesuade him to stay, but he was determined to return; his political views were broadly
socialist, and he thus felt optimistic about China's future under its new government.
Once back home, Feng began to study Marxist-Leninist thought, but he soon found that the political situation fell short of his hopes; by the mid-
1950s his philosophical approach was being attacked by the authorities. He was forced to repudiate much of his earlier work, and to rewrite the rest – including his
History – in order to fit in with the ideas of the
Cultural revolution.
Despite all this, Feng refused to leave China, and after enduring much hardship he finally saw a relaxation of censorship, and was able to write with a certain degree of freedom. He died on
26 November 1990 in
Beijing.
Feng Youlan continues to be known mostly for his
History of Chinese Philosophy, which is still in print, but he was in fact an original and influential philosopher in his own right, deserving of greater attention.
Monographs & collections of essays
*1934:
A History of Chinese Philosophy**1983: translated by Derk Bodde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) ISBN 0691020213
**1948:
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (Collier-Macmillan) — reprinted 1997: Free Press ISBN 0684836343
*1939:
Xin Li-xue (
New Rational Philosophy) (Changsha: Commercial Press)
**1997
A New Treatise on the Methodology of Metaphysics (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press) ISBN 7119019473
Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-lan (Beijing: Foreign Language Press) ISBN 7119010638
Xin yuan ren (
A New Treeatise on the Nature of Man (Chongqing: Commercial Press)
*1946:
Xin zhi yan (
A New Understanding of Words) ((Shanghai: Commercial Press)
*1947:
The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy transl. E.R. Hughes (London: Kegan Paul)
**1970: (Greenwood Press) ISBN 0837128161
*1961:
Xin yuan dao (
A New Treatise on the Nature of Tao) (Xiang gang: Zhong-guo zhe-xue jan jiu hui)
As translator
*1991:
A Taoist Classic: Chuang-Tzu (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press) ISBN 7119001043
Secondary
*2004:
Peter J. King One Hundred Philosophers (Hove: Apple) ISBN 1-84092-462-4
*2001: Francis Soo "Contemporary Chinese Philosophy", in Brian Carr & Indira Mahalingam
[edd] Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London: Routledge) ISBN 0-415-24038-7
*
'Philosophy of Contemporary China' — on-line text provided by
The Radical Academy*[
1] Short bio page at Tsinghua University, useful primarily because it has a photograph. Reports PhD as 1924.
