Feng Youlan

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Feng.

nism, although also describing the mistakes he saw, drew

attention from Chiang Kai-sheks's police. Feng was arrested and spent a short time in jail, but soon became
a rm supporter of the government and its resistance to
Japan. During the Sino-Japanese War he published works
which supported the New Life Movement for revitalizing
Confucian values.* [2]

Feng Youlan (Chinese: ; WadeGiles: Feng

Yu-lan; 4 December 1895 26 November 1990) was
a Chinese philosopher who was instrumental for reintroducing the study of Chinese philosophy in the modern
era.

In 1939, Feng brought out his Xin Lixue (New Rational Philosophy, or Neo-Lixue). Lixue was a philosophical position of a small group of twelfth-century neoConfucianists (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), analyzed 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.

Early life, education and career

Feng Youlan was born on 4 December 1895 in Tanghe

County, Nanyang, Henan, China, to a middle-class family. His younger sister was Feng Yuanjun, who would
become a famous Chinese writer. He studied philosophy in the China Public School in Shanghai, between
19121915, a preparatory school for college, then studied in Chunghua University, Wuhan (later merged into
Central China Normal University) and Peking University
between 1915 and 1918, where he was able to study Western philosophy and logic as well as Chinese philosophy.

2 War and upheaval

Upon his graduation in 1918, he traveled to the United

States in 1919, where he studied at Columbia University
on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. There he
met, among many philosophers who were to inuence his
thought and career, John Dewey, the pragmatist, who became his teacher. Feng gained his PhD from Columbia in
1923. His PhD thesis was titled A Comparative Study
of Life Ideals.

When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and sta of Beijing's Tsinghua and Peking Universities, together with Tianjin's Nankai University, ed
their campuses. They went rst 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
Pennsylvania He spent the year 19481949 as a visiting
professor at the University of Hawaii. He served as President of Tsinghua University from December 1948 to May
1949 (it was known as National Tsinghua University until
January 1949).* [3]

He went on to teach at Chinese universities including Jinan University, Yenching University, and Tsinghua
University in Beijing. From 1934 to 1938 (and again
from 1946 to 1949) he was Chair of the Department of
Philosophy at Tsinghua.* [1] It was while at Tsinghua that
Feng published what was to be his best-known and most
inuential 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 inuenced 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 eld, and had a
huge eect in reigniting an interest in Chinese thought.

While 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 persuade 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 t in

In 1935 Feng, on his way to a conference in Prague,

stopped briey in the Soviet Union and was impressed
with the radical social changes and cultural ferment. His
speeches extolling the utopian possibilities of commu1

with the ideas of the Cultural revolution.

Despite all this, Feng refused to leave China, and after enduring much hardship he nally saw a relaxation of censorship, and was able to write with a certain degree of
freedom. He died on 26 November 1990 in Beijing.

Bibliography

3.1

Monographs and collections of essays

1934: A History of Chinese Philosophy

1983: translated by Derk Bodde (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press) ISBN 0-69102021-3
1948: A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
(Collier-Macmillan) reprinted 1997: Free
Press ISBN 0-684-83634-3
1939: Xin Li-xue (New Rational Philosophy)
(Changsha: Commercial Press)
Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-lan (Beijing: Foreign Language Press) ISBN 7-119-010638
Xin yuan ren (A New Treatise on the Nature of Man
(Chongqing: Commercial Press)
1946: Xin zhi yan (A New Understanding of Words)
((Shanghai: Commercial Press)
1997: A New Treatise on the Methodology
of Metaphysics (Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press) ISBN 7-119-01947-3
1947: The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy transl. E.R.
Hughes (London: Kegan Paul)
1970: (Greenwood Press) ISBN 0-83712816-1
1961: Xin yuan dao (A New Treatise on the Nature
of Tao) (Xiang gang: Zhong-guo zhe-xue jan jiu
hui)

3.2

As translator

1933: Chuang-tzu: A New Selected Translation

with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang
(Shanghai)
1991: A Taoist Classic: Chuang-Tzu (Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press) ISBN 7-119-001043

EXTERNAL LINKS

3.3 Secondary
2004: Peter J. King One Hundred Philosophers
(Hove: Apple) ISBN 1-84092-462-4
2001: Francis SooContemporary Chinese Philosophy, in Brian Carr & Indira Mahalingam [edd]
Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy (London: Routledge) ISBN 0-415-24038-7

4 References
[1] http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/dphien/3106/index.
html
[2] Xiaofei Tu, Feng Youlan Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
[3] http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/publish/then/5780/index.
html

5 External links
'Philosophy of Contemporary China' on-line text
provided by The Radical Academy
Short bio at Tsinghua University site (Feng is the
second entry on the page) (Chinese)
Xiaofei Tu, "Fung Yu-lan, 1895-1990" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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Feng Youlan Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng%20Youlan?oldid=660893970 Contributors: Magnus Manske, Maximus Rex,

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