Feng Youlan - Early Life, Education, & Career

Early Life, Education, & Career

Feng Youlan was born on 4 December 1895 in Tanghe County, Nanyang, Henan, China, to a middle-class family. He studied philosophy in the China Public School in Shanghai, between 1912–1915, a preparatory school for college, then in Peking University between 1915 and 1918, where he was able to study Western philosophy and logic as well as Chinese philosophy.

Upon his graduation in 1918, he travelled to the United States in 1919, where he studied at Columbia University on a Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship. 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 PhD from Columbia in 1923. His PhD thesis was titled "A Comparative Study of Life Ideals".

He went on to teach at a number of Chinese universities such as Jinan University, Yanjing, 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. 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 Lixue (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.