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.
Read more about this topic: Feng Youlan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)