Feng Youlan

Feng Youlan or Fung Yu-Lan was a Chinese philosopher who was important for reintroducing the study of Chinese philosophy.

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 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 Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship. There he met, among many philosophers who were to influence his thought and career, John Dewey, the , who became his teacher. Feng gained his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1925, though he spent the last two years working on his thesis back in China.

He went on to teach at a number of Chinese universities (including , , and . It was while at Tsinghua that Fung published what was to be his best-known and most influential work, his ''History of Chinese Philosophy'' . 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 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'' . Lixue was a philosophical position of a small group of ; 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.

War and upheaval

When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, the students and staff of Beiping's Qinghua and Peking Universities, together with Tianjin's University, fled their campuses. 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 Pennsylvania He spent the year 1948-1949 as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii.

While he was at Pennsylvania, news from China made it clear that the 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 , 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.

Bibliography

Monographs & collections of essays

*1934: ''A History of Chinese Philosophy''
**1983: translated by Derk Bodde ISBN 0-691-02021-3
**1948: ''A Short History of Chinese Philosophy'' — reprinted 1997: Free Press ISBN 0-684-83634-3
*1939: ''Xin Li-xue''
**1997''A New Treatise on the Methodology of Metaphysics'' ISBN 7-119-01947-3
*''Selected Philosophical Writings of Fung Yu-lan'' ISBN 7-119-01063-8
*''Xin yuan ren'' (''A New Treeatise on the Nature of Man''
*1946: ''Xin zhi yan'' (
*1947: ''The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy'' transl. E.R. Hughes
**1970: ISBN 0-8371-2816-1
*1961: ''Xin yuan dao''

As translator

* 1991: ''A Taoist Classic: '' ISBN 7-119-00104-3

Secondary

* 2004: Peter J. King ''One Hundred Philosophers'' ISBN 1-84092-462-4
* 2001: Francis Soo “Contemporary Chinese Philosophy”, in Brian Carr & Indira Mahalingam [edd] ''Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy'' ISBN 0-415-24038-7