Feng Youlan

Feng Youlan was born in 1895 in a middle-class family in Tanghe County, Henan, China. He studied philosophy in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Beijing, where he was exposed to both Western and traditional Chinese philosophy and logic. He traveled to the United States in 1919, where he studied at Columbia University under John Dewey, the pragmatist. He received his PhD in 1923 with a thesis titled A Comparative Study of Life Ideals. He returned to China and taught at various universities, including Jinan University, Yenching University, and Tsinghua University, where he became the chair of the Department of Philosophy. He published his best-known and most influential work, his History of Chinese Philosophy, in 1934, which presented and examined the history of Chinese philosophy from a modern perspective. He also attempted to create a reconstructed version of Chinese philosophy that could respond to the modern situation, by integrating the traditional Neo-Confucianism of Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi with the philosophical traditions of the modern West. He published his New Teaching of Principle between 1939 and 1947, in which he presented Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism, as a middle way between Daoism and Mohism Western philosophy. He also supported the Communist Party of China and wrote some patriotic and socialist plays during and after the Sino-Japanese War. He moved to Beijing in 1952 and became the director of the Foreign Languages Publishing House and the editor-in-chief of Chinese Literature. However, he was denounced as a rightist in 1957 and sent to a labor camp for 20 years. He was politically rehabilitated in 1979 and resumed his literary career. He founded and edited Reading, a magazine that aimed at Chinese intellectuals and featured works by both Chinese and foreign writers. He also confessed his secret role as a government spy during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in his diaries, which were published in 2002. He died in Beijing at the age of 94 in 1990. He was regarded as one of the most important and prolific writers of modern Chinese philosophy and culture.